A skylight and the Kitchen-God
Single burglars usually come in by the skylight, closed at night by a small sliding-door, which does duty as chimney in the kitchen, or crawl under the floor which is some two feet from the ground, by tearing away the boarding under the verandah and come up by carefully removing the loose plank of the floor, under which fuel is kept in the kitchen. If the burglars are in a gang, they naturally come in more boldly than these kitchen sneaks. Once inside, the thief has the run of the house as all the rooms communicate by sliding-doors and are never locked, and the whole household is at his mercy. Since, then, houses are so easy of entry, it might be supposed that burglaries are very frequent in Tokyo; that such is not the case is probably due to the somewhat primitive methods pursued by these gentry and to the effective detective system of the police authorities.
A shrine of the Rice-God
Rice is the staple food of the Japanese; and no other food-stuff stands so high in popular esteem, or has a tutelary deity of its own. This rice-god has more shrines than any other deity, for he is worshipped everywhere, in town and village, and often a small shrine, no bigger than a hut, peeps amid a lonely cluster of trees surrounded on all sides by rice-paddies, its latticed door covered from top to bottom with the ex-votos of the simple peasant folk.