The foundations of Japan

A good judge expressed the opinion that Buddhism was flourishing in 80 per cent. of the villages of Aichi, but this was in a material and ceremonial sense. The prefectures of Aichi and Niigata had been called the "kitchens of Hongwanji" ^[55] (the great temple at Kyoto), such liberal contributions were forthcoming from them. "A belief in progress," this speaker said, "may be a substitute for religion for many of our people; another substitute is a belief in Japan." A village headman from the next prefecture (Shidzuoka) said: "People in my village do not omit to perform their Buddhist ceremonies, but they are not at their hearts religious. In our prefecture the influence of Ninomiya is greater than that of Buddhism. If the villagers are good it is Ninomiyan principles that make them so. Under Ninomiyan influence the spirit of association has been aroused, thriftiness has been encouraged and extravagance reprimanded."

I told Mr. Yamasaki one day that there was an old Scotswoman who divided good people into "rael Christians and guid moral fowk." What I was curious to know was what proportion of Japanese rural people might be fairly called "real Buddhists" and what proportion "good moral folk." "There are certainly some real Buddhists, not merely good moral folk," he assured me. "If you penetrate deeply into the lives of the people you will be able to find a great number of them. In ordinary daily life, during a period when nothing extraordinary happens, it is not easy to distinguish the two classes; but when any trouble comes then those real religious people are undismayed, while the ordinarily good moral people may sometimes go astray. The proportion of religious people is rather large among the poor compared with the middle and upper classes. These poor people are always weighted with many troubles which would be a calamity to persons of the middle or upper classes. Such humble folk get support for their lives from what is in their hearts. Though they may suffer privation or loss they are glad that they can live on by the mercy of Buddha. There are some religious people even among those who are not poor. They are usually people who have lost some of their riches suddenly, or a dear child, or have been deprived of high position, or have met some kind of misfortune. Sometimes a man may become religious because he feels deeply the misfortunes or miseries of a neighbour or the miseries of war. Or his religion may come by meditation. A man who begins to be religious is not, however, at once noticed. On the contrary, if he is a true believer his daily life will be most ordinary."

One day I passed a primary school playground. The girls had just finished and the boys were beginning Swedish drill. Everyone engaged in the drill, including the master, was barefoot.

I saw that some of the cottages were built in an Essex fashion, of puddled clay and chopped straw faced with tarred boards. Some dwellings, however, were faced with straw instead of boards. They had just had their wall thatch renewed for the winter.

In one spot there was a quarter of a mile of wooden aqueduct for the service of the paddy fields. Much agricultural pumping is done in Aichi. I visited an irrigation installation where pumps (from London) were turning barren hill tops into paddy fields. ^[56] The work was being done by a co-operative society of 550 members who had borrowed the 40,000 yen they needed from a bank on an undertaking to repay in fifteen years.

It was stated that common paddy near Anjo had been bought at 5,000 yen per chō and not for building purposes. When one member of our company said, "The farmers here are rivalling each other in hard work," the weightiest authority among us replied: "What the farmer must do is to work not harder but better. At present he is not working on scientific principles. The hours he is spending on really profitable labour are not many. He must work more rationally. In 26 villages in the south-west of Japan, where farming calls for much labour, it was found that the number of days' work in the year was only 192. Statistics for Eastern Japan give 186 days. ^[57] As to a secondary industry, one or two hours' work a night at straw rope making for a month may bring in a yen because the market for rope is confined to Japan. The same with zori, a coarse sort being purchasable for 2 sen a pair. But supplementary work like silk-worm culture produces an article of luxury for which there is a world market."

When we returned home my host was kind enough to summarise for me—the general reader may skip here—some of the reasons set forth by a professor of agricultural politics for the farmer's position being what it is:

1. The average area cultivated per family is very small.
2. The law of diminishing return.
3. Imperfection of the agricultural system. Mainly crop raising, not a combination of crop and stock raising, as in England. No profitable secondary business but silkworm culture. Therefore the distribution of labour throughout the year is not good and the number of days of effective labour is relatively small.
4. The commercial side of agriculture has not been sufficiently developed.
5. There has been a rise in the standard of living. In the old days the farmer did not complain; he thought his lot could not be changed. He was forbidden to adopt a new calling and he was restricted by law to a frugal way of living. Now farmers can be soldiers, merchants or officials and can live as they please. They begin to compare their standard of living with that of other callings. What were once not felt to be miseries are now regarded as such.
   
6. Formerly the farmer had not the expense of education and of losing the services of his sons to the army. There is also an increase in taxation. A representative family which incurred a public expenditure, not including education, of 12.86 yen in 1890, paid in 1898 19.68 yen. In 1908 it was faced by a claim for 34.28 yen. ^[58]
7. Although the area of land does not increase in relation to the increase of population, the size of the peasant family is increasing owing to the decrease of infanticide and abortion and the development of sanitation.
8. The farmer suffers from debts at high interest.
9. The character, morality and ability of the farmer are not yet fully developed.
10. Formerly the farmer lived an economically self-contained existence. He had no great need of money. He must now sell his produce on a market with wider and wider fluctuations.
11. There are many expensive customs and habits, for instance the two or three days' feasting at weddings and funerals.

During the evening I was told this story. In a village in a far part of the prefecture there lived a farmer called Yosōgi. He was a thrifty and diligent man. When he became old he gave all that he had to his son. But the old man could not stop working. He would go to the farm and help his son. The son did not like this. He wanted his old father to rest. In the end he found that the only way to cope with his industrious parent was to work very hard and leave him nothing to do. But the old man was not to be balked. He took himself off to the hillside and began to make a paddy field where there had never been a paddy field before. To make a paddy field on such a slope is a difficult task. The land must be embanked with stones and then levelled. The building of the strong embankment alone calls for much labour. The old man toiled very hard at his job and sometimes his son in despair sent his labourers to help him. At length the paddy field was finished. But it was only a tenth of a tan in area. When the son saw the small result of so much labour he said to his father, "I grieve for the way you have toiled. You have laboured hard for many days and my labourers have helped you, but all that has been accomplished is the making of a paddy field so small and distant that it is uneconomical."

To this the old man replied: "When you go to Tokyo and see the graveyard at Aoyama you will behold there many monuments of generals and ministers of State. Their merits and their works in this world are described on those monuments. But do you know where the monument of the famous hero Kusunoki Masashige is? It is near Kobe, and it is not more than half as big as those monuments at Tokyo. Do you know where the monument of the great Taiko is? It is in Kyoto, but it is only recently that this monument was put up. Thus the monuments of our greatest heroes are small or have been erected recently. The reason is that it is unnecessary to raise big monuments for them because what they did in their lives was in itself their monument. They built their monument in the hearts of the people. Therefore we can never judge from the size of the monument the kind of work which was accomplished by the man who sleeps under it. Monuments are not only for ministers and warriors. We peasants can also erect monuments in our own way. To open a new paddy field, to plant the bare hillside with trees, these are our monuments. How lonely it would be for me if there were no monument left after my death. However small this paddy field may be, it will not be forgotten so long as it yields for your posterity the blessing of its rice crop." "Happily," the interpreter added, "the old man did not die so soon as he thought he would do. He lived for several years and planted the bare hillside with trees. Now the wood which grows there is worth 10,000 yen."

A peasant proprietor expressed the conviction that goodness in a family was "not the result of its own efforts but of the accumulation of ancestral effort." The "ancestral merits and good spirit remain in the family." On the problem of rich and poor he quoted the proverb, "The very rich cannot remain very rich for more than three generations; a poor family cannot long remain poor." He said that he would be interested to know what I found to be "the causes of our villagers becoming good or bad." "For ourselves," he said, quoting another proverb, "'At the foot of the lighthouse it is dark.'"

THE MOST EXACTING CROP IN THE WORLD

CHAPTER VIII

THE HARVEST FROM THE MUD

The vast difference between Far Eastern and Western agriculture is marked by the fact that, except by using such a phrase as shallow pond—and this is inadequate, because a pond has a sloping bottom and a rice field necessarily a level one—it is difficult to describe a rice field in terms intelligible to a Western farmer. The Japanese have a special word for a rice field, ta, water field, written [Kanji: ta]. It will be noticed that the ideograph looks like a water field in four compartments. Another word, hata or hatake, ^[59] written [Kanji: hata], tells the story of the dry or upland field. It is the ideograph for water field in association with the ideograph for fire, and, as we shall see later on, when we make acquaintance with "fire farming," an upland field is a tract the vegetation of which was originally burnt off.

Many of us have seen rice growing in Italy or in the United States. But in Japan^[60] the paddies are very-much smaller than anything to be seen in the Po Valley and in Texas. Owing to the plentiful water supply of a mountainous land, cultivation proceeds with some degree of regularity and with a certain independence of the rainy season; and there has been applied to traditional rice farming not a few scientific improvements.

There is a kind of rice with a low yield called upland rice which, like corn, is grown in fields. But the first requisite of general rice culture is water. The ordinary rice crop can be produced only on a piece of ground on which a certain depth of water is maintained.

In order to maintain this depth of water, three things must be done. The plot of ground must be made level, low banks of earth must be built round it in order to keep in the water, and a system of irrigation must be arranged to make good the loss of water by evaporation, by leakage and by the continual passing on of some of the water to other plots belonging to the same owner or to other farmers. The common name of a rice plot is paddy, and the rice with its husk on, that is, as it is knocked from the ear by threshing, is called paddy rice. The rice exported from Japan is some of it husked and some of it polished.

Some 90 per cent. of the rice grown in Japan is ordinary rice. The remaining 10 per cent. is about 2 per cent. upland and 8 per cent, glutinous^[61] —the sort used for making the favourite mochi (rice flour dumplings, which few foreigners are able to digest). It would be possible to collect in Japan specimens of rice under 4,000 different names, but, like our potato names, many of these represent duplicate varieties. Rice, again reminding us of potatoes, is grown in early, middle and late season sorts. ^[62]

Just one-half of the cultivated area of Japan is devoted to paddy, but there is to be added to this area under rice more than a quarter million acres producing the upland rice, the yield of which is lower than that of paddy rice. The paddy and upland rice areas together make up more than a half of the cultivated land. The paddies which are not in situations favourable to the production of second crops of rice (they are grown in one prefecture only) are used, if the water can be drawn off, for growing barley or wheat or green manure as a second crop^[63].

It is not only the Eastern predilection for rice and the wet condition of the country, but the heavy cropping power of the plant ^[64]—500 go per tan above barley and wheat yields—that makes the Japanese farmer labour so hard to grow it ^[65]. Intensively cultivated though Japan is, the percentage of cultivated land to the total area of the country is, however, little more than half that in Great Britain ^[66]. This is because Japan is largely mountains and hills. Level land for rice paddies can be economically obtained in many parts of such a country by working it in small patches only. There is no minimum size for a Japanese paddy. I have seen paddies of the area of a counterpane and even of the size of a couple of dinner napkins.

The problem is not only to make the paddy in a spot where it can be supplied with water, but to make it in such a way that it will hold all the water it needs. It must be level, or some of the rice plants will have only their feet wet while others will be up to their necks. The ordinary procedure in making a paddy is to remove the top soil, beat down the subsoil beneath, and then restore the top soil—there may be from 5 to 10 in. of it. But the best efforts of the paddy-field builder may be brought to naught by springs or by a gravelly bottom. Then the farmer must make the best terms he can with fortune.

Paddies, as may be imagined from their physical limitations, are of every conceivable shape. There is assuredly no way of altering the shape of the paddies which are dexterously fitted into the hillsides. But large numbers of paddies are on fairly level ground. ^[67] There is no real need for these being of all sizes and patterns. They are what they are because of the degree to which their construction was conditioned by water-supply problems, the financial resources of those who dug them or the position of neighbours' land. And no doubt in the course of centuries there has been a great deal of swapping, buying and inheriting. So the average farmer's paddies are not only of all shapes and sizes but here, there and everywhere.

Therefore there arose wise men to point out that for a farmer to work a number of oddly shaped bits of land scattered all about the village was uneconomical and out of date. (Like the old English strip system which still survives in the Isle of Axholme.) So what was called an adjustment of paddy fields was carried out in many places. The farmers were persuaded to throw their varied assortment of fields into hotchpot and then to have the mass cut up into oblong fields of equal or relative sizes. These were then shared out according to what each man had contributed. In some cases a little compensation had to be given, for there were differences in the qualities as well as the areas of the holdings. But reasonable justice was eventually done all round, and ever afterwards a farmer, now that his holding was in adjoining tracts, might spend his time working in his paddies instead of in walking to and from them. Because many unnecessary paths and divisions between paddies were done away with there was brought about a saving of labour and increased efficiency of cultivation. There was also a little more land to cultivate and the paddies were big enough for an ox or a pony to be employed in them, and the water supply was better and sufficiently under control for floods to be averted. ^[68] In brief, costs were lower and crops were better. ^[69]

Thus all over Japan nowadays one sees considerable tracts of adjusted paddy fields. They are a joy to the rural sociologist. In its way there has been nothing like it agriculturally in our time. For each of these little farmers valued his odds and ends of paddy above their agricultural worth. He or his forbears had made them or bought them or married into them. And he believed that his own paddies were in a condition of fertility surpassing not a few, and he doubted greatly whether after adjustment he would find himself in possession of as valuable land as his own. Sometimes also he believed that his paddies were especially fortunate geomantically. ^[70] Yet, convinced by the arguments for adjustment, the peasant agreed to the proposed rearrangement, let his old tracts go and accepted in exchange neat oblongs out of the common stock. Sometimes so great was the change brought about in a village by adjustment that more than the paddies were dealt with. Cottages were taken to new sites and the bones in many little grave plots were removed. In a village in which there had been an exhumation of the bones of 2,700 persons and a transference of tombstones, I was told that the assembling together of the remains of the departed in one place "had had a unifying effect on the community." In this village within a period of twelve years 96 per cent. of the paddies had been adjusted. ^[71]

An advantage of adjustment which has not yet been mentioned is that adjusted paddies can usually be dried off at harvest and can therefore be put under a second crop, usually of grain. More than a third of the paddy-field area of the country can be dried off, and therefore produces a second crop of barley or wheat. The farmer has two advantages if, owing to adjustment or natural advantages, he is able to dry off his land. Of the first or rice crop, if he is a tenant farmer, he has had to pay his landlord perhaps 60 per cent, in rent, less straw;^[72] but the second crop is his own. The further advantage is that second-crop land can be cultivated dry shod. One-crop paddy is under water all the year round, and must be cultivated with wet feet and legs.

It is because more than half the paddies are always under water that rice cultivation is so laborious. Think of the Western farm labourer being asked to plough and the allotment holder to dig almost knee-deep in mud. Although much paddy is ploughed with the aid of an ox, a cow or a pony,^[73] most rice is the product of mattock or spade labour. There is no question about the severity of the labour of paddy cultivation. For a good crop it is necessary that the soil shall be stirred deeply.

Following the turning over of the stubble under water, comes the clod smashing and harrowing by quadrupedal or bipedal labour. It is not only a matter of staggering about and doing heavy work in sludge. The sludge is not clean dirt and water but dirty dirt and water, for it has been heavily dosed with manure, and the farmer is not fastidious as to the source from which he obtains it. ^[74] And the sludge ordinarily contains leeches. Therefore the cultivator must work uncomfortably in sodden clinging cotton feet and leg coverings. Long custom and necessity have no doubt developed a certain indifference to the physical discomfort of rice cultivation. The best rice will grow only in mud and, except on the large uniform paddies of the adjusted areas, there is small opportunity for using mechanical methods.

One day when I went into the country it happened to be raining hard, but the men and women toiled in the paddies. They were breaking up the flooded clods with a tool resembling the "pulling fork" used in the West for getting manure from a dung cart. On other farms the task of working the quagmire was being done by two persons with the aid of a disconsolate pony harnessed to a rude harrow. The men and women in the paddies kept off the rain by means of the usual wide straw hats and loose straw mantles, admirable in their way in their combination of lightness and rainproofness. Often, besides the farmer's wife, a young widow or a young unmarried woman may be seen at work, but, as was once explained to me, "The old Miss is not frequent in Japan."^[75]

Planting time arrives in the middle of June or thereabouts, when the paddy has been brought by successive harrowings into a fine tilth or rather sludge. It is illustrative of the exacting ways of rice that not only has it to have a growing place specially fashioned for it, it cannot be sown as cereals are sown. It must be sown in beds and then be transplanted. The seed beds have been sown in the latter part of April or the early part of May, according to the variety of rice and the locality.^[76] The seeds have usually been selected by immersion in salt water and have been afterwards soaked in order to advance germination. There is a little soaking pond on every farm. By the use of this pond the period in which the seeds are exposed to the depredations of insects, etc., is diminished. The seed bed itself is about the width of an onion bed, in order that weeds and insect pests may be easily reached. The seed bed is, of course, under water. The seed is dropped into the water and sinks into the mud. Within about thirty or forty days the seedlings are ready for transplanting. They have been the object of unremitting care. Weeds have been plucked out and insects have been caught by nets or trapped. There is a contrivance which, by means of a wheel at either end, straddles the seed bed, and is drawn slowly from one end to the other. It catches the insects as they hop or fly up.

In many localities specially fine varieties are grown for seed on the land of the Shinto shrines. In other localities special sorts are raised in ordinary paddies but surrounded by the rope and white paper streamers which represent a consecrated place. In not a few villages there are communal seed beds so that many farmers may grow the same variety, and there may be a considerable bulk for co-operative sale.

At transplanting time every member of the family capable of helping renders assistance. Friends also give their aid if it is not planting time for them too. The work is so engrossing that young children who are not at school are often left to their own devices. Sometimes they play by the ditch round the paddies and are drowned. Five such cases of drowning are reported from three prefectures on the day I write this. The suggestion is made that in the rice districts there should be common nurseries for farmers' children at planting time.

The rate at which the planters, working in a row across the paddy, set out the seedlings in the mud below the water, is remarkable. ^[77] The first weeding or raking takes place about a fortnight after planting. After that there are three more weedings, the last being about the end of August. All kinds of hoes are used in the sludge. They are usually provided with a wooden or tin float. But most of the weeding is done simply by thrusting the hand into the mud, pulling out the weed and thrusting it back into the sludge to rot. The back-breaking character of this work may be imagined. As much of it is done in the hottest time of the year the workers protect themselves by wide-brimmed hats of the willow-plate pattern and by flapping straw cloaks or by bundles of straw fastened on their backs.

A sharp look-out must be kept for insects of various sorts. In more than one place I saw the boys and girls of elementary schools wading in the paddies and stroking the young rice with switches in order to make noxious insects rise. The creatures were captured by the young enthusiasts with nets. The children were given special times off from school work in which to hunt the rice pests and were encouraged to bring specimens to school.

There is no greater delight to the eye than the paddies in their early green, rippled and gently laid over by the wind. (One should say greens, for there is every tint from the rather woe-begone yellowish green of the newly planted out rice to the happy luxuriant dark green of the paddies that have long been enjoying the best of quarters.) As harvest time approaches, ^[78] the paddies, because they are not all planted with the same variety of rice, are in patches of different shades. Some are straw colour, some are reddish brown or almost black. A poet speaks of the "hanging ears of rice." Rice always seems to hang its head more than other crops. It is weaker in the straw than barley, but rice frequently droops not only because of its natural habit, but because it has been over-manured or wrongly manured or because of wind or wet.

Beyond wind,^[79] insects and drought, floods are the enemies of rice. When the plants are young, three or four days' flooding do not matter much, but in August, when the ears are shooting, it is a different matter. The sun pours down and soon rots the rice lying in the warm water. Sometimes the farmer, by almost withdrawing the water from his paddies, raises the temperature of the soil with benefit to the crop.

The farmer is fortunate who is able to get the water completely out of his paddies by the time harvest arrives, but, as we have seen, two-thirds of the paddies must be harvested in sludge. Many crops are muddied before they can be cut. Sometimes on the eve of harvest the farmer wades in and tries, by arranging the fallen stems across one another, to keep some of the ears out of the water. But he is not very successful. Rice may lie in the wet a week or even the best end of a fortnight without serious damage. But all that this means is that within the period specified it may not sprout. It must be damaged to some extent even by a few days' immersion. The reason why it is not damaged more than it is is no doubt, first, because rice is a plant which has been brought up to take its chances with water, and in the second place because the thing which is known to the housewife as rice is not really the grain at all but the interior of the grain.

Western farmers are hard put to it when their grain crops are beaten down by wind and rain; Japanese agriculturists, because they gather their harvest with a short sickle, do not find a laid crop difficult to cut. But these harvesters are very muddy indeed. When the rice is cut and the sheaves are laid along the low mud wall of the paddy they are still partly in the sludge. We know how miserable a wet harvest is at home, but think of the slushy harvest with which most Japanese farmers struggle every year of their lives. The rice grower, although year in and year out he has the advantage of a great deal of sunshine, seldom gets his crop in without some rain. How does he manage to dry his October and November rice? By means of a temporary fence or rack which he rigs up in his paddy field or along a path or by the roadside. On this structure the sheaves are painstakingly suspended ears down. Sometimes he utilises poles suspended between trees. These trees, grown on the low banks of the paddies, have their trunks trimmed so that they resemble parasols.

When the sheaves are removed in order to be threshed on the upland part of the holding, they are carried away at either end of a pole on a man's shoulder or are piled up on the back of an ox, cow or pony. The height of the pile under which some animals stagger up from the paddies gives one a vivid conception of "the last straw."

Threshing is usually done by a man, woman, girl or youth taking as many stems as can be easily grasped in both hands and drawing the ears, first one way and then another, through a horizontal row of steel teeth. The flail is not used for threshing rice but is employed for barley. Another common way of knocking out grain is by beating the straw over a table or a barrel. There are all sorts of cheap hand-worked threshing machines. After the threshing of the rice comes the winnowing, which may be done by the aid of a machine but is more likely to be effected in the immemorial way, by one person pouring the roughly threshed ears from a basket or skep while another worker vigorously fans the grain. The result is what is known as paddy rice. The process which follows winnowing is husking. This is done in the simplest possible form of hand mill. Before husking the rice grain is in appearance not unlike barley and it is no easy matter to get its husk off. The husking mill is often made of hardened clay with many wooden teeth on the rubbing surface. After husking there is another winnowing. Then the grains are run through a special apparatus of recent introduction called mangoku doshi, so that faulty ones may be picked out. The result is unpolished rice.

It looks grey and unattractive, and unfortunately the unprepossessing but valuable outer coat is polished away. This is done in a mortar hollowed out of a section of a tree trunk or out of a large stone. One may see a young man or a young woman pounding the rice in the mortar with a heavy wooden beetle or mallet. Often the beetle is fastened to a beam and worked by foot. Or the polishing apparatus may be driven by water, oil or steam power. Constantly in the country there are seen little sheds in each of which a small polishing mill driven by a water wheel is working away by itself. After the polishing, the mangoku doshi is used again to free the rice from the bran. This polished rice is still further polished by the dealer, who has more perfect mills than the farmer.

The farmer pays his rent not in the polished but in the husked rice. At the house of a former daimyo I saw an instrument which the feudal lord's bailiff was accustomed to thrust into the rice the tenants tendered. If when the instrument was withdrawn more than three husks were found adhering, the rice was returned to be recleaned. There are names for all the different kinds of rice. For instance, paddy rice is momi; husked rice is gemmai; half-polished rice is hantsukimai; polished rice is hakumai; cooked rice is gohan.

CHAPTER IX

THE RICE BOWL, THE GODS AND THE NATION

I

How many people who have not been in the East or in the rice trade realise that rice, in the course of the polishing it receives from the farmer and the dealer, loses nearly half its bulk? A necessary part of the grain is lost. No wonder that sensible people in Japan and the West demand the grey unpolished rice. In Japan some enterprising person has started selling bottled stuff made from the part of the rice grain that is rubbed off in the polishing process. It does not look appetising. An easier thing would be to leave some of the coating on the rice. One thinks of what Smollett said of white bread:

"They prefer it to wholesome bread because it is whiter. Thus they sacrifice their health to a most absurd gratification of a misjudging eye, and the tradesman is obliged to poison them in order to live."

Although, for economy's sake, a considerable amount of barley is eaten with or instead of rice, it may be said in a general way that the Japanese people, like so many millions of other Asiatics, have rice for breakfast, rice for lunch and rice for dinner. If they have anything to eat between meals it is as like as not to be rice cakes—- to the foreigner's taste a loathly, half-cooked compost of rice flour or pounded rice and water, a sort of tepid underdone muffin. We in the West have bread at every meal as the Japanese have rice, but we eat our bread not only as plain bread but as toast and bread-and-butter; we also ring the changes on brown, white and oat bread.

Among the covered lacquer dishes on the little table set before each kneeling breakfaster, luncher or diner in Japan there is one which is empty. This is the rice bowl. When the meal begins—or in the case of an elaborate dinner at the rice course—the maid brings in a large covered wooden copper-bound or brass-bound tub or round lacquered box of hot rice. This rice she serves with a big wooden spoon, the only spoon ever seen at a Japanese meal. A man may have three helpings or four in a bowl about as big as a large breakfast cup. The etiquette is that, though other dishes may be pecked at, the rice in one's bowl must be finished. The usage on this point may have originated in the feeling that it was almost impious to waste the staple food of the country. It is not difficult to pick up the last rice grains with the wooden hashi (chopsticks), for the rice is skilfully boiled. (Soft rice is served to invalids only.) But when the bowl is almost empty the custom is to pour into it weak tea or hot water, and then to drink this, so getting rid of the odd grains. It is through omitting to drink in this way that foreigners get indigestion when at a Japanese meal they eat a lot of rice.

At first it is not easy for the foreigner to believe that people can come with appetite to several bowls of plain rice three times a day.^[80] But good rice does seem to have something of the property of oatmeal, the property of a continual tastiness. Further, the rice eater picks up now and then from a small saucer a piece of pickle which may have either a salty or a sweet fermented taste. The nutrition gained at a Japanese meal is largely in soups in which the bean preparations, tofu and miso, and occasionally eggs, are used. And there is no country in the world where more fish is eaten than in Japan. The coast waters and rivers team with fish, and fish—fresh, dried and salted, shell-fish and fish unrecognisable as fish after all sorts of ingenious treatment—is consumed by almost everybody.

The Japanese are in no doubt that the foreign rice which is brought into the country to supplement the home supply is inferior to their own.^[81] Inferior means that they prefer the flavour of their own rice, just as most Scots prefer oatmeal made from oats grown in Scotland.

II

In the year of the Coronation—it took place three years after the Emperor's accession—two prefectures had the honour of being chosen to produce the rice to be placed before gods, Emperor and dignitaries at Kyoto. The work was not undertaken without ceremony. I was a witness of the rites performed at the planting of the rice in one of the prefectures. Plots had been prepared with enormous care. Along the top of the special fencing were the Shinto straw bands and paper streamers. A small shrine had been built to overlook the plots. Even the instruments of the little meteorological station near, by which the management of the crop would be guided, were surrounded by straw bands and streamers—religion protecting science. The mattocks and other implements which had been used in the preparation of the paddy or were to be used in getting in the crops and in cultivating, harvesting, threshing and cleaning it were all new. Even the herring which had manured the plot had been "specially selected and blessed." Further, there was a special bath-house where the young men and women who were to plant the rice had washed ceremonially at an early hour.

We had reached the spot through a crowd of twenty or thirty thousand people who were gathering to witness the ceremony. A covered platform had been built in front of the rice field shrine, and on either side were large roofed-in spaces for some scores of Shinto priests and the favoured spectators. The ceremony lasted two hours. It carried us magically away from a Japan of frock coats to Japan of a thousand, it may be two thousand years ago. Between the wail of ancient wood and wind instruments and the cinema operators who missed nothing external and some bored top-hatted spectators who furtively puffed a cigarette before the ceremony came to an end, ^[82] what a gulf! Platter after platter of food, sometimes rice, sometimes vegetables, sometimes fruit, sometimes a big fish, was passed by one priest to another in the sunlight until all the offerings were reverently placed by a special dignitary on one of those unpainted, unvarnished, undecorated but exquisitely proportioned altars which are an artistic glory of Shintoism. The shrine was wholly open on the side of the rice field, and the high priest was in full view as he stood before the altar with bowed head and folded hands, his robe caught by the breeze, and delivered in a loud voice his zealous invocation. His words were stressed not only by an acolyte who twanged the strings of a venerable harp, but by the song of a lark which rose with the first strains of the harpist. The purpose of the ceremony was to call down the gods and to gain their blessing for the crop and the new reign. At the moment of highest solemnity the thousands assembled bowed their heads: the gods were deigning to descend and accept the offering. More ancient music, more ceremonial, and the gods having been called upon to return to high heaven, the laden platters were gravely removed, and the rice planting in the adjoining field began. To the sound of drum the young men and women in special costumes strode through the wicket into the mud of the paddies, and, under the supervision of the director of the prefectural agricultural experiment station in a silk hat, planted out the tufts of rice seedlings in scrupulously measured rows.

I asked a distinguished Japanese who was standing near me—he is a Christian—how many of the educated people in the assembly believed that the gods had descended. His answer was, "I may not believe that the gods of a truth descended, but I find something beautiful in calling on the gods with a harp of Old Japan, and I do believe that our humble and natural offering to-day may be acceptable to whatever gods there may be and that it is a worthy exercise for us to undertake and may also be conducive to a good harvest." My friend attempted the following rough rendering of a song which had been sung by the rice planters before the shrine: