Note 15 — Chapter XXXV
Reading edition
“Some years ago,” says Kämpfer, “our East India Company sent over from Batavia a Casuar (a large East India bird, who would swallow stones and hot coals) as a present to the emperor. This bird having the sad ill luck not to please our rigid censors, the governors of Nagasaki, and we having thereupon been ordered to send him back to Batavia, a rich Japanese assured us that if he could have obtained leave to buy him, he would have willingly given a thousand taels for him, as being sure within a year’s time to get double that money only by showing him at Ōsaka.” The mermaids exhibited in Europe and America to the great profit of enterprising showmen, have been of Japanese manufacture.