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out of the station into the streets of Osaka was a circus tent. We wanted to dash right in, but it seemed that we were expected at the Zoo, so we went there first, and submitted to the usual photographs and interviews.  Bill was asked, for the nth time, how Japanese Zoos compared with American Zoos, and I was asked what I though of Japanese girls.  Our doings are chronicled daily in the newspapers, and every opinion we express is aired, usually with some inaccuracy, over the radio.  We have posed with the Tokyo elephant, the Kyoto hippopotamus, the Osaka stilt-walking chimpanzee and incidentally with a Kyoto geisha girl, but Mrs. Komai tells us that it was not a good newspaper but a sort of tabloid that published the picture taken in the geisha house.

The Osaka Zoo was, like the others, interesting.  It has recently been enlarged, and an underground passage connects the new part with the old.  This subway has been turned into a small, underground aquarium.  The Zoo has one giraffe, and a fine sea-lion pool with eight sea lions, which the public is allowed to feed with fish thoughtfully provided and sold for a sen or two each.  This honor system for feeding the animals is used in every Zoo.  The public, the animals and the administration all enjoy the benefit.  There were two elephants in a bar-less pit, a good monkey island, a row of big cat cages covered with a wistaria trellis, seven sacred cranes, a trained chimp and three others, a ouakari, an albino king snake - 1500 specimens of 280 species.  And the usual charge, 15 sen for adults, 10 sen for children.  (100 sen equals 29 American cents.)

From Osaka we were driven to Koshien, a place we had never heard of, where a most amusing Zoo is maintained by the Osaka-Kobe Electric Railway Co. in a Coney Island sort of amusement park.  Here was a monkey island with windmill and rowboats for the Japanese monkeys.  A pair of wart hogs proudly displayed their three babies.  The chimpanzee had a glass-fronted house, with fireplace, benches, and other domestic furniture.  Thirteen sealions - one big bull - disported in an enormous pool.  The great sight was the penguin pool, where there are about thirty penguins (jackass) in all stages from egg to adult.  Thirty have been born here.  We photographed the flock, and then a three-weeks' old baby was brought out to have his picture taken.  I petted him, and he was as soft as silk.  Below the pool is a glass front, so that the birds can be seen through the water, swimming and diving for fish.  There were 25 species of  monkey, including douroucoulis and wooly and gibbon, a trained chimp, a circus wagon cage for performing lions, a Chosen leopard.  The greatest thrill of all was a pool about a hundred feet in diameter, which contained a live whale, an 11-foot Globiocephalus scammoni, which feeds on dead squid and spends all day swimming counter clockwise, and coming up to blow three times in each circuit of the pool.

Koshien also has an aquarium, where the tanks are nicely arranged, some of them projecting, rather than having them all in a straight line, and sparklingly clean, with coral set in cement for backgrounds.  One of the nicest exhibits was a flock of Hypodytes rubripinnis, the Sargassum fish.