It certainly was an ill-favoured crowd.  The Japanese are not an ugly race.  The young aristocrat who has grown up with fresh air and healthy exercise is often good-looking, and sometimes distinguished and refined.  But the lower classes, those who keep company with poverty, dirt and pawnshops, with the pleasures of the sake barrel and the Yoshiwara, are the ugliest beings that were ever created in the image of their misshapen gods.  Their small stature and ape-like attitudes, the colour and discolour of their skin, the flat Mongolian nose, their gaping mouths and bad teeth, the coarse fibre of their lustreless black hair, give them an elvish and a goblin look, as though this country were a nursery for fairy changelings, a land of the Nibelungen, where bad thoughts have found their incarnation.  Yet the faces have not got that character for good and evil as we find them among the Aryan peoples, the deep lines and the firm profiles.

“It is the absence of something rather than its presence which appals and depresses us,” Reggie Forsyth observed, “an absence of happiness perhaps, or of a promise of happiness.”

The crowd which filled the four roads with its slow grey tide was peaceable enough; and it was strangely silent.  The drag and clatter of the clogs made more sound than the human voices.  The great majority were men, though there were women among them, quiet and demure.  If ever a voice was lifted, one could see by the rolling walk and the fatuous smile that its owner had been drinking.  Such a person would be removed out of sight by his friends.  The Japanese generally go sight-seeing and merry-making in friendships and companies; and the Verein, which in Japan is called the Kwai, flourishes here as in Germany.

Two coolies started quarreling under the Barringtons’ window.  They too had been drinking.  They did not hit out at each other like Englishmen, but started an interchange of abuse in gruff monosyllables and indistinguishable grunts and snorts.

“Baka!  Chikushome!  Kuso! (Fool!  Beast!  Dung!)”

These amenities exasperating their ill humour, they began to pull at each other’s coats and to jostle each other like quarrelsome curs.  This was a sign that affairs were growing serious; and the police intervened.  Again each combatant was pushed away by his companions into opposite byways.

With these exceptions, all tramplings, squeezings, pushings and pokings were received with conventional grins or apathetic staring.  Yet in the paper next day it was said that so great had been the crowd that six deaths had occurred, and numerous persons had fainted.

“But where is the Yoshiwara?” Geoffrey asked at last.  “Where are these wretched women kept?”

Reggie waved his hand in the direction of the three roads facing them.

“Inside the iron gates, that is all the Yoshiwara, and those high houses and the low ones too.  That is where the girls are.  There are two or three thousand of them within sight, as it were, from here.  But, of course, the night time is the time to see them.”