"Oh, I see. This is all very interesting," declared Nan. "You certainly have learned something from your stay with the Sannomiyas, Jean. Tell us some more. What about the classes below the samurai, the common people, 'po' white trash' as it were?"
"So far as I could learn, the peasant class are called either eta or heimin, though it seems to me that the eta is lower than the heimin, for they are the ones who are considered very unclean, as they slaughter animals, tan skins, and are sometimes beggars."
"But tanners are quite respectable persons at home," put in Jack.
"They are not so here, for the having something to do with dead animals puts them quite without the pale. The samurai would be disgraced if he married into an eta family and would be considered an eta himself, although they maintain that there is no such thing as any difference in class nowadays. Mr. Sannomiya told me, through Ko-yeda as an interpreter, that the samurai despised trade and all that. The merchant class is considered, or used to be so, below the farmers; in fact they were not up to the mechanics, and were very low down in the social scale. That partly explains why there is so much talk of the dishonesty of tradespeople in Japan; it is the lower class who carry on the shops and all that, or so it was. The samurai try to keep to the professions and such employments, for it was formerly thought very low down indeed to barter in any way. All this is passing away, Mr. Sannomiya says, and many of the samurai are going into mercantile life, adopting Western standards and trying to establish a reputation for honest dealing which the merchant class have not always had."
"Did you make any dreadful mistakes?" inquired Jack.
"No, I don't think so. I wasn't quite as bad as the lady who wanted onions for dinner and told the cook to serve up a Shinto priest. The two words are almost the same, only one has a very different meaning from the other. The worst thing I did was to sit in front of the tokonoma when I went in. It was like planting yourself at the right hand of your host without being asked."
"How did you find out it was not the thing to do?" asked Mary Lee.
"I begged Ko-yeda to tell me if I had made any mistake. She was overcome with confusion at the idea of saying anything to the discredit of a guest, but I just insisted and she told me that."
"It was like Nan's taking her seat on the sofa in Germany," remarked Jack.