The foundations of Japan

CHAPTER XXXIII

GREEN TEA AND BLACK

(SHIDZUOKA)

More than half of the tea grown in Japan comes from the hilly coast-wise prefecture of Shidzuoka through which every traveller passes on his journey from Kobe or Kyoto to Tokyo. He sees a terraced cultivation of tea and fruit carried up to the skyline. But there is more tea on the hills than the passenger in the train imagines. When viewed from below much of the tea looks like scrub. In various parts of southern Japan patches of tea may be noticed growing on little islands in the paddies, but tea is a hill plant and it is on the sides of hills and on the plateaus at the top of them that the plantations are to be found.

Tea looks not unlike privet and grows or is made to grow like box to a height which can be conveniently picked over. The rows of neat-looking plants are half a dozen feet apart. The first picking may take place when the bush is three or four years old. Bushes may last forty, fifty or even a hundred years, but the ordinary life of tea is between twenty and thirty. A bush is usually cut back every ten years or so. A good deal depends on the pruning. After each picking the bushes are cut over with the shears just as we trim box. These trimmings may be used to make an inferior tea for farmhouse consumption, or they may be utilised in the manufacture of caffeine or theine—the two products are indistinguishable. Usually the bushes are cut round-topped, but occasionally they are roof-shaped and sometimes they are like giant green toadstools.

The characteristic feature of a tea district beyond the rows of tea bushes is the chimney piping of the farmhouses which manufacture their own tea. (The word manufacture is used in the original sense, for farmhouse tea is hand-made.) In a country where the houses are chimneyless these galvanised iron chimneys are conspicuous.

The picking of the tea seems to be done almost entirely by women and children. The pickers are supposed to take only the three leaves at the tips. But the pickers mostly take bigger pieces, for the somewhat higher price given for good picking is not enough to secure three-leaf stuff only. It is not absolutely necessary, however, that the leaves gathered should be all of such a choice sort.

Women and girls come from a distance to pick tea. Picking is regarded as "polite labour by the daughters of the higher middle class of farmers." It has also the attraction that farmers' sons have a way of visiting tea gardens in order to "pick up wives." The girls certainly give would-be husbands every chance of seeing what they can do, for they are at work for a long day, often of from twelve to fourteen hours. In such a day it is possible, I was told, to pick 50, 80 or even 100 lbs. of leaves. One man put the rate as from 50 to 120 pieces a minute. Four pounds of leaves make a pound of tea.

In one district the first picking may take place during the first three weeks of May. In colder districts it is proceeding until the end of the month. The second season is from the end of June until the beginning of July. The third is in August. The bushes, after producing their three crops of leaves, bear in November their seeds, which are about three-quarters of an inch in diameter and are worth about a sen a pound. Oil is pressed from them.

Good tea depends on climate and soil, careful cutting over and good manuring. In some places I saw soya bean being grown between the rows as green manuring. Like so many other crops, tea is or ought to be sprayed. The northern limit of tea is Niigata, where the bushes must be protected from the snow, which may fall in that prefecture to a great depth. The region in which tea cannot be grown is that in which the temperature falls below zero for two months. Tea is not grown, as in India and Ceylon, by tea planters, but in small areas and as a side-line at that. I never saw a plantation of more than five acres. Most areas are much smaller. The chief reason for this is that tea is largely manufactured on the day on which it is picked and the capacity of a farmer's tea manufacturing equipment is limited. In Shidzuoka nearly a quarter of the tea is hand rolled and three-quarters made by machinery. Elsewhere in Japan half the crop may be hand rolled.

When leaves are sold to factors the transactions take place in booths opened by them in the tea districts. It is a busy scene in the region of the cottage factories. One is on a wide plateau covered almost entirely with rows of tea plants. Here and there are parties of chattering pickers, their heads protected by the national towel. Against the blue hilltops on the horizon stand out the cottages of the farmers with chimney-pipes smoking, the booths of the dealers, and, in every patch of tea, the thatched roof over the precious sunken pot of liquid manure by which the tea bushes have so often benefited. On the road one passes women with baskets on their backs, like Scotch fish-wives with their creels, men carrying two baskets suspended from a pole across one shoulder, or a man and his wife hauling a barrow, all heavy-laden with newly picked leaves. Small horse-drawn wagons carry the manufactured tea in big, well-tied, pink paper bales. On the whole, although the labour is hard it seemed a better life having to do with the fragrant tea than with the rice of the sludge ponds in the valley below.

The tea produced in Japan is principally green tea. Most of this is of the kind called sencha—Chao means tea. An inferior article made out of older and tougher leaves is called bancha. The custom is for the maid who serves bancha to heat the leaves over the charcoal fire just before infusing. This gives it an agreeable roasted flavour. It is often served in a darker shade of porcelain than is used for ordinary tea. There are also the finer teas, kikicha (powdered tea) and gyokuro (jewelled dewdrops), which is the best kind of sencha. Black tea was being made experimentally when I first arrived in Japan. Brick tea (pressed to the consistency and weight of wood) may be green or black. Most of the exported tea, other than brick tea, goes to America.

It is unnecessary to state that the Japanese tea-tray does not include a sugar basin, cream jug or spoons. It does include, however, a squat oval jug into which the hot water from the kettle is poured in order to lower the temperature below boiling point. Boiling water would bring out a bitter flavour from the tea. Made with water just below boiling point the tea is deliciously soft, even oily, and has a flavour and aroma which cream and sugar would ruin. It is certainly refreshing, and, when drunk newly infused, relatively harmless. Bancha is made with hotter water than other tea. The handleless cups hold about half of what our teacups contain. ^[201] Tea is not the only plant used for making "tea." One drinks in some parts infusions of cherry, plum or peach blossom.

The processes of tea manufacture in farmers' outhouses and in factories are described in school-books, and I need not transcribe my impressions. ^[202] But I may note that some of the money the tea farmer earns for the country is spent in his interests. There is in Shidzuoka a well-directed prefectural experiment station which exercises itself over problems of tea production. Every tea grower and tea dealer in the prefecture must belong to the prefectural tea guild. He must also belong to his county tea guild. The rules of the guilds—there is a central guild in Tokyo—have the force of law. Evil doers in the tea industry have their product confiscated. Tea dealers who do not carry their guild membership card are fined. It is not difficult to discover colouring in tea if it is rubbed on white paper. The Government's part in subduing tea colouring was to seize all the dye stuff it could lay hold of which could be used for colouring tea.

The future of green tea depends almost entirely on the demand from the growing population of Japan, but a taste for the "foreign style" black tea—with condensed milk—is spreading. The cheap labour of India and China and the big plantations and factories of India have diminished the Japanese green tea trade and the effort to produce black tea is also met by foreign competition. I was told that China tea receives much sunshine while growing, and that there was most hope for Japanese black tea when made from leaves grown in the extreme south. There is a difference between the Chinese and the Japanese tea plant and it cannot be got over by importing Chinese plants, for the climate of Japan simply Japanises the imported sort.

I found in the United States that green tea is bought, as it is no doubt sold in Shidzuoka, on appearance. American housewives were paying for an appearance that matters little in an article that is not to be looked at but soaked. Not only is much extra labour required for sifting the leaf several times in order to obtain a good appearance, but the bulk is reduced from 5 to 10 per cent. The drinking quality of the tea also suffers, for the largest leaf has usually the best cup quality. If teas were bought for cup quality only they might be at least from 5 to 10 per cent. cheaper.

EXCURSIONS FROM TOKYO

CHAPTER XXXIV

A COUNTRY DOCTOR AND HIS NEIGHBOURS

(CHIBA)

When I first went to Chiba, the peninsular prefecture lying across the bay from Tokyo, many carriages in the trains were heated by iron hibachi ^[203] with pieces of old carpet thrown over them. It is on the Chiba trains that the recruits of that section of the army which has to do with the operation of the railways learn their business. It is in part of Chiba—and also in a district in Tokyo prefecture—that the earliest rice is grown. Chiba also contains more poultry than any other prefecture. ^[204] It has the further distinction of having tried to issue truthful crop statistics. ^[205]

Wherever one goes in Japan one is impressed by the large consumption of fish—fresh, dried, and salted. Thin slices of raw fish make one of the tasty dishes at a Japanese meal. The foreigner, forgetting the Western relish for oysters and clams, is repelled by this raw fish, but a liking for it seems to be quickly acquired. In Tokyo the slices of raw fish are cut from the meaty bonito (tunny), but tai (bream) is also used. Bonito also provides the long narrow steaks, dried to a mahogany-like hardness, which are known as katsubushi. This katsubushi keeps indefinitely and is grated or shaved with a kind of plane and used much as the Western cook employs Parmesan cheese.

I heard a man in Chiba combating very strongly the idea of there being a connection between leprosy and fish eating. As to leprosy, it is doubtful if the belief expressed by the Chinese name for the disease, "heavenly punishment," has disappeared. There are at least 24,000 lepers in Japan, and as a well-known Japanese work of reference casually remarks, "the hospitals can at present accommodate only 5 per cent. of them."

I could not but compare the undulating countryside, on which so vast an amount of labour had been expended, with what it would have been under European treatment and the influence of an European climate—possibly picturesque pasture with high hedges. The congeries of rice fields was fringed, where the water supply had given out, with upland cultivation. On the low mud walls which separated the paddies beans grew except at a boundary corner, where a tea or mulberry bush served as a landmark. In looking down or up the little valleys one saw how completely the houses had been brushed aside to the foot of the low hills so that no land cultivable as paddies should be wasted. This intensely developed countryside was not however ideal land. It was often much too sandy. Not a few paddies had to depend to some extent on the water they could catch for themselves. A naturally draughty and hungry land was yielding crops by a laborious manurial improvement of its physical and chemical condition, by wonders being wrought in rural hydraulics and by unending industry in cultivation and petty engineering.

It might be supposed that beauty had gone from the countryside. Some of what the land agents call the amenities of the district had certainly disappeared. There seemed to be nowhere for the pedestrian to sit down in order to refresh himself with those rural sights and sounds which exhilarate the spirit. But this marvellously delved, methodised and trimmed countryside had a character and a stimulus of its own. It reflected the energy and persistence that had subdued it. I saw nothing ugly. The tidied rice plots, shaped at every possible curve and angle, and eloquent of centuries of unremitting toil; the upland beyond them, worked to a skilled perfection of finish; the nesting houses which nowhere offended the eye; the big still ponds contrived by the rude forefathers of the hamlet for water storage or the succour of the rice in the hottest weather; the low hilltops green with pine because cultivation could not ascend so far, and hiding here and there a Shinto sanctuary: such a countryside was satisfying in its own way.

In Chiba, as in other prefectures, one is impressed by the way in which the exertions of many generations have resulted in the levelling of wide areas and even the complete removal of small hills. In many places one can still see low hills in process of demolition. In Tokyo itself several small hills have been carried off in recent years.

I was in Chiba several times and I remember to have noticed one winter day with what considered roughness the paddies had been dug in order to receive from frost and sun the benefits which are as good as a manuring. Some notion of the strength of the weather forces at work may be gathered from the fact that, though I was walking without an overcoat and was glad to shade my eyes by pulling down the brim of my hat, the frost of the two previous nights had produced ice on the paddies an inch thick.

Sometimes at the irrigation reservoirs one may see notice boards announcing that these water areas are stocked with koi (carp). This fish is also kept in the paddies. The carp are put in as yearlings or two-year-olds, when the paddies are flooded, and a score out of every hundred come out in the autumn—assuming the happiest conditions—ten inches or so long. Carp culture flourishes in the sericulture districts, where the pupæ which remain when the cocoons are unwound are thrown to the fish; but pupæ fed carp have a flavour which diminishes their value. Indeed paddy-field fish, which on the whole must have a rather troubled existence, do not bring the price of river carp. Other fish than carp, eels for instance, are also kept in paddies.^[206]

I visited a vigorous personality who was at once a landowner and rural oculist, as his father and grandfather had been before him. He had graduated at Tokyo and had kept himself abreast of German specialist literature. There was accommodation for about a hundred patients in the buildings attached to his house. He believed in the efficacy in eye cases of "the air of the rice fields," not to speak of the shrine which overlooks the patients' quarters. As the number of blind people in Japan is appalling, ^[207] it was interesting to hear the opinion that the chief causes were gonorrhœa, inadequate attention at birth, insufficient nourishment in childhood and nervous disease—all more or less preventible. Nearly a quarter of my host's patients had had their eyes wounded by rice-stem points while stooping in the paddies. As the people are hurt in the busy season they often put off coming for help until it is too late.

The landowner-oculist's premises were lighted by natural gas from a depth of 900 ft. According to a fellow-guest, who happened to be an expert in this matter, natural gas is to be had all over Japan. ^[208]

The room in which I slept belonged to a part of the house which was of great age, but by my futon there was laid an electric torch.

A pleasant thing during my visit was the presence of a dozen intelligent, kindly students who early in the evening came and knelt in a semicircle round us, "in order to profit by our talk." One of them, a son of the house, an athlete (and now, after travelling in Europe, his father's successor), did all sorts of services for me during my stay, in the simple-hearted fashion that shows such an attractive side of the Japanese character. One question asked by the students was, "For what reasons does Sensei believe that the influence of women in public life would be good?" Another enquiry was, "Which are the best London and Paris papers?" These lads could hardly hope to get through the university before they were twenty-five or twenty-six. Yet, compared with our undergraduates, they had very little time for general reading, discussions and outdoor sports. I remember a man of some experience in the educational world saying to me, "Our students do not read enough apart from their studies; it is their misfortune." They have not only the burden of having to learn nearly several thousand ideographs, ^[209] three scripts and Japanese and Chinese pronunciation. They have to acquire Western languages, which, owing to their absolute dissimilarity from Oriental tongues—for example, the word for "I" is watakushi—must be learnt entirely from memory. It is not that the Japanese student does not begin early as well as leave off late. A professor once said to me, "For some little time after I first went to school I was still fed from the bosom of my mother." In some ways it is no doubt a source of strength for Japan that her men can spend from their earliest years to the age of twenty-six on the acquirement of knowledge and self-discipline—the privileges of the student class and the generosity of their families and friends and the public at large are remarkable—but the disadvantages are plain. No sight seems stranger to a new arrival in Japan than that of so many men in their middle or late twenties still wearing the conspicuous kimono and German bandsman cap of the student.

To return to our host, he told us that tenants were "getting clever." They were paying their rent in "worse and worse qualities of rice." The landlords "encouraged" their tenants with gifts of tools, clothes or saké in order that they might bring them the best rice, but the tenants evidently thought it paid better to forgo these benefits and market their best rice. This raises the question whether rent ought nowadays to be paid in kind. Rural opinion as a whole is in favour of continuing in the old way, but there is a clear-headed if small section of rural reformers which is for rent being paid in cash.

One thing I found in my notes of my talk with the landowner-oculist I hesitated to transcribe without confirmation. Speaking of the physique of the people, he had said that few farmers could carry the weights their fathers and grandfathers could move about. But later on a high agricultural authority mentioned to me that it had been found necessary to reduce the weight of a bale of rice from 19 to 18 kwamme and then to 15—1 kwamme is 8.26 lbs.

In the oaza in which I was staying there were eighty families. Seventy were tenants. Under a savings arrangement initiated by my host, the hamlet, including its five peasant proprietors, was saving 120 yen a month. On the other hand, more than half the tenants were in debt "in connection with family excesses," such as weddings, births and burials. But there might be unknown savings. I should state that the villagers seemed contented enough.

For some reason or other I was particularly struck by the sturdiness of the small girls. This was interesting because Chiba had for long an evil reputation for infanticide, and under a system of infanticide in the Far East it would be supposed—I have heard this view stoutly questioned—that more girls die than boys. The landowner-oculist was of opinion that in stating the causes of the low economic condition of his tenants the abating of infanticide must be put first. People no longer restricted themselves to three of a family. The average area available locally was only 6 tan of paddy and 1.2 tan of dry land. In a one-crop district in which there was work for only a part of the year this area was obviously insufficient and there was not enough dry land for mulberries. Then taxation was now 2½ yen per bale of rice (hyō). A third of the rice went in rent.

I tried to find out what the oaza might be spending on religion. The Shinto priest seemed to get 5 sen a month per family, which as there are eighty families would be 48 yen yearly. The Buddhist priest had land attached to his temple and money was given him at burials and at the Bon season. The oaza might spend 100 yen a year to send five pilgrims as far away as Yamagata, on the other side of Japan. The priests did not seem to count for much. "Their only concern with the public," I was informed, "is to be succoured by it. They are living very painfully. The Buddhist priests have to send money to their sect at Kyoto." In one of my strolls I passed the Shinto priest carrying a rice basket and looking, as my companion said, "just like any other man." At a shrine I saw a number of bowls hung up. A hole cut in the bottom of each seemed a pathetic symbol of need, material or spiritual.

The keeper of the teahouse in the oaza had been given a small sum by our host to take himself off, but in the village of which the oaza formed a part there were two teahouses, where ten times as much was spent as was laid out on religion. No one had ever heard of a case of illegitimacy in the oaza but there had been in the twelve months three cases which pointed to abortion. It was five years since there had been an arrest. The young men's association helped twice a year families whose boys had been conscripted.

According to what I was told in various quarters, some landowners in Chiba did a certain amount of public work but most devoted themselves to indoor trivialities. The fact that two banks had recently broken at the next town, one for a quarter of a million yen, and that a landowner had lost a total of 30,000 yen in these smashes, seemed to show that there was a certain amount of money somewhere in the district. No one appeared to "waste time on politics." In ten years "there had been one or two politicians," but "one member of Parliament set a wholesome example by losing a great deal of money in politics." As to local politics, election to the prefectural assembly seemed to cost about 500 yen. Membership of the village assembly might mean "a cup of saké apiece to the electors."

I was assured that this hamlet was above the economic level of the county. The belief was expressed that it could maintain that position for three or four years. "I do not feel so much anxiety about the present condition of the people," my host said; "they are passive enough: but as to the future it is a difficult and almost insoluble question."

"The condition of our rural life is the most difficult question in Japan," said a fellow guest.

In one of the farmers' houses a girl, with the assistance of a younger brother, was weaving rough matting for baling up artificial manure. Near them two Minorcas were laying in open boxes. In this family there were seven children, "three or four of whom can work." The hired land was 8 tan of paddy and 2½ of dry. There was nothing to the good at the end of the year. Indeed rice had had to be borrowed from the landlord. The family was therefore working merely to keep itself alive. But it looked cheerful enough. Looking cheerful is, however, a Japanese habit. The conditions of life here were what many Westerners would consider intolerable. But it was not Westerners but Orientals who were concerned, and what one had to try to guess was how far the conditions were satisfactory to Eastern imaginations and requirements. The people at every house I visited—as it happened to be a holiday the mending of clothing and implements seemed to be in order—were plainly getting enjoyment from the warm sunshine. Undoubtedly the long spells of sunshine in the comparatively idle period of the year make hard conditions of life more endurable.

In a very small house which was little more than a shelter, the father and mother of a tenant were living. It is not uncommon for old peasants to build a dwelling for themselves when they get nearly past work, or sometimes after the eldest son marries.

I found a 1-chō peasant proprietor playing go and rather the worse for saké, though it was early in the morning. A 3-chō proprietor was living in a good-sized house which had a courtyard and an imposing gateway.

On the thatch of one house I noticed a small straw horse perhaps two feet long. On July 7 such a horse is taken by young people to the hills, where a bale of grass is tied on its back. On the reappearance of the figure at the house, dishes of the ceremonial red rice and of the ordinary food of the family are set before it. "The offering of other than horse food indicates," it was explained, "that the desire is to keep the straw animal as a little deity." Finally the horse is flung on the roof.

I went some distance to visit an oaza of twenty families. It was described to me as "well off and peaceful." Alas, one peasant proprietor had gone to Tokyo, where he had made money, and on his return had built his second son a house with Tokyo labour instead of with the labour of his neighbours. So the oaza was "excited with bitter inward animosity." Like our own hamlets, these oaza in the sunshine, seemingly so peaceful, whisper nothing to townsfolk of their bickerings and feuds.

One of the thatched mud houses I came to was at once a primitive co-operative sale-and-purchase society and the clubhouse of the old people of the oaza. The rent the old folk received from the society was enough to maintain the building. The oldsters gather from time to time in order to eat, drink and make merry with gossip and dancing. Dancing is a possibility for old people because it is swaying, sliding and attitudinising, with an occasional stamp of the foot, rather than hopping and whirling. One of the best amateur dances I have seen was performed by a grandsire. Such clubhouses, places for the comfort of the ageing and aged, are found in many villages. Young people are not admitted. The subscription to this particular clubhouse was 2 yen and 3 sho of saké on joining and 2 yen a year.

As we went on our way there was pointed out to me a house the owner of which had sold half a tan of land for 120 yen and was drinking steadily. He had tried to make money by opening an open-air village theatre which owing to rain had been a failure.

I visited an oaza where all the land belonged to the man I called upon. He assured me that most of his tenants "made ends meet." The remainder had a deficiency at the end of the year due to "lack of will to save" and to their "lack of capital which caused them to pay interest to manure dealers." A co-operative society had just been started.

In looking at a map of the village to which some of these oaza belonged I noticed many holdings tinted a special colour. These were called "jump land." They consisted of land subdued from the wild by strangers. The properties were regarded as belonging to the oaza in which their cultivators lived.

I walked through a bit of woodland which had formerly been held in common and had been divided up, amid felicitations no doubt, at the rate of half a tan each to every family. But the well-to-do people soon got hold of their poorer neighbours' portions.

In a roughish tract I came on burial grounds. One portion was set apart for the eight families which recognised the chief landlord as their head. The graves of lowlier folk seemed to occur anywhere. Each grave was covered by a pyramidal mound of sandy earth with a piece of twig stuck in it. Sometimes a tree had been planted and had grown. A child's grave had some tiny bowls of food and a clay doll before a little headstone. By way of shelter for these offerings there was hung on the headstone a peasant's wide straw hat. A large beehive-shaped bamboo basket over another grave was a reminder of the time when a grave needed such protection in order to save the body from wild animals.

I saw at a distance in the midst of paddies two tree-covered mounds, a large one and a small one. They looked like the grave mounds I had seen in China, but it was suggested that they were probably on an old frontier line and marked spots at which ceremonies for scaring off disease were performed.

In one place I found the people planting plum trees in order to meet their communal taxation. It was reckoned that the yield of one tree when it came into full bearing would defray the taxes of a moderate-sized family.

An open space in a wood was pointed out to me as the spot on which dead horses were formerly thrown to the dogs and birds. Nowadays notice was given to the Eta that a dead horse was to be cast away, and they came and, after skinning the animal, buried the body. Farther off, on the high road, I saw an 8 ft. high monument to a local steed that had died in Manchuria.

One of my further visits to Chiba was in the spring. The paddies, which had been fallow since November, were under water; but much of the stubble had been turned over with the long-bladed mattock. The seed beds from which the rice is transplanted to the paddies were a vivid green. On the high ground I saw good clean crops of barley and wheat, beans and peas, on soil of very moderate quality.

The name of Funabashi at a station reminded me of a Japanese friend having told me that it was "famous for a shrine and a very immoral place." But I afterwards heard that the keeper of that shrine, "acting from conscientious motives, gave up his lucrative post and died a poor man." It is said of one of the most sacred places in Japan that it is also the "most immoral." Kyoto which contains nine hundred shrines is also supposed to harbour several thousand women of bad character.

I passed a place where 25,000 Russian prisoners had been detained. There was an old peasant there who told his son that he could not understand why so many Japanese went abroad at such great cost to see the different peoples of the world. If they would only stay at home, he said, they would see them all in turn, for first there had been the Chinese prisoners, then the Russians and now there were the Germans.

In the uplands it was peaceful and restful to walk through the shady lanes between the tree-studded homesteads or along the road passing between plots of mulberry, tea, vegetables or grain, cultivated with the care given to plants in a garden. In the herbage by the roadside, but not among the crops I need hardly say, I noticed dandelions, sow thistles, Scots thistles, plantains and some other familiar weeds.

In the paddies some men wore only a narrow band of red cotton between their legs joined to a waist string, which, though convenient wear in paddies, was comically conspicuous. I recall a friend's story of a little foreign girl of seven who stayed with her mother in a Japanese hamlet and struck up a friendship with a kindly old peasant. One hot summer day the child came home carrying all her scanty garments over her arm, and covered with mud to the waist. In answer to her mother's enquiries the child said, "Well, mother, Ito San has all his clothes off, and I could not go into the paddy to help him with mine on."

I visited an elementary school which was little more than a shed. The roofing was of bark and the paper-covered window shutters were of the roughest. It said much for the stamina of the children that they could sit there in bleak weather. An attempt had been made to shut off the classes from one another by pieces of thin cotton sheeting fastened to a string. But such essential furniture, from a hygienic point of view, as benches with backs had been provided, for it is considered by the national educational authorities that kneeling in the Japanese manner is inimical to physical development. I noticed, also, that when the children sang they had been taught to place their hands on their hips in order that their chests might benefit from the vocal exercise. The earnestness and kindliness of the men and women teachers were evident. All the teachers came to school bare-foot on geta. ^[210]

The sea was not far off and we went to the beach where there was nothing between us and America. My companion and I were carried over shallows on the backs of fishermen, wonderful bronze-coloured figures. Above high-water mark heaps of small fish were drying. They were to be turned into oil and fish-waste manure. I saw an earthenware vase with a hole in the bottom like a flowerpot and found that it was used, with a rope attached to the rim, for catching octopus. When the octopus comes across such a vase on the sea bottom he regards it as a shelter constructed on exactly the right principles and takes up his abode therein. He is easily captured, for he refuses to let go his vase when it is brought to the surface. Indeed the only way to dislodge him is to pour hot water through the hole in the bottom of his upturned tenement.

CHAPTER XXXV

THE HUSBANDMAN, THE WRESTLER AND THE CARPENTER

(SAITAMA, GUMMA AND TOKYO)

One day in the third week of October when the roads were sprinkled with fallen leaves I made an excursion into the Kwanto plain and passed from the prefecture of Tokyo into that of Saitama. ^[211] The weather now made it necessary for Japanese to wear double kimonos. During the middle of the day, however, I was glad to walk with my jacket over my arm, and many little boys and girls were running about naked. The region visited had a naturally well-drained dark soil, composed of river silt, of volcanic dust and of humus from buried vegetation, and it went down to a depth beyond the need of the longest daikon (giant radish). Sweet potatoes and taro were still on the ground, and large areas, worked to a perfect tilth, had been sown or were in course of preparation for winter wheat and barley; but the most conspicuous crop was daikon. There were miles and miles of it at all sorts of stages from newly transplanted rows to roots ready for pulling. There is daikon production up to the value of about a million yen. In addition to the roots sent into Tokyo, there is a large export trade in daikon salted in casks.

I came into a district where there was a system of alternate grain and wood crops. The rotation was barley and wheat for three or four years, then fuel wood for about fifteen. The tendency was to lengthen the corn period in the rotation.

The women even as near Tokyo as this wore blue cotton trousers like the men. One farm-house I entered was a century old but it had not been more than forty years on its present site. It had been transported three miles. I was once more impressed by the low standard of living. If by this time I had not been getting to know something of the ways of the farmers I should have found it difficult to credit the fact that a household I visited was worth ten thousand yen.

Sweet potatoes are here much the most important crop. They were bringing the farmer in Tokyo a little over a yen the 82 lbs. bale. The consumer was paying double that. Not a few of the farmers were cultivating as much as 5 chō or even 8 chō, for there was little paddy. Even then, I was told, "it's a very hard life for a third of the farmers." The reason was that there was no remunerative winter employment.

Before the Buddhist temple, where there was preaching twice a year, were rows of little stone figures, many of which had lost their heads. The heads were in much demand among gamblers who value them as mascots. Among some mulberry plots belonging to different owners I saw a little wooden shrine, evidently for the general good. It was there, it was explained, "not because of belief but of custom." The evening was drawing in and Fuji showed itself blue and mystical above the dark greenery of the country. As I gazed a sweet-sounding gong was struck thrice in the temple. Three times a day there is heard this summons to other thoughts than those of the common task.

My companion entered into conversation with a decent middle-aged pedestrian, neatly but poorly dressed, and found that he was a man who had formerly pulled his kuruma in Tokyo. The man had found the work of a kurumaya too much for him and had withdrawn to his village to open a tiny shop. But he had been taken ill and had been removed to hospital. When he came out he found that his wife was in poverty and that his eldest son had been summoned to serve in the army. Now his wife had become ill and he was on his way to a distant relative to ask him to take charge of a small child and to help him with a little money to start some petty business. My companion gave him a yen and deplored the fact that poor people should fail to take advantage of the law releasing from service a son required for the support of a parent. They failed occasionally to find friends to represent their case to the authorities.

It is difficult to enter a village which has not its pillar or its slab to the memory of a youth or youths who perished in the Russian or Chinese wars. ^[212] But in the severe struggle with Russia the villages did more than give their sons and build memorials to them when they were killed. They tried, in the words of an official circular of that time, "to preserve the spirit of independence in the hearts of the relieved and to avoid the abuses of giving out ready money." There was the secret ploughing society of the young men of a village in Gumma prefecture. "Either at night or when nobody knew these young men went out and ploughed for those who were at the front." In one prefecture the school children helped in working soldiers' farms. In villages in Osaka and Hyogo prefectures there was given to soldiers' families the monopoly of selling tofu, matches and other articles. Some of the societies which laboured in war time were the Women's One Heart Society, the Women's Chivalrous Society, the National Backing Society and the Nursing Place of Young Children of those Serving at the Front.

In the train we talked of the hardiness induced by not being the slave of clothing. When it rains kuruma men and workmen habitually roll up their kimonos round their loins, or if they are wearing trousers, take them off. ^[213] Of course no Japanese believes in catching cold through getting his feet wet. This is a condition which is continually experienced, for the cotton tabi are wet through at every shower. Some years back it was not uncommon in walking along the sea-beach at night to find fishermen sleeping out on the sand. An old man told me that it used to be the custom in his sea-shore hamlet for all members of a family to sleep on the beach except fathers, mothers and infants.

On my return from the country I found myself in a company of earnest rural reformers who were discussing a plan of State colonisation for the inhabitants of some villages where everything had been lost in a volcanic eruption. Families had been given a tract of forest land, 15 yen for a cottage, 45 yen for tools and implements and the cost of food for ten months (reckoned at 8 sen per adult and 7 sen per child per day). During the evening I was shown the figure of a goddess of farming venerated by the afflicted folk. The deity was represented standing on bales of rice, with a bowl of rice in her left hand and a big serving spoon in her right.

The gathering discussed the question of rural morality. As to the relations of the young men and women of the villages, to which there has necessarily been frequent references in these pages, the reader must always bear in mind the way in which the sexes are normally kept apart under the influence of tradition. In nothing does this Japanese countryside differ more noticeably from our own than in the fact that joyous young couples are never seen arming each other along the road of an evening. Thousands of allusions in our rural songs and poetry, innumerable scenes in our genre pictures, speak of blissful hours of which Japan gives no sign. There is no courting; there are in the public view no "random fits of Daffi'." An unmarried young man and young woman do not walk and talk together. A young man and woman who were together of an evening would be suspected of immorality. Even when married they would not think of linking arms on the road. I was a beholder of a family reunion at a railway station in which a young wife met her young husband returned from abroad. There were merely repeated bows and many smiles. The view taken of kissing in Japan is shown by the fact that an issue of a Tokyo periodical was prohibited by the police because it contained an allusion to it. We are helped to understand the Japanese standpoint a little if we remember how repugnant to English and American ideas is the Continental custom of men kissing one another. Kissing is understood by the Japanese to be a sexual act, as is shown by their word for it.

Early in November in the neighbourhood of Tokyo, where three crops are taken in the year and sometimes four or five, I found between the rows of growing winter barley two lines of green stuff which would be cleared off as the barley rose. The barley was sown in clumps of two dozen or even thirty plants, each clump being about a foot apart, and liberally treated with liquid manure. In Saitama 100 bushels per acre has been produced by a good farmer. The clump method of sowing is believed to afford greater protection against the weather. (Outside the volcanic-soil area ordinary sowing in rows is common.) The volcanic soil, as one sees in spots where excavations have been made, is originally light yellow. The humus introduced by the liberal applications of manure has made it black.

I came upon a hollow in some low hills, studded with trees and overlooking Tokyo Bay, which had been secured for the building of an elaborate series of temples at a cost of three million yen. Acres of grounds were being laid out with genius. The buildings were of that beautiful simplicity which marks the edifices of the Zen sect. The construction was in the hands of some of the cleverest master craftsmen in Japan. The work was to be spread over four years. A great hoarding displayed thousands of wooden tablets bearing the names and the amounts of the subscriptions of the faithful. In one of the completed temples a kindly priest was preaching. He added to the force of his gestures by the use of a fan. He was being attentively listened to by an intelligent-looking congregation. I caught the injunction that in the attainment of goodness aspiration was little worth without will.

The method of announcing subscriptions on hoardings was also adopted outside the new primary school near by. The subscriptions were from a hundred yen to one yen. The charge to scholars at this school, I found, was 10 sen per month during the first compulsory six years and 30 sen during the next two years.

Just after Christmas I walked again into the country. There were miles of dreary brown paddies with the stubble in puddles. On the non-paddy land there was the refreshing green of young corn which seemed greatly to enjoy being treated as a garden plant in a deep exquisitely worked soil with never a weed in an acre. But children were kept from school because their parents could not get along without their help. Many of the school teachers seemed as poor as the farmers. As I passed the farm-houses in the evening they seemed bleak and uninviting. In the fire hole ^[214] of every house, however, there was a generous blaze and the bath tub out-of-doors was steaming for the customary evening hot dip in the opening.

In my host's house I noticed an old painting of a forked daikon. Such malformed roots used to be presented to shrines by women desirous of having children.

In the office of one village I visited I was permitted to examine the dossiers of some of the inhabitants. Among a host of other particulars about a certain person's origin and condition I read that he was a minor when his father died, that such and such a person acted as his guardian, that the guardianship ended on such and such a date, and that his widowed mother had a child nine years after her husband's death.

In not a few places I found that the tiny shrines of hamlets (aza) had been taken away and grouped together at a communal shrine with the notion of promoting local solidarity. At one such combination of shrines I saw notice boards intimating that "tramps, pedlars, wandering priests and other carriers of subscription lists and proselytisers" were not received in the village. It was explained that a community was sometimes all of one faith: "therefore it does not want to be disturbed by tactless preachers of other beliefs."

At an inn there was a middle-aged widow who served there as waitress in the summer but in the winter returned to Tokyo, where she employed a number of girls in making haori tassels. (She gave them board and lodging and clothes for two years, and, after that period, wages.^[215] ) Remembering what I had written down about courting, I asked for her mature judgment on our rural custom of "walking out." She was amused, but, in that way the Japanese have of trying to look at a Western custom on its merits, she said, after consideration, that there was much to be said for the plan. "In Japan," she declared, "you cannot know a husband's character until you are married. On the whole, I wish I had been a man." In order to catch our train we had to leave this inn the moment our meal was finished, although the widow quoted to us the adage, "Rest after a meal even if your parents are dead."

On a morning in May I went into the country to visit a friend who was taking a holiday in a ramshackle inn 4,000 ft. up Mount Akagi. I continually heard the note of the kakkō (cuckoo). On the higher parts of the mountain there were azaleas at every yard, some quite small but others 12 or even 15 ft. high. Many had been grazed by cattle. Big cryptomeria were plentiful part of the way up, but at the top there were no trees but diminutive oaks, birches and pines, stunted and lichen covered, the topmost branches broken off by the terrific blasts which from time to time sweep along the top of the extinct volcano.

One of the products of rural Japan is the wrestler. Sumo, which is going on in every school and college of the country, exhibits its perfect flower twice a year in the January and May ten-days-long tournaments in the capital. The immense rotunda of the wrestlers' association suggests a rather rickety Albert Hall and holds 13,000 people.^[216] On the day I went in I paid 2 yen and had only standing room. Everybody knows the more than Herculean proportions of the wrestlers in comparison with the rest of their countrymen. The rigorous training, Gargantuan feeding and somewhat severe discipline of the wrestlers enable them to grow beyond the average stature and to a girth, protected by enormously developed abdominal muscles, which reinforces strength with great weight. ^[217]

I had often the opportunity at a railway station or in a train to witness the easy carriage and magnificent pride of these massive, good-tempered men. There is not in the world, probably, a more remarkable illustration than they afford of what superior physical training and superior feeding can do. At first sight, indeed, these gigantic creatures seem to belong to a different race. It is no wonder that they should be so commonly proteges of the rich and distinguished. When an eminent wrestler retired in the year in which I first saw a good wrestling bout the ceremony of cutting his hair—for, like Samson, the wrestler wears his hair long—was performed by a personage who combined the dignities of an admiral and a peer. There is nothing of the bruiser in the looks of the smooth-faced wrestlers. Many, however, are the bruises to their bodies and to their self-esteem which they receive in their disciplinary progress from the contests of their native villages through all the grades of their profession to the highest rank. Their sexual morality is commonly of the lowest.

In my own hamlet at home in England I have seen the shoemaker, tailor and carpenter successively pass away; the only craftsman left is the smith. In Japan the hereditary craftsman survives for a while. I watched in my house one day the labours of such a worker. He was not arrayed in a Sunday suit fallen to the greasy bagginess of everyday wear, topped by a soiled collar. He appeared in a blue cotton jacket-length kimono and tight-fitting trousers of the same stuff, and both garments, which were washed at least once a week, were admirably fitted to their wearer's work. Almost the same rig was worn by our own medieval and pre-medieval workmen. The carpenter had on the back of his coat the name of his master or guild in decorative Chinese characters in white. There are nowadays in the cities many inferior workers, but all the men who came to my house worked with rapidity and concentration, hardly ever lifting their eyes from their jobs. The dexterity of the Japanese workman is seldom exaggerated. To his dexterity he adds the considerable advantage of having more than two hands, for he uses his feet together or singly. His supple big toes are a great possession. We have lost the use of ours, but the Japanese artisan, accustomed from his youth to tabi with a special division for the big toe, and to geta, which can be well managed only when the big toe is lissom, uses his toes as naturally as a monkey, with his paws and mouth full of nuts, gives a few to his feet to hold. The first sight of a foot holding a tool is uncanny.

The pitiful thing is that a modest, polite, cheerful, industrious, skilful, and in the best sense of the word artistic hereditary craftsmanship is proving only too easy a prey to the new industrial system. It is a sad reflection that the country which, owing to her long period of seclusion, had the opportunity of applying to all the things of common life so remarkable a skill and artistry, should be so little conscious of the pace at which her industrial rake's progress is proceeding, so insensible to the degree to which she is prodigally sacrificing that which, when it is lost to her, can never be recovered. It is no doubt true that when our own handicrafts were dying we also were insensitive. But because the Middle Ages in England encountered the industrial system gradually we suffered our loss more slowly than Japan is doing. Because, too, we never had in our bustling history the long periods of immunity from home and foreign strife by which Japanese craftsmanship profited so wonderfully, we may not have had such large stores of precious skill and taste to squander as New Japan, the spendthrift of Old Japan's riches, is unthinkingly casting away.

It is at Christmas at home that we have in the Christmas tree our reminder of the country. It is on New Year's Day that in Japan a pine tree is set up on either side of the front gate, but there are three bamboos with it, and the four trunks are all beautifully bound together with rope. If the ground be too hard for the trees to be stuck in the ground, they are kept upright by having a dozen heavy pieces of wood, not unlike fire logs, neatly bound round them. The pines may be about 10 ft. high, the bamboo about 15 ft. To the trees are affixed the white paper gohei. Over the doorway itself is an arrangement of straw, an orange, a lobster, dried cuttlefish and more gohei. A less expensive display consists of a sprig of pine and bamboo. Poor people have to be content with a yard-high pine branch with a French nail through it at either side of their doorway. I have been ruralist enough to harbour thoughts of the extent to which the woods are raided for all this New Year forestry. Some prefectures, in the sincerity of their devotion to afforestation, forbid the New Year destruction of pine trees.

I remember the gay and elaborate dressing of the horses during the New Year holidays. I saw one driver of a wagon who was not content with tying streamers on every part of his horse where streamers could be tied: he had also decorated himself, even to the extent of having had his head cropped to a special pattern, tracts of hair and bare scalp alternating.

It was pleasant to learn that a fine chrysanthemum show arranged in an open space in Tokyo was free to the public. Some plants, by means of grafting, bore flowers of half a dozen different varieties. Several plants had been wondrously trained into the form of kuruma, etc. Not a few of the varieties exhibited were, according to our ideas, atrocious in colouring, but many were beautiful and all were marvels of cultivation. Even greater manipulative and horticultural skill was represented in the chrysanthemums I saw at the Imperial garden party. A chief of a department of the Ministry of Agriculture told me that from a chrysanthemum growing in the ground it was possible to have a thousand blooms.

In a Japanese room the timber upright alongside the tokonoma is always a tree trunk in the rough. If it be cherry it has its bark on. The contrast with the finely finished wood of the rest of the room is arresting. It is said that the use of the unplaned upright is not more than three or four hundred years old and that it had its origin in Cha-no-yu affectations of simplicity.

I was visited one evening by an agricultural official who had returned from a visit to Great Britain. He spoke of the "lonelyism" of our best hotels. In a Japanese hotel of the same class one's room is so simple and the view of the garden is so refreshing that, with the beautiful flower arrangement indoors, the frequent change of kakemono, the serving of one's meals in a different set of lacquer and porcelain each day and the willing and smiling service always within the call of a hand clap, there comes a sense of restfulness and peace. The drawback which the Western man experiences is the lack of any means of resting his back but by lying down and the inability to read for long while resting an elbow on an arm rest which is too low for him. ^[218] A Japanese often reads kneeling before a table.

Here I am reminded to say that the development of the desire for books and newspapers in the rural districts is a noticeable thing, if only because it is new. It is not so long ago that reading was considered to be an occupation for old men and women and for children. The samurai had few books and the farmers fewer still. But the idea of combining cultivation and culture was not unknown. I have heard a rural student humbly quote the old saying, SE-kō U-doku (literally, "Fine weather—farming—Rainy weather—reading").

I have a rural note of one of my visits to the Nō. ^[219] One farce brought on an inferior priest of a sect which is now extinct but surely deserves to be remembered for its encouragement of mountain climbing. This "mountain climber," as he was called, was hungry and climbed a farmer's tree in order to steal persimmons. (The actor got on a stool, obligingly steadied by a supposedly invisible attendant, and pretended to clamber up a corner post of the stage.) While he was eating the persimmons he was discovered by their owner. The farmer was a man of humour and said that he thought that "that must be a crow in the tree." So the poor priest tried to caw. "No," said the farmer, "it is surely a monkey." So the priest began to scratch after the manner of monkeys. "But perhaps," the farmer went on, "it is really a kite." The priest flapped his arms—and fell. The farmer thought that he had the priest at his mercy. But the priest, rubbing his beads together, put a spell on him and escaped. The word Nō is written with an ideograph which means ability, but Nō also stands for agriculture.^[220]