The foundations of Japan

CHAPTER XXVIII

MEN, DOGS AND SWEET POTATOES

(SHIMANE)

When we descended from the hills we were in Shimane, a long, narrow, coastwise prefecture through which one travels over a succession of heights to the capital, Matsue, situated at the far end. Two-thirds of the journey must be made on foot and by kuruma. ^[186] Some talk by the way was about the farmers going five or six miles daily to the hills to cut grass for their "cattle," the average number of cattle per farmer being 1.3 hereabouts. It seemed strange to see buckwheat at the flowering stage reached by the crops seen in Fukushima several months before. The explanation was that buckwheat is sown both in spring and autumn.

In the old days notable samurai, fugitives from Tokyo, had kept themselves secluded in the rooms we occupied at Yamaguchi. In Shimane we had small plain low-ceiled rooms in which daimyos had been accommodated. Not here alone had I evidences of the simplicity of the life of Old Japan.

I was wakened in the morning by the voice of a woman earnestly praying. She stood in the yard of the house opposite and faced first in one direction and then in another. A friend of mine once stayed overnight at an inn on the river at Kyoto. In the morning he saw several men and a considerable number of women praying by the waterside. They were the keepers and inmates of houses of ill-fame. The old Shinto idea was that prayers might be made anywhere at other times than festivals, for the god was at the shrine at festivals only. Nowadays some old men go to the shrine every morning, just as many old women are seen at the Buddhist temples daily. Half the visitors to a Shinto shrine, an educated man assured me, may pray, but in the case of the other half the "worship" is "no more than a motion of respect." My friend told me that when he prayed at a shrine his prayer was for his children's or his parents' health.

At a county town I found a library of 4,000 volumes, largely an inheritance from the feudal regime. Wherever I went I could not but note the cluster of readers at the open fronts of bookshops. ^[187]

On our second day's journey in Shimane I had a kuruma with wooden wheels, and in the hills the day after we passed a man kneeling in a kago, the old-fashioned litter. When we took to a basha we discovered that, owing to the roughness of the road, we had a driver for each of our two horses. We had also an agile lad who hung on first to one part and then another of the vehicle and seemed to be essential in some way to its successful management. The head of the hatless chief driver was shaved absolutely smooth.

It was a rare thing for a foreigner to pass this way. My companion frequently told me that he had difficulty in understanding what people said.

We saw an extinct volcano called "Green Field Mountain." There was not a tree on it and it was said never to have possessed any. The whole surface was closely cut, the patches cut at different periods showing up in rectangular strips of varying shades. Wherever the hills were treeless and too steep for cultivation they were carefully cut for fodder. In cultivable places houses were standing on the minimum of ground. More than once we had a view of a characteristic piece of scenery, a dashing stream seen through a clump of bamboo.

When our basha stopped for the feeding of the horses, they had a tub of mixture composed of boiled naked barley, rice chaff, chopped straw and chopped green stuff. I noticed near the inn a doll in a tree. It had been put there by children who believe that they can secure by so doing a fine day for an outing. When we started again we met with a company of strolling players: a man, his wife and two girls, all with clever faces. We also saw several peasant anglers fishing or going home with their catch. A licence available from July to December cost 50 sen.

At a shop I made a note of its signs, the usual strips of white wood about 8 ins. by 3, nailed up perpendicularly, with the inscriptions written in black. One sign was the announcement of the name and address of the householder, which must be shown on every Japanese house. A second stated that the place was licensed as a shop, a third that the householder's wife was licensed to keep an inn, a fourth that the householder was a cocoon merchant, a fifth that he was a member of the co-operative credit society, a sixth that he belonged to the Red Cross Society, a seventh that his wife was a member of the Patriotic Women's Society, ^[188] the eighth, ninth and tenth that the shopkeeper was an adherent of a certain Shinto shrine, a member of a Shinto organisation and had visited three shrines and made donations to them. An eleventh board proclaimed that he was of the Zen sect of Buddhism. Finally, there was a box in which was stored the charms from various shrines.

We passed a company of villagers working on the road for the local authority. The labourers were chiefly old people and they were taking their task very easily. Farther along the road men and women were working singly. It seemed that the labourers belonged to families which, instead of paying rates, did a bit of roadmending. The work was done when they had time to spare.

For some time we had been in a part of the country in which the ridges of the houses were of tiles. At an earlier stage of our journey they had been either of straw or of earth with flowers or shrubs growing in it. The shiny, red-brown tiles give place elsewhere to a slate-coloured variety. The surface of all of these tiles is so smooth that they are unlikely to change their hard tint for years. Meanwhile they give the villages a look of newness. Their use is spreading rapidly. Shiny though the tiles may be, one cannot but admire the neat way in which they interlock. One day when I wondered about the cost involved in recovering roofs with these tiles, a woman worker who overheard me promptly said that, reckoning tiles and labour, the cost was 60 or 70 sen per 22 tiles. In the old days tiled porticoes were forbidden to the commonalty. They were allowed only to daimyos who also used exclusively the arm rests which every visitor to an inn may now command. Besides arm rests I have frequently had kneeling cushions of the white brocade formerly used only for the zabuton of Buddhist priests.

In the county through which we were passing the fine water grass, called i, used for mat making, is grown on an area of about 78 chō. It is sown in seed beds like rice and is transplanted into inferior paddies in September. (The grass is better grown in Hiroshima and Okayama.)

I saw a beautiful tree in red blossom. The name given to it is "monkey slip," because of the smoothness of its skin, which recalled the name of that very different ornament of suburban gardens, "monkey puzzle."

During this journey we recovered something of the conditions of old-time travel. There were chats by the way and conferences at the inn in the evening and in the morning concerning distances, the kind of vehicles available, the character of their drivers, the charges, the condition of the road, the probable weather and the places at which satisfactory accommodation might be had. What was different from the old days was that at every stopping-place but one we had electric light. Part of our journey was done in a small motor bus lighted by electricity. Like the automobile we had hired a day or two before, it was driven—by two young men in blue cotton tights—at too high a speed considering the narrowness and curliness of the roads by which we crossed the passes. The roads are kept in reasonably good condition, but they were made for hand cart and kuruma traffic.

We passed an island on which I was told there were a dozen houses. When a death occurs a beacon fire is made and a priest on the mainland conducts a funeral ceremony. By the custom of the island it is forbidden to increase the number of the houses, so presumably several families live together. In the mountain communities of the mainland, where the number of houses is also restricted, it is usual for only the eldest brother to be allowed to marry. The children of younger brothers are brought up in the families of their mothers.

We passed at one of the fishing hamlets the wreck of a Russian cruiser which came ashore after the battle of Tsushima. Two boat derricks from the cruiser served as gate posts at the entrance of the school playground.

A familiar sight on a country road is the itinerant medicine vendor. He or his employer believes in pushing business by means of an impressive outfit. One typical cure-all seller, who had his medicines in a shiny bag slung over his shoulders, wore yellow shoes, cotton drawers, a frock coat, a peaked cap with three gold stripes, and a mysterious badge. On his hands he had white cotton gloves and as he walked he played a concertina. A common practice is to leave with housewives a bag of medicines without charge. Next year another call is made, when the pills and what not which have been used are paid for and a new bag is exchanged for the old one.

The use of dogs to help to draw kuruma is forbidden in some prefectures, but in three stages of our journey in Shimane we had the aid of robust dogs. During this period, however, I saw, attached to kuruma we passed, three dogs which did not seem up to their work. Dogs suffer when used for draught purposes because their chests are not adapted for pulling and because the pads of their feet get tender. The animals we had were treated well. Each kuruma had a cord, with a hook at the end, attached to it; and this hook was slipped into a ring on the dog's harness. The dogs were released when we went downhill and usually on the level. Several times during each run, when we came to a stream or a pond or even a ditch, the dogs were released for a bathe. They invariably leapt into the water, drank moderately, and then, if the water was too shallow for swimming, sat down in it and then lay down. Sometimes a dog temporarily at liberty would find on his own account a small water hole, and it was comical to see him taking a sitz bath in it. When the sun was hot a dog would sometimes be retained on his cord when not pulling in order that he might trot along in the shade below the kuruma. The dog of the kuruma following mine usually managed when pulling to take advantage of the shade thrown by my vehicle. A kurumaya told me that he had given 8 yen for his dog. Dogs were sometimes sold for from 10 to 15 yen. The difficulty was to get a dog that had good feet and would pull. The dogs I saw were all mongrels with sometimes a retriever, bloodhound or Great Dane strain.

I made enquiries about another county town library. There were 18,000 volumes of which 300 consisted of European books and 600 of bound magazines. The annual expenditure on books, and I presume magazines, was 600 yen.

We passed a "special tribe" hamlet. Here the Eta were devoting themselves to tanning and bamboo work. I was told of other "peculiar people" called Hachia, also of a hawker-beggar class which sells small things of brass or bamboo or travels with performing monkeys.

Water from hot springs is piped long distances in water pipes made of bamboo trunks, the ends of which are pushed into one another. A turn is secured by running two pipes at the angle required into a block of wood which has been bored to fit.

When we got down to the sand dunes there were windbreaks, 10 or 15 ft. high, made of closely planted pines cut flat at the top. Elsewhere I saw such windbreaks 30 ft. high. On the telegraph wires there were big spiders' webs about 4 ft. in diameter.

As we sped through a village my attention was attracted by a funeral feast. The pushed-back shoji showed about a dozen men sitting in a circle eating and drinking. Women were waiting on them. At the back of the room, making part of the circle, was the square coffin covered by a white canopy.

While passing a Buddhist temple I heard the sound of preaching. It might have been a voice from a church or chapel at home.

Shortly afterwards I came on a memorial to the man who introduced the sweet potato into the locality 150 years before. This was the first of many sweet-potato memorials which I encountered in the prefecture and elsewhere. Sometimes there were offerings before the monuments. Occasionally the memorial took the form of a stone cut in the shape of a potato. There is a great exportation of sweet potatoes—sliced and dried until they are brittle—to the north of Japan where the tuber cannot be cultivated. ^[189]

While we rested at the house of a friend of my companion we spoke of emigration. There are four or five emigration companies, and it is an interesting question just how much emigration is due to the initiative of the emigrants themselves and how much to the activity of the companies. The chief reason which induces emigrants to go to South America is that, under the contract system, they get twice as much money as they would obtain, say, in Formosa. ^[190]

Our host did not remember any foreigner visiting his village since his boyhood, though it is on the main road. It took nearly four days for a Tokyo newspaper to arrive. This region is so little known that when a resident mentioned it in Tokyo he was sometimes asked if it was in Hokkaido.

I was interested to see how many villages had erected monuments to young men who had won distinction away from home as wrestlers.

I had often noticed bulls drawing carts and behaving as sedately as donkeys, but it was new to see a bull tethered at the roadside with children playing round it. Why are the Japanese bulls so friendly?

In the mountainous regions we passed through I saw several paddies no bigger than a hearthrug. At one spot a land crab scurried across the road. It was red in colour and about 2½ ins. long.

At a village office the headman's gossip was that priests had been forbidden by the prefecture to interfere in elections. We looked through the expenses of the village agricultural association. For a lecture series 5 yen a month was being paid. Then there had been an expenditure by way of subsidising a children's campaign against insects preying on rice. For ten of the little clusters of eggs one may see on the backs of leaves 4 rin was paid, while for 10 moths the reward was 2 rin. The association spent a further 10 yen on helping young people to attend lectures at a distance. The commune in which those things had been done numbered 3,100 people. There had been two police offences during the year, but both offenders were strangers to the locality.

In a cutting which was being made for the new railway, girl labourers were steering their trucks of soil down a half-mile descent and singing as they made the exhilarating run. The building of a railway through a closely cultivated and closely populated country involves the destruction of a large amount of fertile land and the rebuilding of many houses. The area of agricultural land taken during the preceding and present reigns, not only for railways and railway stations but for roads, barracks, schools and other public buildings, has been enormous. "The owner of land removed from cultivation may seem to do well by turning his property into cash," a man said to me. "He may also profit to some extent while the railway is building by the jobs he is able to do for the contractor, with the assistance of his family and his horse or bull; but afterwards he has often to seek another way of earning his living than farming."

We neared railhead on a market day and many folk in their best were walking along the roads. Of fourteen umbrellas used as parasols to keep off the sun that I counted one only was of the Japanese paper sort; all the others were black silk on steel ribs in "foreign style" except for a crude embroidery on the silk.

When we got into the town it was as much as our kurumaya could do to move through the dense crowd of rustics in front of booths and shops. Once more I was impressed by the imperturbability and natural courtesy of the people. At the station quite a number of farmers and their families had assembled, not to travel by the train but to see it start.

During the short journey by train I noticed lagoons in which fish were artificially fed. At an agricultural experiment station in the place at which we alighted there were two specimen windmills set up to show farmers who were fortunate enough to have ammonia water on their land the cheapest means of raising it for their paddies. The tendency here as elsewhere was to apply too much of the ammonia water. All rubbish on this extensive experiment station was carefully burnt under cover in order to demonstrate the importance not only of getting all the potash possible but of preserving it when obtained.

Farmers who are without secondary industries are short of cash except at the times when barley, rice and cocoons are sold, and in certain places they seem to have taken to saving money on salt. An old man told us with tears in his eyes how he had protested to his neighbours against the tendency to do without salt. An excuse for attempting to save on salt, besides the economical one, was the size of the salt cubes. Neighbours clubbed together to buy a cube, and thus a family, when it had finished its share, had to wait until the neighbours had disposed of theirs and market day came round. ^[191]

I saw a monument erected to the memory of "a good farmer" who had planted a wood and developed irrigation.

We made a stay at the spot where, on a forest-clad hill overlooking the sea, there stands in utter simplicity the great shrine of Izumo. The customary collection of shops and hotels clustering at the town end of the avenue of torii cannot impair the impression which is made on the alien beholder by this shrine in the purest style of Shinto architecture. In the month in which we arrived at Izumo the deities are believed to gather there. Before the shrine the Japanese visitor makes his obeisance and his offering at the precise spot—four places are marked—to which his rank permits him to advance. (This inscription may be read: "Common people at the doorway.") The estimate which an official gave me of the number of visitors last year, 40,000, bore no relation to the "quarter of a million" of the guide book. But it had been a bad year for farmers. Forty-seven geisha, who had reported the previous year that they had received 35,000 yen—there is no limit to what is tabulated in Japan—now reported that they had gained only half that sum in twelve months, "the price of cocoons being so low that even well-to-do farmers could not come." I noticed that there was a clock let into one of the granite votive pillars of the avenue along which one walks from the town to the shrine. As I glanced at the clock it happened that the sound of children's voices reached me from a primary school. I wondered what time and modern education, which have brought such changes in Japan, might make of it all.

CHAPTER XXIX

FRIENDS OF LAFCADIO HEARN

(SHIMANE, TOTTORI AND HYOGO)

At Matsue, with which the name of Lafcadio Hearn will always be associated, I chanced to arrive on the anniversary of his death. His local admirers were holding a memorial meeting. As a foreigner I was honoured with a request to attend. First, however, I had the chance of visiting Hearn's house. Matsue was the first place at which Hearn lived. He always remembered it and at last came back there to marry. Except that a pond has been filled up—no doubt to reduce the number of mosquitoes—the garden of his house is little changed.

The most interesting feature of the meeting was old pupils' grateful recollections of Hearn, the middle-school teacher. The gathering was held in a room belonging to the town library in the prefectural grounds, but neither the Governor nor the mayor was present. A sympathetic speech was made by a chance visitor to the town, the secretary-general to the House of Peers. He recalled the antagonism which the young men at Tokyo University, himself among them, felt towards the odd figure of Hearn—he had a terribly strained eye and wore a monocle—when he became a professor, and how very soon he gained the confidence and regard of the class.

I had often wondered that there was no Japanese memorial to Hearn, and when I rose to speak I said so. I added that it was rare to meet a Japanese who had any understanding of how much Hearn had done in forming the conception of Japan possessed by thousands of Europeans and Americans. The fault in so many books about Japan, I went on, was not that their "facts" were wrong. What was wrong was their authors' attitude of mind. I had heard Japanese say that Hearn was "too poetical" and that some of his inferences were "inaccurate." That was as might be. What mattered was that the mental attitude of Hearn was so largely right. He did not approach Japan as a mere "fact" collector or as a superior person. What he brought to the country was the humble, studious, imaginative, sympathetic attitude; and it was only by men and women of his rare type that peoples were interpreted one to the other.

In that free-and-easy way in which meetings are conducted in Japan it was permissible for us to leave after another speech had been made. The proceedings were interrupted while the promoters of the gathering showed us a collection of books and memorials of Hearn, arranged under a large portrait, and accompanied us to the door of the hall. I do not recall during the time I was in Japan any other public gathering in honour of Hearn, and I met several prominent men who had either never heard his name or knew nothing of the far-reaching influence of his books. But some months after this Matsue meeting there was included among the Coronation honours a posthumous distinction for Hearn—"fourth rank of the junior grade." ^[192]

During this journey I attended a dinner of officials and leading agriculturists and had the odd sensation of making a short after-dinner speech on my knees. At such a dinner the guests kneel on cushions ranged round the four walls of the room, and each man has a low lacquer table to himself, and a geisha to wait on him. When the geisha is not bringing in new dishes or replenishing the saké bottle, she kneels before the table and chatters entertainingly. The governors of the feast visit the guests of honour and drink with them. In the same way a guest drinks with his neighbour and with his attendant geisha. I have a vivid memory of a grave and elderly dignitary who at the merry stage of such a function capered the whole length of the room with his kneeling-cushion balanced on the top of his head. There is a growing temperance movement in Japan but a teetotaller is still something of an oddity. My abstinence from saké was frequently supposed to be the result of a vow.

Although the average geisha may be inane in her patter and have little more than conventional grace and charm, I have been waited on by girls who added real mental celerity, wit and a power of skilful mimicry to that elusive and seductive quality that accounts for the impregnable position of their class. At one dinner impersonations in both the comic and the tragic vein were given by a girl of unmistakable genius. Frequently a plain, elderly geisha will display unsuspected mimetic ability. Alas, behind the merry laugh and sprightliness of the girls who adorn a feast lurks a skeleton. One is haunted by thoughts of the future of a large proportion of these butterflies. No doubt most foreigners generalise too freely in identifying the professions of geisha and joro. In the present organisation of society some geisha play a legitimate rôle. They gain in the career for which they have laboriously trained an outlet for the expression of artistic and social gifts which would have been denied them in domestic life. At the same time the degrading character of the life led by many geisha cannot be doubted. Apart from every other consideration the temptation to drink is great. The opening of new avenues to feminine ability, the enlarged opportunities of education and self-respect and the increasing opening for women on the stage—from which women have been excluded hitherto—must have their effect in turning the minds of girls of wit and originality to other means of earning a living than the morally and physically hazardous profession of the geisha.

When we left Matsue by steamer on our way to Tottori prefecture I saw middle-school eights at practice. An agriculturist told me of the custom of giving holidays to oxen and horses. The villagers carefully brush their animals, decorate them and lead them to pastures where, tethered to rings attached to a long rope, "they may graze together pleasantly." One of the islands we visited bore the name of the giant radish, Daikon, which is itself a corruption of the word for octopus. The island devoted itself mainly to the growing of peonies and ginseng. The ginseng is largely exported to China and Korea, but there is a certain consumption in Japan. Ginseng is sometimes chewed, but is generally soaked, the liquid being drunk. Ginseng is popularly supposed to be an invigorant, and Japanese doctors in Korea have lately declared that it has some value. The root is costly, hence the proverb about eating ginseng and hanging oneself, i.e. getting into debt.

In walking across the island I passed a forlorn little shrine. It was merely a rough shed with a wide shelf at the back, on which stood a row of worn and dusty figures, decked with the clothes of children whose recovery was supposed to have been due to their influence. It was raining and the shelter was full of children playing in the company of an old crone with a baby on her back. Further on in the village I came across a new public bath. The price of admission was one sen, children half price.

A small port was pointed out to me as being open to foreign trade. Everybody is not aware that in Japan there is a restriction upon foreign shipping except at sixty specified places. ^[193] The reason given for the restriction is the unprofitableness of custom houses at small places. One day, perhaps, the world will wake up to the inconvenience and financial burden imposed by the custom-house system of raising revenue.

We stayed the night at a little place at the eastern extremity of the Shimane promontory where there is a shrine and no cultivation of any sort is allowed "for fear of defilement." Waste products are taken away by boat. I marked a contrast between theoretical and practical holiness. Our inn overlooked a special landing-place where, because a "sacred boat" from the shrine is launched there, a notice had been put up forbidding the throwing of rubbish into the sea. A few minutes after the board had been pointed out to me I saw an old man cast a considerable mass of rubbish into the water not six feet away from it. When we visited the shrine three pilgrims were at their devotions. The next morning when our steamer left and the chief priest of the shrine was bidding us adieu my attention was attracted by loud conversation in the second storey of an inn, the shoji of which were open. Our pilgrims, two of whom were bald, had spent the night at an inn of bad character and were now in the company of prostitutes in the sight of all men. One pilgrim had a girl on his knee, another was himself on a girl's knee and a third had his arm round a girl's neck. In this "sacred" place of 2,000 inhabitants there were forty "double license" girls, five being natives. A few years ago all the girls were natives. A "double license" girl means one who is licensed both as a geisha and a prostitute. The plan of issuing "double licenses" is adopted at Kyoto and elsewhere. As to the pilgrims to whom I have referred, someone quoted to me the saying, "It is only half a pilgrimage going to the shrine without seeing the girls."

Returning to the custom of launching a sacred boat it is not without significance that many Japanese deities have some connection with the sea. Even in the case of the deities of shrines a long way from the sea the ceremony of "going down to the sea" is sometimes observed. Sand and sea water are sent for in order to be mixed with the water used to cleanse the car in which the figure of the deity is drawn through the streets.

The social and financial position of tenants was illustrated by an incident at an inn. As the maid came from the country I asked her if her father were a tenant or an owner. My companion interrupted to tell me that the question was not judiciously framed because the girl would "think it a disgrace to own that her father was a tenant." The name of a tenant used long ago to be "water drinker." This waiting-maid was a good-looking and rather clever girl. I was dismayed when my friend told me that she had said to him quite simply that she had thoughts of becoming a joro. She thought it would be a "more interesting life."

When we reached Tottori prefecture we found ourselves in a country which grows more cotton than any other. Japanese cotton (grown on about 400 chō) is unsuitable for manufacture into thread, but because of its elasticity is considered to be valuable for the padding of winter clothing and for futon and zabuton. Their softness is maintained by daily sunning.

At a county office I noted that the persons who were receiving relief were classified as follows: Illness, 26; cripples, 17; old age, 16; schoolboys, 12; infancy, 1.

In the course of our journey a Shinto priest was pointed out to me as observing the priestly taboo by refusing tea and cake. I noticed, however, that he smoked. I was told that when he was in Tokyo he purified himself in the sea even in midwinter. I did not like his appearance. Nor for the matter of that was I impressed by the countenances of some Buddhist priests I encountered in the train from time to time. "Thinking always of money," someone said. But every now and again I saw fine priestly faces.

I have noted down very little in regard to the crops and the countryside in Tottori. Things seemed very much the same as I had seen in Shimane. At an agricultural show in the city of Tottori the varieties of yam and taro were so numerous as to deceive the average Westerner into believing that he was seeing the roots of different kinds of plants. A feature of the show was a large realistic model of a rice field with two life-size figures.

In the evening I talked with two distinguished men until a late hour. "We are not a metaphysical people," one of them said. "Nor were our forefathers as religious as some students may suppose. Those who went before us gave to the Buddhist shrine and even worshipped there, but their daily life and their religion had no close connection. We did not define religion closely. Religion has phases according to the degree of public instruction. Our religion has had more to do with propitiation and good fortune than with morality. If you had come here a century ago you would have been unable to find even then religion after another pattern. If it be said that a man must be religious in order to be good the person who says so does not look about him. I am not afraid to say that our people are good as a result of long training in good behaviour. Their good character is due to the same causes as the freedom from rowdiness which may be marked in our crowds."

"What is wanted in the villages," said the other personage, "is one good personality in each." I said that the young men's association seemed to me to be often a dull thing, chiefly indeed a mechanism by means of which serious persons in a village got the young men to work overtime. "Yes," was the response, "the old men make the young fellows work."

The first speaker said that there had been three watchwords for the rural districts. "There was Industrialisation and Increase of Production. There was Public Spirit and Public Welfare. There was The Shinto Shrine the Centre of the Village. We have a certain conception of a model village, but perhaps some hypocrisy may mingle with it. They say that the village with well-kept Buddhist and Shinto shrines is generally a good village."

"In other words," I ventured, "the village where there is some non-material feeling."

The rejoinder was: "Western religion is too high, and, I fear, inapplicable to our life. It may be that we are too easily contented. But there are nearly 60 millions of us. I do not know that we feel a need or have a vacant place for religion. There is certainly not much hope for an increase of the influence of Buddhism."

As we went along in the train I was told that on a sixth of the rice area in Tottori there had been a loss of 70 per cent. by wind. When a man's harvest loss exceeds this percentage he is not liable for rates and taxes. A passenger told me about "nursery pasture." This is a patch of grass in the hills to which a farmer sends his ox to be pastured in common with the oxen of other farmers under the care of a single herdsman. It is from cattle keeping on this modest scale that the present beef requirements of the country are largely met. ^[194]

Although the opinions expressed to me by Governors of prefectures have been frequently recorded in these pages, I have not felt at liberty to identify more than one of the Excellencies who were good enough to express their views to me. A friend who knew many Governors offered me the following criticism, which I thought just: "They are too practical and too much absorbed in administration to be able to think. Often they read very little after leaving the university. They have seldom anything to tell you about other than ordinary things, and they seldom show their hearts. You cannot learn much from Governors who have nothing original to say or are fearful or live in their frock coats or do not mean to show half their minds or are practising the old official trick of talking round and round and always evading the point. One fault of Governors is that they are being continually transferred from prefecture to prefecture. You have no doubt yourself noticed how often Governors were new to their prefectures. But with all the faults that our Governors have, there are not a few able, good and kind men among them and they are not recruited from Parliament but must be members of the Civil Service. One of the most common words in our political life is genshitsu, 'responsibility for one's own words.' If Governors fear to assume the responsibility of their own views they are only of a part with a great deal of the official world."

We turned away from the northern sea coast and struck south in order to cross Japan to the Inland Sea en route for Kobe and Tokyo.

As we came through Hyogo prefecture my companion pointed to hill after hill which had been afforested since his youth. One of the things which interested me was the number and the tameness of the kites which were catching frogs in the paddies.

Before I left Hyogo I had the advantage of a chat with one who for many years past had thought about the rural situation in Japan generally. He spoke of "the late Professor King's idealising of the Japanese farmer's condition." He went on: "While King laid stress on the ability to be self-supporting on a small area he ignored the extent to which many rural people are underfed. The change in the Meiji era has been a gradual transference from ownership to tenancy. Many so-called representative farmers have been able to add field to field until they have secured a substantial property and have ceased to be farmers. An extension of tenancy is to be deplored, not only because it takes away from the farmer a feeling of independence and of incentive, but because it creates a parasitic class which in Japan is perhaps even more parasitic than in the West. A landowner in the West almost invariably realises that he has certain duties. In Japan a landowner's duties to his neighbourhood and to the State are often imperfectly understood.

"On the other hand the position of the farmer has been very much improved socially. A great deal of pity bestowed by the casual foreign visitor is wasted. The farmer is accustomed to extremes of heat and cold and to a bare living and poor shelter. And after all there is a great deal of happiness in the villages. It is hardly possible to take a day's kuruma ride without coming on a festival somewhere, and drunkenness has undoubtedly diminished."

I spoke with an old resident about the agricultural advance in the prefecture. "In fifteen years," he said, "our agricultural production has doubled. As to the non-material condition of the people, generally speaking the villagers are very shallow in their religion. Not so long ago officials used to laugh at religion, but I don't know that some of them are not now changing their point of view. Some of us have thought that, just as we made a Japanese Buddhism, we might make a Japanese Christianity which would not conflict with our ideas."

TWO MONTHS IN TEMPLE

CHAPTER XXX

THE LIFE OF THE PEASANTS AND THEIR PRIESTS

(NAGANO)

The Buddhist temple in which I lived for about two months stands on high ground in a village lying about 2,500 ft. above sea-level in the prefecture of Nagano and does not seem to have been visited by foreigners. It is reached by a road which is little better than a track. No kuruma are to be found in the district, but there are a few light two-wheeled lorries. Practically all the traffic is on horseback or on foot. There is a view of the Japanese Alps and of Fuji.

Running through the village ^[195] is a river. Most of the summer it may be crossed by stepping stones, but the width of the rocky bed gives some notion of the volume of water which pours down after rains and on the melting of the snow. Two or three miles up from the village a considerable amount of water is drawn off into two channels which have been dug, one on either side of the river, at a gentler slope than that at which the stream flows. The rapid fall of the river is indicated by the fact that these channels reach the village more than 100 ft. above the level at which the river itself enters it. The channels, cut as they have been through sharply sloping banks packed with boulders and big stones, and strengthened throughout by banking, in order to cope as far as possible with the torrents which rage down the hillside in winter, represent a vast amount of communal labour. By the side of each channel the excavated earth and stones have been used to make a path for pack horses. The water which comes down these channels serves not only for the ordinary uses of the village but for irrigating the rice fields and for driving the many water wheels, the plashing and groaning of which are heard night and day.

The whole area of the oaza is officially recorded as 800 chō, but the real area may be double, or even more than that. About 40 per cent. is cultivated either as paddy or as dry land. The remaining 60 per cent., from which 18 chō may be deducted for house land, is under grass and wood. Half of this grass and woodland belongs to the oaza and half to private persons. The grass is mostly couch grass and weeds. In places there is a certain amount of clover and vetch. Of the 200 families, numbering about 1,700 people, less than a dozen are tenants. Of the others, a third cultivate their own land and hire some more. The remaining two-thirds cultivate their own land and hire none. The outstanding crop beyond rice is mulberry. A considerable amount of millet and buckwheat is also grown.

The village is obviously well off. The signs are: successful sericulture, the large quantity of rice eaten, the number of well-looking horses (the millet seems to be grown largely for them, but they also receive beans and wheat boiled), the fact that no attempt is made to collect the considerable amount of horse manure on the roads, the cared-for appearance of the temple and shrines, the almost complete absence of tea-houses, the ease with which new land may be obtained and the contented look of the people.

One does not expect to find in a remote and wholly Buddhist village many other animals than horses, and in this community the additional live stock consists of ten goats (kept for giving milk for invalids), two pigs and a number of poultry. A working horse over four years was worth 150 yen. The value of land ^[196] is to be considered in relation to local standards of value. It is doubtful if the priest, who seemed to be comfortably off, is in receipt of more than 250 yen a year. The midwife, who belongs to the oldest family and has been trained in Tokyo, gets from 2 to 2½ yen per case. As new land is always available on the hillsides there is very little emigration to the towns, but twenty girls are working in the factories in the big silk-reeling centre twelve miles off. The hillside land which is owned by the village is not sold but rented to those who want it. To make new paddies is primarily a question of having enough capital with which to buy the artificial manure required for the crops.

I was given to understand that no one in the village was poor enough to need public help, but that the school fees of twelve children were paid by the community. This is a system peculiar to Nagano, which is a progressive prefecture vying with other prefectures to increase the percentage of school attendance. One of the signs of the well-off character of the village which appears when one is able to investigate a little is that the place is a favourite haunt of beggars, who, I am told—every calling is organised—have made it over to the less fortunate members of their fraternity. The village has enough money to spend to make it worth while for tradesmen from a distance to open temporary shops every Bon season and at the New Year festival. A man in an average position may lay out 200 yen on his daughter's wedding. A farmer who knew his fellow-villagers' position pretty closely said he thought that the position of tenant farmers was "rather well." In the whole village there might be seventy or eighty householders who had some debt, but it was justifiable. In an ordinary year about 150 farmers would have something to lay by after their twelve months' work. Perhaps fifty farmers, if the price of rice or of cocoons were low, might be unable to save; but ordinarily they would have something in their pockets. About half the farmers are engaged in sericulture—I noticed cocoons offered at the shrine. The other half sell their mulberry leaf crop to their neighbours. The village, which is perhaps 400 years old, is increasing in population by about forty every year. The family which is said to have founded the village is still largely represented in it.