of industrial and commercial intercompetition. At all events, the Osaka merchant or manufacturer has a much longer inheritance of business experience than his rival of the political capital. Perhaps this may partly account for the acknowledged superiority of Osaka commercial travelers; a modernized class, offering some remarkable types. While journeying by rail or steamer you may happen to make the casual acquaintance of a gentleman whose nationality you cannot safely decide even after some conversation. He is dressed with the most correct taste in the latest and best mode; he can talk to you equally well in French, German, or English; he is perfectly courteous, but able to adapt himself to the most diverse characters; he knows Europe; and he can give you extraordinary information about parts of the Far East which you have visited, and also about other parts of which you do not even know the names. As for Japan, he is familiar with the special products of every district, their comparative merits, their history. His face is pleasing,--nose straight or slightly aquiline,--mouth veiled by a heavy black moustache: the

eyelids alone give you some right to suppose that you are conversing with an Oriental. Such is one type of the Osaka commercial traveler of 1896,--a being as far superior to the average Japanese petty official as a prince to a lackey. Should you meet the same man in his own city, you would probably find him in Japanese costume,--dressed as only a man of fine taste can learn how to dress, and looking rather like a Spaniard or Italian in disguise than a Japanese.

II

From the reputation of Osaka as a centre of production and distribution, one would imagine it the most modernized, the least characteristically Japanese, of all Japanese cities. But Osaka is the reverse. Fewer Western costumes are to be seen in Osaka than in any other large city of Japan. No crowds are more attractively robed, and no streets more picturesque, than those of the great mart.

Osaka is supposed to set many fashions; and the present ones show an agreeable tendency to variety of tint. When I first came