Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 October 1893 — A JAPANESE POSTOFFICE. [ARTICLE]

A JAPANESE POSTOFFICE.

How the Mall Is Handled In the Land of the Mikado. The interior of a Japanese postoffice is interesting not only from the lack ol mechanical appliances, but also from the great number of hands employed, as is customary in Eastern countries where labor is so cheap. First there is the posting office, with the curious sallow little faces crowded into the 12x12 window space. Next comes the stamping room, each table surrounded by busy workers who look like women with their pinned-up queues, and full nether garments,. The letters are slowly and methodically stamped, one at a time, with a big modern stencil, much like a miniature churn-dasher, and then consigned to a chute running from the table into baskets on the floor. The baskets are taken up when full by boys and taken to the inspection room and thence to the distribution room. Here before long tiers of shelves above great tables, the clerks are busy as bees and silent as the grave; they are not allowed to talk—blessed precaution against blunders. The foreign and domestic mails are then divided, and the next step is the assorting and the registry rooms, where the mail is done up in small brown bags. In the mailing room the clerks wear full European dress. At the door is the foreign mail cart, a dray consisting of floor and high sides and ends of bright red slats. In this the bags are laid carefully, and a coolie starts in at a trot and lands it at the dock, where it is transferred, by an important, uniformed Jap, to the mail steamer.

But the home collecting and delivery service is far more picturesque. The collector uses a hand cart and two boys. At regular intervals on the road are boxes similar to American patrol boxes, but only about a tenth as large. The mail has been shot into them from the openings on each side of the gable roof, and the collector has to unlock a little door near the ground and extract the mail from below.