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.  Headaches seem to lodge somewhere in the bamboos, to afflict every victim entrapped in it.  To ride in a kago is as pleasant as riding in a washtub or a coffin slung on a pole.  In some mountain-passes stout native porters carry you pickapack.  Crossing the shallow rivers, you may sit upon a platform borne on men’s shoulders as they wade.  Saddle-horses are not to be publicly hired, but pack-horses are pleasant means of locomotion.  These animals and their leaders deserve a whole chapter of description for themselves.  Fancy a brass-bound peaked pack-saddle rising a foot above the animal’s back, with a crupper-strap slanting down to clasp the tail.  The oft-bandied slur, that in Japan everything goes by contraries, has a varnish of truth on it when we notice that the most gorgeous piece of Japanese saddlery is the crupper, which, even on a pack-horse, is painted crimson and gilded gloriously.  The man who leads the horse is an animal that by long contact and companionship with the quadruped has grown to resemble him in disposition and ejaculation:  at least, the equine and the human seem to harmonize well together.  This man is called in Japanese “horse side.”  He is dressed in straw sandals and the universally worn kimono, or blue cotton wrapper-like dress, which is totally unfitted for work of any kind, and which makes the slovens of Japan—­a rather numerous class—­always look as if they had just got out of bed.  At his waist is the usual girdle, from which hangs the inevitable bamboo-and-brass pipe, the bowl of which holds but a pellet of the mild fine-cut tobacco of the country.  The pipe-case is connected with a tobacco-pouch, in which are also flint, steel and tinder.  All these are suspended by a cord, fastened to a wooden or ivory button, which is tucked up through the belt.  On his head, covering his shaven mid-scalp and right-angled top-knot, is a blue cotton rag—­not handkerchief, since such an article in Japan is always made of paper.  This head-gear is usually fastened over the head by twisting the ends under the nose.  With a rope six feet long he leads his horse, which trusts so implicitly to its master’s guidance that we suspect the prevalence of blindness among the Japanese pack-horses arises from sheer lack of the exercise of their eyesight.  These unkempt brutes are strangers to curry-combs and brushes, though a semi-monthly scrubbing in hot water keeps them tolerably clean.  Their shoes are a curiosity:  the hoofs are not shod with iron, but with straw sandals, tied on thrice or oftener daily.  Grass is scarce in Japan, and oats are unknown.  The nags live on beans, barley, and the stalks, leaves and tops of succulent plants, with only an occasional wisp of hay or grass.