FORE:"In their Machinery Hall they have a very creditable exhibit, considering how recently they have opened the country to the Western world, and how little they had before the opening in the way of Western ideas. There is a small steam-engine of Japanese make; there are two or three looms, some rice-mills, winnowing-machines, an apparatus for winding and spinning silk, some pumps, a hay-cutter, and a fire-engine worked by hand. Then there are several agricultural machines, platform scales, pumps, and a wood-working apparatus from American makers, and there are two or three of English production. In the Agricultural Hall there are horse-rakes, mowers, reapers, and ploughs from America, and there are also some well-made ploughs from Japanese hands. In the Eastern Hall there are some delicate balances for weighing coin and the precious metals; they were made for the mint at Osaka, and look wonderfully like the best French or German balances. The Japanese have been quite successful in copying these instruments, more so than in imitating the heavier scales from America. Fairbanks's scales have been adopted as the standard of the Japanese postal and customs departments. Some of the skilful workmen in Japan thought they could make their own scales, and so they set about copying the American one. They made a scale that looked just as well, but was not accurate as a weighing-machine. As the chief use of a scale is to weigh correctly, they concluded to quit their experiments and stick to Fairbanks's.The road wound among the fields where the rice was growing luxuriantly, and where now and then they found beans and millet, and other[Pg 165] products of Japanese agriculture. The cultivation was evidently of the most careful character, as the fields were cut here and there with little channels for irrigation; and there were frequent deposits of fertilizing materials, whose character was apparent to the nose before it was to the eye. In some places, where the laborers were stooping to weed the plants, there was little more of them visible than their broad sun-hats; and it did not require a great stretch of the imagination to believe they were a new kind of mushroom from Brobdingnagian gardens. Hills like sharply rounded cones rose from each side of the narrow valley they were descending; and the dense growth of wood with which the most of them were covered made a marked contrast to the thoroughly cleared fields. The boys saw over, and over, and over again the pictures they had often seen on Japanese fans and boxes and wondered if they were realities. They had already learned that the apparently impossible pictures we find in Japanese art are not only possible, but actual; but they had not yet seen so thorough a confirmation of it as on this day's ride.
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