For Mako, a little Japanese girl, the new shoeswere clogs painted with red lacquer that shone beautifully. This is the story of what happened after she cracked the new clogs playing the weather-telling game and so longed for a bright, shiny new pair to replace them that she almost did a dishonest thing.

    

    

    

    The world -famed woodblock prints of Japan, belong to a type of art known in Japan as "ukiyo-e", "pictures of the floating world".This somewhat whimsical name is eminently appropriate, for the subject matter of "ukiyo-e" came for the most part from the very temporal world of the commoners in old Edo (Tokyo), the capital of the Tokugawa shoguns.