[15] “Some years ago,” says Kämpfer, “our East India Company sent over from Batavia a Casuar (a large East India bird, who would swallow stones and hot coals) as a present to the emperor. This bird having the sad ill luck not to please our rigid censors, the governors of Nagasaki, and we having thereupon been ordered to send him back to Batavia, a rich Japanese assured us that if he could have obtained leave to buy him, he would have willingly given a thousand taels for him, as being sure within a year’s time to get double that money only by showing him at Ōsaka.” The mermaids exhibited in Europe and America to the great profit of enterprising showmen, have been of Japanese manufacture.
[16] A mistake for Yamashiro.—Edr.
[17] Name of a town on Lake Biwa.—Edr.
[18] The Aratame is a sort of an inquisition into the life and family of every inhabitant, the number of his children and domestics, the sect he professes or the temples he belongs to, made very punctually, once every year, in every city and district, by commissioners appointed for this purpose.
[19] The worshippers of Amida were the most numerous, amounting to 159,113. The other principal sects had, respectively, 99,728, 99,016, 54,586. Caron had noticed and mentioned this division into twelve sects, or observances. He states, and other subsequent authors have repeated, that, notwithstanding this division, they have no controversies or religious quarrels; but this does not agree with the accounts of the Catholic missionaries. Every resident of Miyako, except the Shintō priests, and, perhaps, the household of the Dairi, would seem to belong to some Buddhist sect.
[20] According to Klaproth, following Japanese authorities, it is seventy-two and one-half English miles long, and twenty-two and one-quarter at its greatest breadth. [The lake Biwa is meant.]
[21] Kōshi is the Japanese name for Confucius, who, however, can scarcely be meant here.—Edr.
[22] Fuji-no-yama, in the province of Suruga, on the borders of Kai, is an enormous pyramid, generally covered with snow, detached from and southerly of the great central chain of Nippon. It is the largest and most noted of the volcanoes of Japan. In the year 1707 there was an eruption from it which covered all the neighborhood with masses of rock, red-hot sand, and ashes, which latter fell, even in Yedo, some inches deep.—Klaproth (from Japanese authorities), in “Asiatic Journal,” vol. xxxii.
[23] A mistake for Enoshima.—Edr.
[24] At the date of these travels, and indeed at a much later period similar exhibitions might have been seen in Europe.