What a great japan goes there

I am not aware of what purpose, but I have acquired the healthy habit of consulting the encyclopedia for a few years from time to time to satisfy the curiosity or to collect some clamorous failure of general culture. On one of these occasions, I discovered something amazing. That Garcia de Orta, our illustrious 16th century doctor and botanist, was sentenced to the fire by Judaism; And since he was already dead, the Holy Inquisition was not with half measures: he had his bones dig up and reduced them to ashes. Perhaps so no longer left remnants of Judaism… Men, especially fanatics, are capable of the stupid and dark acts.
Let us return to the great Portuguese and Brazilian Encyclopedia, in 40 volumes, from the 1930s-50, which is the one I serve. Perhaps the texts do not have depth or perhaps the scientific rigor of the latest academic works. But I am almost always pleasantly surprised because I find in them information that I can't find anywhere else.
Take as an example the article about Japan, which offers us very curious data. «Cattle raising is mediocre (a clearly outdated statement, as the best meat in the world is produced in Kobe from Wagyu cows, whose marbled steaks cost a fortune. But below); The Japanese are as a rule as a rule, and they only gather rice vegetables and fish. ' Now the strangest part has caused me: « Fishing are active in every back of the country, and in many provinces, fish was used as fertilizer. » Fish like fertilizer? Now there is something I had never read in any book about the history of Japan.
There are more interesting data, now in the field of geography: “All these islands and islets (which make up the archipelago) are no more than the emerged portions of many mountains linked to each other, one of the largest and most accused among the plicatures of the earth's crust. (While the Alps are only 1300 km long, and the Japanese mountain range is extended by 3200). Nowhere is it such a great slope in such a small space: from the fudje-ema summit (read Monte Fuji) (3780 m.) To the 8513m.
In these pages, I also learned that the word 'Japan' not only designates the country. It can be synonymous with 'Japanese' and, in Coimbra, was used to refer to 'the mass of outsiders' that flushed there to watch the burning of ribbons and parties of the Santa Queen. It's not hard to imagine one of those old teachers looking suspiciously at the crowd and commenting between teeth: « What a great Japan goes there! » (The Female – Japona – can be used as a synonym for drunkenness, which does not escape much of the context, if we take into account the amount of alcohol consumed in the burning of the tapes)
As for the word 'Japanese', it notices the great encyclopedia, it can designate a 'strange, parasite or adventitious individual'. Ramalho Ortigão used it in this sense: « Not to look like a parasite, a Japanese, as it is now said …. »
'Strange' still go, but 'parasite'?! There must be some misunderstanding there: everyone knows that the Japanese are one of the most worker peoples in the world.