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Ayrton could judge, to have no reference to the lottery. Could Mr. Griffis inform them whether seeing the wheel of chance turning round was merely an attraction to the buyers, or whether the place at which the wheel stopped in any way determined the amount of sweets given to each of the children who had previously deposited their ju mons?
The next question referred to the varied stock in trade displayed at different times at each of the toy-shops in Tokei. At the present time the principal of these shops contained only one kind of toy which resembled more than anything else a fender for a fire-place, but made of wood. But quite recently dolls and nothing else were to be seen in the same shops. Before that, battledores alone were to be found, and so on through a long series. Where he would ask was this immense stock in trade kept? The masks of the Japanese mummers were excellent, they formed for the time part of the actor. Was this due solely to the goodness of the acting, or to the expression of countenance in the masks given to them in their manufacture, or to the cloth which the Japanese street actors tied over their heads and which concealed the edge of the mask, or to the fact that the faces of the common Japanese were themselves so comic that a mask, which in another country would be ridiculous and extravagant, was out here but a slight exaggeration of the type of the men’s faces amongst the lower classes. Professor Ayrton also remarked that he had been told by a Japanese that as in England sweets were considered almost exclusively for children, so in Japan the pleasures of eating fruit were left to the juveniles.
In reply to Mrs. Ayrton, Mr. Griffis said that the scientific toys referred to were made by the Japanese, but the particular toy called “The Cartesian Diver,” though made by the native glass blowers, was imitated from a foreign model. The bloody masks on which were red stripes and representations of ghastly wounds, such as children played with, were not used by boys in the weird games of “Hiyaku Monogatari” and “Kondame-shi” (“One Hundred Tales” and “Soul Examination”) but were worn in imitation of actors, simply for amusement. The game with leaden counters (often played with real coins by boys), was a game in which one player tried to knock the other’s counter (or coin) out of a ring drawn on the ground. The players win or lose as in a game of marbles. With regard to the questions of Professor Ayrton, he said that the street processions of boys in which they carried representations of shrines and jostled against each other, were evidently imitations of the popular matsuris and street processions, when the local gods were carried out to be aired and were returned again to their original sanctums. The jostling of the boys against each other was probably in imitation of the crowds of spectators brushing against each other, or jostling even the procession, as might be seen on the occasions of great processions in Tokio. In regard to the means of lottery displayed on the boards of itinerant candy-sellers, it was a matter of fact that, while no result of the revolution or drawing decreased
