The foundations of Japan

CHAPTER XXV

"SPECIAL TRIBES"

(EHIME)

In the prefecture of Ehime our journey was still by basha or kuruma and near the sea. The first man we talked with was a gunchō who said that "more than half the villages contained a strong character who can lead." He told us of one of the new religions which taught its adherents to do some good deed secretly. The people who accepted this religion mended roads, cleaned out ponds and made offerings at the graves of persons whose names were forgotten. I think it was this man who used the phrase, "There is a shortage of religions."

I had not before noticed wax trees. They are slighter than apple trees, but often occupy about the same space as the old-fashioned standard apple. The clusters of berries have some resemblance to elderberries and would turn black if they were not picked green. ^[178] Occasionally we saw fine camphor trees. Alas, owing to the high price of camphor, some beautiful specimens near shrines, where they were as imposing as cryptomeria, had been sacrificed.

I began to observe the dreadful destruction wrought in the early ear stage of rice not by cold but by wind. The wind knocks the plants against one another and the friction generates enough heat to arrest further development. The crops affected in this way were grey in patches and looked as if hot water had been sprayed over them. In one county the loss was put as high as 90 per cent. Happily farmers generally sow several sorts of rice. Therefore paddies come into ear at different times.

The heads of millet and the threshed grain of other upland crops were drying on mats by the roadside, for in the areas where land is so much in demand there is no other space available. Sesame, not unlike snapdragon gone to seed, only stronger in build, was set against the houses. On the growing crops on the uplands dead stalks and chopped straw were being used as mulch.

I noticed that implements seemed always to be well housed and to be put away clean. Handcarts, boats and the stacks of poles used in making frameworks for drying rice were protected from the weather by being thatched over.

We continued to see many white-clad pilgrims and everywhere touring students, as often afoot as on bicycles. I noted from the registers at many village offices that the number of young men who married before performing their military service seemed to be decreasing. In one community, where there were two priests, one Tendai and the other Shingon, neither seemed to count for much. One was very poor, and cultivated a small patch near his temple; the other had a little more than a chō. The custom was for the farmers to present to their temple from 5 to 10 shō of rice from the harvest.

In connection with the question of improved implements I noticed that a reasonably efficient winnowing machine in use by a comfortably-off tenant was forty-nine years old—that is, that it dated back to the time of the Shogun. The secondary industry of this farmer was dwarf-plant growing. He had also a loom for cotton-cloth making. There were in his house, in addition to a Buddhist shrine, two Shinto shrines. After leaving this man I visited an ex-teacher who had lost his post at fifty, no doubt through being unable to keep step with modern educational requirements. He had on his wall the lithograph of Pestalozzi and the children which I saw in many school-houses.

On taking the road again I was told that the local landlords had held a meeting in view of the losses of tenants through wind. Most had agreed to forgo rents and to help with artificial manure for next year. I found taro being grown in paddies or under irrigation. Not only the tubers of the taro but its finer stalks are eaten. I saw gourds cut into long lengths narrower than apple rings and put out to dry. I also noticed orange trees a century old which were still producing fruit. Boys were driving iron hoops—the native hoop was of bamboo—and one of the hoop drivers wore a piece of red cloth stitched on his shoulder, which indicated that he was head of his class. One missed a dog bounding and barking after the hoop drivers. Sometimes at the doors of houses I noticed dogs of the lap-dog type which one sees in paintings or of the wolf type to which the native outdoor dog belongs. The cats were as ugly as the dogs and no plumper or happier looking. When I patted a dog or stroked a cat the act attracted attention.

We saw a good deal of hinoki (ground cypress), the wood of which is still used at Shinto festivals for making fire by friction.

We were able to visit an Eta village or rather oaza. Whether the Eta are largely the descendants of captives of an early era or of a low class of people who on the introduction of Buddhism in the seventh or eighth century were ostracised because of their association with animal eating, animal slaughter, working in leather and grave digging is in dispute. No doubt they have absorbed a certain number of fugitives from higher grades of the population, broken samurai, ne'er-do-weels and criminals. The situation as the foreigner discovers it is that all over Japan there are hamlets of what are called "special tribes." In 1876, when distinctions between them and Japanese generally were officially abolished, the total number was given as about a million. Most of these peculiar people, perhaps three-quarters of them, are known as Eta. But whether they are known as Eta or Shuku, or by some other name, ordinary Japanese do not care to eat with them, marry with them or even talk with them. In the past Eta have often been prosperous, and many are prosperous to-day, but a large number are still restricted to earning a living as butchers and skin and leather workers, and grave diggers. The members of these "special tribes," believing themselves to be despised without cause, usually make some effort to hide the fact that they are Eta.

Shuku seem to be living principally in hamlets of a score or so of houses in the vicinity of Osaka, Kyoto and Nara, and are often travelling players, or, like some Eta, skilled in making tools and musical instruments. There seems to be a half Shuku or intermarried class. Many prostitutes are said to be Shuku or Eta. I was told that most of the girls in the prostitutes' houses of Shimane prefecture are from "special tribes," and that they are "preferred by the proprietors" because, as I was gravely informed, "they do not weary of their profession and are therefore more acceptable to customers." As prostitutes are frequently married by their patrons, it is believed that not a few women from "special villages" are taken to wife without their origin being known. Unwitting marriage with an Eta woman has long been a common motif in fiction and folk story. Many members of the "special tribes" go to Hokkaido and there pass into the general body of the population. The folk of this class are "despised," I was told by a responsible Japanese, "not so much for themselves as for what their fathers and grandfathers did." The country people undoubtedly treat them more harshly than the townspeople, but a man of the "special tribes" is often employed as a watchman of fields or forests. I was warned that it was judicious to avoid using the word Eta or Shuku in the presence of common people lest one might be addressing by chance a member of the "special tribes."

Except that the houses of the village we were visiting looked possibly a trifle more primitive than those of the non-Eta population outside the oaza, I did not discern anything different from what I saw elsewhere. The people were of the Shinshu sect; there was no Shinto shrine. At the public room I noticed the gymnastic apparatus of the "fire defenders." The hamlet was traditionally 300 years old and one family was still recognised as chief. According to the constable, who eagerly imparted the information, the crops were larger than those of neighbouring villages "because the people, male and female, are always diligent."

The man who was brought forward as the representative of the village was an ex-soldier and seemed a quiet, able and self-respecting but sad human being. His house and holding were in excellent order. None of his neighbours smiled on us. Some I thought went indoors needlessly; a few came as near to glowering as can be expected in Japan. I got the impression that the people were cared for but were conscious of being "hauden doon" or kept at arm's length. ^[179]

Our next stop was for a rest in a fine garden, the effect of which was spoilt in one place by a distressing life-size statue of the owner's father. When we took to our kuruma again we passed through a village at the approaches to which thick straw ropes such as are seen at shrines had been stretched across the road. Charms were attached. The object was to keep off an epidemic.

The indigo leaves drying on mats in front of some of the cottages were a delight to the eye. There were also mats covered with cotton which looked like fluffy cocoons. On the telegraph wires, the poles of which all over Japan take short cuts through the paddies, swallows clustered as in England, but it is to the South Seas, not to Africa, that the Japanese swallow migrates. When the telegraph was a newer feature of the Japanese landscape than it is now swallows on the wires were a favourite subject for young painters.

We crossed a dry river bed of considerable width at a place where the current had made an excavation in the gravel, rocks and earth several yards deep. It was an impressive illustration of the power of a heavy flood.

I found in one mountainous county that only about a sixth of the area was under cultivation. A responsible man said: "This is a county of the biggest landlords and the smallest tenants. Too many landowners are thinking of themselves, so there arise sometimes severe conflicts. Some 4,000 tenants have gone to Hokkaido." The conversation got round to the young men's societies and I was told a story of how an Eta village threatened by floods had been saved by the young men of the neighbouring non-Eta village working all night at a weakened embankment. Some days later an Eta deputation came to the village and "with tears in their eyes gave thanks for what had been done." The comment of a Japanese friend was: "In the present state of Japan hypocrisy may be valuable. The boys and the Eta were at least exercising themselves in virtue."

Four villages in this county have among them eight fish nurseries, the area of salt water enclosed being roughly 120 acres. I looked into several cottages where paper making was going on. ^[180]

I also went into two cotton mills. In both there were girls who were not more than eleven or twelve. "They are exempted from school by national regulation because of the poverty of their parents," ^[181] I was told.

As we passed the open shop fronts of the village barbers I saw that as often as not a woman was shaving the customer or using the patent clippers on him.

We looked at a big dam which an enterprising landowner was constructing. Three hundred women were consolidating the earthwork by means of round, flat blocks of granite about twice the size of a curling stone. Round each block was a groove in which was a leather belt with a number of rings threaded on it. To each ring a rope was attached. When these ropes were extended the granite block became the hub of a wheel of which the ropes were the spokes. A number of women and girls took ropes apiece and jerked them simultaneously, whereupon the granite block rose in the air to the level of the rope pullers' heads. It was then allowed to fall with a thud. After each thud the pullers moved along a foot so that the block should drop on a fresh spot. The gangs hauling at the rammers worked to the tune of a plaintive ditty which went slowly so as to give them plenty of breathing time. It was something like this:

None of the sturdy earth thumpers seemed to be overworked in the bracing air of the dam top, and they certainly looked picturesque with their white and blue towels round their heads. Indeed, with all the singing and movement, not to speak of the refreshment stalls, the scene was not unlike a fair. When we got back to the road again we passed through a well-watered rice district which was equal to the production of heavy crops. Only three years before it had been covered by a thick forest in which it was not uncommon for robbers to lurk. The transformation had been brought about by the construction of a dam in the hills somewhat similar to the one we had just visited.

I could not but notice in this district the considerable areas given up to grave-plots. No crematoria seemed to be in use. There had been a newspaper proposal that in areas where the population was very large in proportion to the land available for cultivation the dead should be taken out to sea. Where land is scarce one sees various expedients practised so that every square foot shall be cropped. I repeatedly found stacks of straw or sticks standing not on the land but on a rough bridge thrown for the purpose over a drainage ditch. In this district land had been recovered from the sea.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE STORY OF THE BLIND HEADMAN

(EHIME)

It is delightful to find so many things made of copper. Copper, not iron, is in Japan the most valuable mineral product after coal. ^[182] But there are drawbacks to a successful copper industry. Several times as I came along by the coast I heard how the farmers' crops had been damaged by the fumes of a copper refinery. "There are four copper refineries in Japan, who fighted very much with the farmers," it was explained. The Department of Agriculture is also the Department of Commerce and "it was embarrassed by those battles." The upshot was that one refinery moved to an island, another rebuilt its chimney and the two others agreed to pay compensation because it was cheaper than to install a new system. The refinery which had removed to an island seven miles off the coast I had been traversing had had to pay compensation as well as remove. I saw an apparatus that it had put up among rice fields to aid it in determining how often the wind was carrying its fumes there. The compensation which this refinery was paying yearly amounted to as much as 75,000 yen. It had also been compelled to buy up 500 chō of the complaining farmers' land. When we ascended by basha into the mountains we looked down on a copper mine in a ravine through which the river tumbled. The man who had opened the original road over the pass had had the beautiful idea of planting cherry trees along it so that the traveller might enjoy the beauty of their blossoms in spring and their foliage and outlines the rest of the year. The trees had attained noble proportions when the refinery started work and very soon killed most of them. They looked as if they had been struck by lightning.

Some miles farther on, wherever on the mountain-side a little tract could be held up by walling, the chance of getting land for cultivation had been eagerly seized. It would be difficult to give an impression of the patient endeavour and skilful culture represented by the farming on these isolated terraces held up by Galloway dykes. Elsewhere the heights were tree-clad. In places, where the trees had been destroyed by forest fires or had been cleared, amazingly large areas had been closely cut over for forage. One great eminence was a wonderful sight with its whole side smoothed by the sickles of indomitable forage collectors. In some spots "fire farming" had been or was still being practised. Here and there the cultivation of the shrubs grown for the production of paper-making bark had displaced "fire farming." I saw patches of millet and sweet potato which from the road seemed almost inaccessible.

On the admirable main road we passed many pack ponies carrying immense pieces of timber. Speaking of timber, the economical method of preserving wood by charring is widely practised in Japan. The palisades around houses and gardens and even the boards of which the walls or the lower part of the walls of dwellings are constructed are often charred. The effect is not cheerful. What does have a cheerful and trim effect is a thing constantly under one's notice, the habit of keeping carefully swept the unpaved earth enclosed by a house and buildings as well as the path or roadway to them. This careful sweeping is usually regarded as the special work of old people. Even old ladies in families of rank in Tokyo take pleasure in their daily task of sweeping.

When we had crossed the pass and descended on the other side and taken kuruma we soon came to a wide but absolutely dry river bed. The high embankments on either side and the width of the river bed, which, walking behind our kuruma, it took us exactly four minutes to cross, afforded yet another object lesson in the severity of the floods that afflict the country. The rock-and rubble-choked condition of the rivers inclines the traveller to severe judgments on the State and the prefectures for not getting on faster with the work of afforestation; but it is only fair to note that in many places hillsides were pointed out to me which, bare a generation ago, are now covered with trees. Within a distance of twenty-five miles hill plantations were producing fruit to a yearly value of half a million yen. As for the cultivation on either side of the roadway, along which our kurumaya were trotting us, I could not see a weed anywhere.

A favourite rural recreation in Ehime, as in Shimane on the mainland, is bull fighting. It is not, however, fighting with bulls but between bulls: the sport has the redeeming feature that the animals are not turned loose on one another but are held all the time by their owners by means of the rope attached to the nose ring. The rope is gripped quite close to the bull's head. The result of this measure of control is, it was averred, that a contest resolves itself into a struggle to decide not which bull can fight better but which animal can push harder with his head. That the bulls are occasionally injured there can be no doubt. The contests are said to last from fifteen to twenty minutes and are decided by one of the combatants turning tail. There is a good deal of gambling on the issue. In another prefecture of Shikoku the rustics enjoy struggles between muzzled dogs. A taste for this sport is also cultivated in Akita. A certain amount of dog and cock fighting goes on in Tokyo.

At an inn there was an evident desire to do us honour by providing a special dinner. One bowl contained transparent fish soup. Lying at the bottom was a glassy eye staring up balefully at me. (The head, especially the eye, of a fish is reckoned the daintiest morsel.) There was a relish consisting of grapes in mustard. A third dish presented an entire squid. I passed honourable dishes numbers two and three and drank the fish soup through clenched teeth and with averted gaze.

I interrogated several chief constables on the absence of assaults on women from the lists of crimes in the rural statistics I had collected. Various explanations were offered to me: if there were cases of assault they were kept secret for the credit of the woman's family; no prosecution could be instituted except at the instance of the woman, or, if married, the woman's husband; women did not go out much alone; the number of cases was not in fact as large as might be imagined, because the people were well behaved. An official who had had police experience in the north of Japan declared that the south was more "moral and more civilised and had higher tastes." In Ehime, for example, there was very little illegitimacy and fewer children still-born than in any other prefecture. Nevertheless four offences against women had occurred in villages in Ehime within the preceding twelve months.

One of the most interesting stories of rural regeneration I heard was told me by a blind man who had become headman of his village at the time of the war with Russia. His life had been indecorous and he had gradually lost his sight, and he took the headmanship with the wish to make some atonement for his careless years. This is his story:

"Although I thought it important to advance the economic condition of the village it was still more important to promote friendship. As the interests of landowners and tenants was the same it was necessary to bring about an understanding. I began by asking landowners to contribute a proportion of the crops to make a fund. I was blamed by only fourteen out of two hundred. But the landowners who did blame me blamed me severely, so much so that my family ^[183] were uneasy. I went from door to door with a bag collecting rice as the priests do. My eccentric behaviour was reported in the papers. The anxiety of my household and relatives grew. My children were told at the school that their father was a beggar. During the first harvest in which I collected I gathered about 40 koku (about 200 bushels). In the fourth year a hundred tenants came in a deputation to me. They said: 'This gathering of rice is for our benefit. But you gather from the landowners only. So please let us contribute every year. Some of us will collect among ourselves and bring the rice to you, so giving you no trouble.' I was very pleased with that. But I did not express my pleasure. I scolded them. I said: 'Your plan is good but you think only of yourselves. You do not give the landowners their due. When you bring your rent to them you choose inferior rice. It is a bad custom.' I advised them to treat their landowners with justice and achieve independence in the relation of tenant and landowner. They were moved by my earnestness.

"In the next year the tenants exerted themselves and the landowners were pleased with them. Thus the relation of landlord and tenant became better. The landowners in their turn became desirous of showing a friendly feeling toward the tenants. Some landlords came to me and said, 'If you wish for any money in order to be of service to the tenants we will lend it to you without interest.' I received some money. I lent money to tenants to buy manure and cattle, to attack insect pests, to provide protection against wind and flood and to help to build new dwellings nearer their work. By these means the tenants were encouraged and their welfare was promoted. The landlords were also happier, for the rice was better and the land improved. The landlords found that their happiness came from the tenants. There was good feeling between them. The landlords began to help the tenants directly and indirectly. Roads and bridges and many aids to cultivation were furnished by the landlords. A body of landlords was constituted for these purposes and it collected money. My idea was realised that the way of teaching the villages is to let landlords and tenants realise that their interests agree and they will become more friendly."

The co-operative credit society which the blind headman established not only buys and sells for its members in the ordinary way but hires land for division among the humbler cultivators. One of the departments of the society's work is the collection of villagers' savings. They are gathered every Sunday by school-children. One lad, I found from his book, had collected on a particular Sunday 5 sen each—5 sen is a penny—from two houses and 10 sen each from another two dwellings. The next Sunday he had received 5 sen from one house, 10 sen from two houses, 30 sen and 50 sen from others and a whole yen from the last house on his list. The subscriber gets no receipt but sees the lad enter in his book the amount handed over to him, and the next Sunday he sees the stamp of the bank against the sum. Some 390 householders out of the 497 in the village hand over savings to the boy and girl collectors, whose energy is stimulated with 1 per cent. on the sums they gather. In five years the Sunday collections have amassed 60,000 yen. The previous year had been marked by a bad harvest and large sums had been drawn out of the bank, but there was still a sum of 14,000 yen in hand.

In this village there had been issued one of the economic and moral diaries mentioned in an earlier chapter. The diary of this village has two spaces for every day—that is, the economic space and the moral space. The owner of this book had to do two good deeds daily, one economic and the other moral, and he had to enter them up. Further, he had to hand in the book at the end of the year to the earnest village agricultural and moral expert who devised the diary and carefully tabulates the results of twelve months' economic and moral endeavour. One might think that the scheme would break down at the handing in of the diary stage, but I was assured that there were good reasons for believing that a considerable proportion of the 440 persons who had taken out diaries would return them.

There is an old custom by which Buddhist believers, in companies of a dozen or so, meet to eat and drink together. As a good deal is eaten and drunk the gatherings are costly. Our blind headman met the difficulty of expense in his village by getting the companies of believers to cultivate together in their spare time about three acres of land. His object was to associate religion and agriculture and so to dignify farming in the eyes of young men. He also wished to provide an object lesson in the results of good cultivation. The profits proved to be, as he anticipated, so considerable as to leave a balance after defraying the cost of the social gathering. The headman prevailed on the cultivators to keep accurate accounts and they made plain some unexpected truths: as for example, that a tan of paddy did not need the labour of a man for more than twenty-three days of ten hours, and that the net income from such an area was a little more than 16 yen, and that thus the return for a day's labour was 73 sen. It was demonstrated, therefore, that labour was recompensed very well, and that instead of farming being "the most unprofitable of industries"—for in Japan as in the West there are sinners against the light who say this—it was reasonably profitable.

But if rice called for only twenty-three days' labour per tan—nearly all the farmers' land was paddy—and the whole holding numbered only a few tan, it was also plain that there were many days in the year when the farmer was not fully employed. From this it was easy to proceed to the conviction that the available time should be utilised either in secondary employments, or in, say, draining, which would reduce the quantity of manure needed on the land. So the farmers began to think about drainage and the means of economising labour. They began to realise how time was wasted owing to most farmers working not only scattered, but irregularly shaped pieces of land. So the rice lands were adjusted, and everybody was found to have a trifle more land than he held before, and the fields were better watered and more easily cultivated. Only from sixteen to seventeen days' labour instead of twenty-three were now needed per tan ^[184] and the crops were increased. There is now no exodus from this progressive village.

Concerning his blindness the headman said that it was more profitable for him to hear than to see, for by sight "energy might be diverted." He had recited in every prefecture his personal experience of rural reform. He asserted that while conditions varied in every prefecture, there was, generally speaking, labour on the land for no more than 200 days in the year. He deplored the disappearance of some home employments. He did not approve of the condition of things in the north where women worked as much in the fields as their husbands and brothers. Women were "so backward and conservative." The biggest obstacles to agricultural progress were old women. To introduce a secondary industry was to take women from the fields.

I spoke with an agricultural expert, one of whose dicta was that "students at normal schools who come from town families are not so clever as students from farmers' families." He told me that 10,000 young men in his county had sworn "to act in the way most fitting to youths of a military state [sic], to buy and use national products as far as possible and so to promote national industry."

What was wrong with some farming, according to an official of a county agricultural association whom I met later, was that the farmers cultivated too intensively. They used too much "artificial." A prefectural official, speaking of the possibility of extending the cultivated area in Japan, said that in Ehime there were 6,000 chō which might be made into paddies if money were available. As to afforestation, 100,000 yen a year, exclusive of salaries, was spent in the prefecture. As a final piece of statistics he mentioned that whereas ten years before pears were grown only in a certain island of the prefecture, the production of a single county was now valued at half a million yen yearly.

I spent a night at a hot spring. It is said that the volume of water is decreasing. What a situation for a town which lives on a hot spring if the hot-water supply should suddenly stop! I heard of another hot-spring resort at which the water is gradually cooling: it is warmed up by secret piping.

I have not troubled my readers with many stories of the jostling of past and present, but I noticed in an electric street car at Matsuyama a peasant trying to light his pipe with flint and tinder. As he did not succeed a fellow-passenger offered him a match. He was so inexpert with it that he still failed to get a light and he had to be handed a cigarette stump.

In riding down to the port in the street car I borrowed for a few moments a schoolboy's English reader. It seemed rather mawkish. A book of Japanese history which I was also allowed to look at was full of reproductions of autographs of distinguished men. "They make the impression very strong," I was told.

THE SOUTH-WEST OF JAPAN

CHAPTER XXVII

UP-COUNTRY ORATORY

(YAMAGUCHI)

The main street of an Inland Sea island we visited was 4 ft. wide. Because it was the eve of a festival the old folk were at home "observing their taboo." The islander who had been the first among the inhabitants to visit a foreign country was only fifty. The local policeman made us a gift of pears when we left.

At another primitive island querns were in use and "ordinary families" were "only beginning to indulge in tombstones." In contrast with this, the constable told us that a small condensed-milk factory had been started. (This constable was a fine, dignified-looking fellow, but so poor that his toes were showing through his blue cloth tabi.) The condensed-milk factory must have been responsible for some surprises to the cows when they were first milked in its interests. I heard a tale of the first milking of an elderly cow. She had ploughed paddies, carried hay and other things and had drawn a cart. But it took five men and a woman to persuade her that to be milked into a clay pot was a reasonable thing.

The third island we explored lies in such a situation in the Inland Sea that sailing ships used to be glad to shelter under it while waiting for a favourable wind. Someone had the evil thought of providing it with prostitutes, and, until steam began to take the place of sails, the number of these women established in the island was large. Even now, although the whole population numbers only a hundred families, there are thirty women of bad character. These poor creatures were conspicuous because of their bright clothing and dewomanised look. A scrutiny of the islanders old and young yielded the impression that the whole place was suffering from its peculiar traffic. There were two houses, one for registering the women and the other for investigating their state of health, and the purpose of the buildings was bluntly proclaimed on the nameboards at their doors.

When we got out to sea again the newest Japanese battleship doing her trials was pointed out to me, but I was more interested in a large fishing boat running before the wind. A sturdy woman was at the helm and her naked young family was sprawling about the craft.

Someone spoke of villagers of the mainland "failing to realise that they now possessed the privilege of self-government." I was reminded of the pleasant way of the headman of a village assembly in the Loochoos, Japan's oldest outlying possession. He assembles or used to assemble his colleagues in his courtyard and appear there with a draft of proposed legislation. They bowed and departed and the Bill had become an Act.

Although we were already within the territorial waters of Hiroshima prefecture, we determined not to make the mainland at once but to stay the night at the famous island which is called both Miyajima (shrine island) and Itsukushima (taboo island), and is considered to be one of the three most noteworthy sights in Japan. Photographs and drawings of the shrine with its red colonnades on piles by the shore and its big red torii standing in the sea are as familiar as representations of Fuji. It used to be the custom to prevent as far as possible births and deaths occurring on the island. Even now, funerals, dogs and kuruma are prohibited. The iron lanterns of the shrine and galleries and a hundred more in the pine tree-studded approaches are undoubtedly "a most magnificent spectacle at full tide on a moonless night"; but what of the subservience to the profitable foreign tourist seen in this shrine notice?—

Zori (straw sandals), geta (wooden pattens) and all footgear except shoes and boots are forbidden.

One is attracted by the idea of listening to music and watching dances which came from afar in the seventh or eighth centuries, but the business-like tariff,

is calculated to take one out of the atmosphere of Hearn's dreams. The deities of the shrine get along as best they can with the raucous sirens of the tourist steamers, the din of the motor boats and the boom of the big guns which are hidden at the back of the island and make of Miyajima and its vicinity "a strategic zone" in which photography, sketching or the too assiduous use of a notebook is forbidden. Alas, I had myself arrived in a steamer which blew its siren loudly, and in the morning I crossed from the holy isle to the mainland in a motor launch.

The name of Yamaguchi prefecture, which is at the extreme end of the mainland and has the sea to the south, the east and the north, is not so familiar as the name of its port, Shimoneseki. It was mentioned to me that the farmers of Yamaguchi worked a smaller number of days than in Ehime, possibly only a hundred in the year. The comment of my companion, who had visited a great deal of rural Japan, was that 150 full days' work was the average for the whole country. ^[185]

I was told that here as elsewhere there was an unsound tendency to turn sericulture from a secondary into a primary industry. "Experts are not always expert," confessed an official. "Our farmers have had bitter experience. Experts come who have learnt only from books or in other districts, so they give unsuitable counsel. Then they leave the prefecture for other posts before the results of their unwisdom are apparent."

The same official told me of a "little famine" in one county which had imprudently concentrated its attention on the production of grape fruit to the annual value of about a million yen. When a storm came one spring there was almost a total loss. "The river and the sea were covered with fruit, fishing was interfered with, and the county town complained of the smell of the rotting fruit." It seems that many of the suffering orange growers were samurai who found fruit farming a more gentlemanly pursuit than the management of paddies. Like rural amateurs everywhere, "some of them would do better if they knew more about the working of the land."

Rice was being assailed by a pest which survived in the straw stack and had done damage in the prefecture to the amount of 30,000 yen.

In this prefecture and two others during our tour my companion delivered addresses to farmers under the auspices of the National Agricultural Association. The burden of his talk was their duty as agriculturists in the new conditions which were opening for the nation. His three audiences numbered about 700, 1,000 and 1,500. They were composed largely of picked men. At the first gathering the audience squatted; at the next chairs were provided; at the third there were school forms with backs. What I particularly noticed was the easy-going way in which the meetings were conducted. No gathering began exactly at the time announced, although one of the audiences had been encouraged to be in time by the promise of a gift of mottoes to the first hundred arrivals. At each meeting the Governor of the prefecture was the first speaker. At one meeting the Governor arrived about 8.30 a.m., made his speech and departed. When my friend had been introduced to various people in the anteroom, had drunk tea and had smoked and chatted a little, he was taken to the platform half an hour or three quarters after the conclusion of the Governor's speech. Nothing had happened at the meeting in the interval. The idea was that the wait would help the audience's digestion of the speech it had had and the speech it was going to have. There was no formal introduction of the orator. He just mounted the platform and spoke for two hours.

At the second meeting the Governor awaited our arrival but "went on" alone. The star speaker meanwhile refreshed himself in the anteroom with tea, tobacco and conversation as before. In a few minutes the Governor, having done his turn, rejoined us, and my friend proceeded to the meeting to deliver his speech, the Governor taking his departure.

I was told that school fees go up a little when the price of rice is high; also of the "negatively good" effects of young men's associations. During the period of our tour efforts were being made to systematise these organisations. The Department of Agriculture wanted a farmer at the head of each society, the War Office an ex-soldier. There can be no doubt that the militarists have been doing their best to give the societies the mental attitude of the army.

In the country we were entering, the horse had taken the place of the ox as the beast of burden. Two men of some authority in the prefecture agreed that it was difficult to think of tracts in the south-west that would be suitable for cattle grazing. There was certainly no "square ri where the price of land was low enough to keep sheep." As to cattle breeding and forestry, one of them must give way. It was necessary to keep immense areas under evergreen wood for the defence of the country against floods. With regard to the areas available for afforestation, for cattle keeping and for cultivation respectively, it was necessary to be on one's guard against "experts" who were disposed to claim all available land for their specialties.

When we took to an automobile for the first stage of our long journey through Yamaguchi and Shimane—the railway came no farther than the city of Yamaguchi—I noticed that just as the bridges are often without parapets, the roads winding round the cliffs were, as in Fukushima, unprotected by wall or rail. This was due, no doubt, to considerations of economy, to a widely diffused sense of responsibility which makes people look after their own safety, and also, in some degree, to stout Japanese nerves. That our driver's nerves were sound enough was shown by the speed at which he drove the heavy car round sharp corners and down slippery descents where we should have dropped a few hundred feet had we gone over.

At our first stopping-place I saw a photograph showing a Shinshu priest engaged with the girl pupils of a Buddhist school in tree planting. Our talk here was about the low incomes on which people contrive to live. A little more than a quarter of a century ago the family of a friend of mine, now of high rank, was living in a county town on 5 yen a month! There were two adults and three children. Rent was 1.20 yen and rice came to 1.80 yen. Even to-day an ex-Minister may have only 1,500 yen a year. Many ex-Governors are living quietly in villages. We went to call upon one of them who was getting great satisfaction out of his few tan. Among other things he told us was that there were five doctors and one midwife in the community. These doctors do not possess a Tokyo qualification. They have qualified by being taught by their fathers or by some other practitioner, and they are entitled to practise in their own village and in, perhaps, a neighbouring one.

It was thoughtless of me, after inquiring about the doctors, to ask about the gravedigger. I was told that when there was no member of a "special tribe" available it was the duty of neighbours to dig graves. A community's displeasure was marked by neighbours refraining from helping to dig an unpopular person's grave. (One might have expected to hear that such a grave would be dug with alacrity.) Families which had run counter to public opinion had had to "apologise" before they could get neighbourly help at the burial of their dead.

Only one family in the village, I learnt from the headman, was being helped from public funds. This family consisted of an old man and his daughter, who, owing to the attendance her father required, could not go out to work. The village provided a small house and three pints of rice daily. The headman in his private capacity gave the girl, with the assistance of some friends, straw rope-making to do and paid a somewhat higher price than is usual.

Of last year's births in the village 10 per cent. had been legally and 5 per cent. actually illegitimate. Four or five births had occurred a few months after marriage.

We ate our lunch in the headman's room in the village office. Hanging from the ceiling was a sealed envelope to be opened on receipt of a telegram. Some member of the village staff always slept in that room. The envelope contained instructions to be acted upon if mobilisation took place.

When we had gone on some distance I stopped to watch a farmer's wife and daughter threshing in a barn by pulling the rice through a row of steel teeth, the simple form of threshing implement which is seen in slightly different patterns all over Japan. (It is the successor of a contrivance of bamboo stakes.) The women told me that one person could thresh fourteen bushels a day. The implement cost 2½ yen from travelling vendors but only 1½ yen from the co-operative society. While we talked the farmer appeared. I apologised to him for unwittingly stepping on the threshold of the barn—that is, the grooved timber in which the sliding doors run. It is considered to be an insult to the head of the house to tread on the threshold as in some way "standing on the householder's head."

This man had a bamboo plantation, and he told me, in reply to a question, that the bamboo would shoot up at the rate of more than a foot in twenty-four hours. (During the month in which this is dictated I have measured the growth of a shoot of a Dorothy Perkins climber and find that it averages about quarter of an inch in twenty-four hours.)