3-017-088 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

New-Year's Day in Japan - game of battledore and shuttlecock in the streets of Yokohama, 1865. Illustration of '...Japanese manners and customs which we have received from our Special Artist and Correspondent at Yokohama...the first three days of [the New Year] are devoted to games of every kind, played by old and young. Their most characteristic performance is the game of battledore and shuttlecock. The battledore is made of solid wood, with the picture of a man or woman on the reverse side; the shuttlecock is something like ours, but very much smaller, and having a little round marble, into which the feathers are fixed. All day long, in the street, before every shop and house door, you see laughing groups of people engaged in this sport, and the fun waxes fast and furious, while every miss is punished by applying the battledore rather sharply to that part of the human frame known to schoolboys as the natural enemy of the birch...Meantime, the boys walk on stilts, with the sticks held between their big toe and first toe; or they divert themselves with kites, tops, hoops, and other toys'. From "Illustrated London News", 1865.