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Updated: May 15, 2025
Our eyes rested with delight on the White City throned on its numerous isles, looking like a sea Cybele ascending from the lake with her tiara of proud towers. At our arrival on the Fair Grounds, Mr. James thoughtfully provided us with guides and rolling-chairs vehicles which reminded us of the Japanese Jin-riki-sha.
It is rather a long distance by foot, but Englishmen, at least according to Japanese ideas, have too much money to walk when they can ride, so to keep up the national conceit, but more for our own convenience, we jump into an elegant little carriage, or "jin-riki-sha," literally "man-power-carriage," but in sailor phrase "johnny-ring-shaw," or short "ring shaw."
So, resolving to be a heathen for a week at least, I left Yeddo one afternoon, though it took several hours to do so: the big city is one of distances more magnificent than those of Washington. I started in a jin-riki-sha, which baby-carriage on adult wheels has already been described, so as to be tolerably familiar to all American readers.
With these and fresh relays you can travel sixty, or even eighty, miles a day; and I have known one man to run thirty miles on the stretch. Of all the modes of traveling in Japan, the jin-riki-sha is the most pleasant. The kago is excruciating. It is a flat basket, swung on a pole and carried on the shoulders of two men. If your neck does not break, your feet go hopelessly to sleep.
What the author has seen with his own eyes, would amaze many Japanese born since 1868 and the readers of the rhapsodies of tourists who study Japan from the jin-riki-sha.
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