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that for a farmer to work a number of oddly shaped bits of land scattered all about the village was uneconomical and out of date.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.



A century ago the farmer ate his rice at the gemmai stage, that is in its natural state, and there was no beri-beri. The "black sake" made from this gemmai rice is still used in Shinto ceremonies. In order to produce clear sake the rice was polished. Then well-to-do people out of daintiness had their table rice polished. Now polished rice is the common food. Half-polished rice may be prepared with two or three hundred blows of the mallet; fully polished or white rice may receive six, seven or eight hundred, or even it may be a thousand blows.

FOOTNOTES:

[47] See Appendix VII.

[48] See Appendix VIII.

[49] Family in the French sense.

[50] See Appendix IX.

[51] See Appendix X.

[52] See Appendix XI.

[53] See Appendix XII.

[54] See Appendix XIII.

[55] It was recently stated that the consent of the authorities was awaited for collections to the amount of 20 million yen, of which 13-1/2 million were for the two Hongwanjis.

[56] For yields of new paddy, see Appendix XIV.

[57] See Appendix XII.

[58] It would be from 80 to 100 yen now.

[59] Hata (upland field) is not to be confounded with hara (prairie, wilderness, moor, often erroneously translated, plain).

[60] Rice is grown in every prefecture. The largest total yields are in Niigata, Hyogo, Fukuoka, Aichi, Yamagata, Ibariki and Chiba.

[61] See Appendix XV.

[62] The average yield of the three kinds at Government experimental farms—the middle variety yields best and next comes the late variety—is about 2-1/2 koku per tan or roughly (a koku being about 5 bushels and a tan about a quarter of an acre) about 45 bushels per acre. The average yield of ordinary rice in Japan in an ordinary year is 40-3/4 bushels. In the bumper year of 1920 the average yield was 41-1/3 bushels. In the year 1916 (to which most of the figures in this book, apart from the Appendix and footnotes, in which the latest available figures are given, refer) there was produced 58-1/4 million koku of all kinds of rice, the value of which was 826-1/2 million yen. The normal yield (average of 7 years, excluding the years of highest and lowest production) is 54-1/2 million koku. See Appendix XV.

[63] For wheat and barley crops, see Appendix XVI.

[64] A few rice plants may be seen growing at Kew.

[65] The cost of the rice crop and the income it yields are discussed in Appendix XVII.

[66] See Appendix XVIII.

[67] In Japanese rural statistics the word plain may be said to mean a tract of land which is neither cultivated nor timbered nor used for the purposes of habitation. Sometimes it is called prairie, but this is not always correct as it is very often a barren waste, a tract of volcanic ash, or an area producing bamboo grass. Some of this land, however, could be cultivated after proper irrigation, etc. In this note, plains is employed in the ordinary acceptation of the word. Of such plains there are several. The plain in which Tokyo is situated is 82,000 acres in extent. The traveller from Kobe to Tokyo passes through the Kinai plain in which Kobe, Kyoto and Osaka stand. It is said to feed 2-1/2 million people. Four other plains are reputed to feed 7-1/2 million.

[68] Rivers supply about 65 per cent. of the paddy water and reservoirs about 21 per cent. The remainder has to be got from other sources.

[69] An acreage of a tan is aimed at, but it is frequently larger; it may even be 4 tan (an acre). The cost ranges from about 8 yen to 50 yen per tan. The average increase in yield alter adjustment is about 15 per cent., to which must be added the yield of the new land obtained, say 3 per cent. of the area adjusted. The consent of half the owners is required for adjustment.

[70] Once when a friend in Tokyo had trouble with her servants a maid informed her that the house was unlucky because a certain necessary apartment faced the wrong point of the compass.

[71] In the whole of Japan by 1919 two million and a half acres had been adjusted or were in course of adjustment.

[72] The rent is usually 57 per cent. of the rice harvest in the paddies and 44 per cent. (in cash or kind) of the crops on the non-paddy land. Any crop raised in the paddies between the harvesting of one rice crop and the planting out of the next belongs to the farmer. (All taxes and rates are paid by the landlord, and amount to from 30 to 33 per cent. of the rent.) The area under paddy and the area of upland under cultivation are almost equal.

[73] See Appendix XIX.

[74] See Appendix XX.

[75] In 1920 there were 38,922,437 males and 38,083,073 females.

[76] See Appendix XXI.

[77] See Appendix XXII.

[78] The harvest extends from mid-September in the north of Japan to the end of October or beginning of November in the south. The harvest is taken early in the north for fear of frost.

[79] The "210th day" (counted from the beginning of spring), when flowering commences, is so critical a period that the weather conditions during the twenty-four hours in every prefecture are reported to the Emperor.



CHAPTER IX

THE RICE BOWL, THE GODS AND THE NATION

I thank whatever gods there be....—HENLEY

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:

This day the beginning of sowing at an auspicious time— Long life to the rice! May it be a token of the years of the Reign, The seed of peace for the world— May it start from this consecrated field! One in heart we see to it that our seedlings are well matched. Mikawa's[83] millennium and the millennium of rice. Let us pray for an abundant shooting. Now let us plant the seedlings straight; Pleasing to the gods are the ways that are not crooked.

After this ceremony, in which the staple crop of the country and the labour of the farmer in his paddy field had been honoured by the State and dignified by ancestral blessings, there was luncheon in one of those deftly contrived reed-covered structures, of the building of which the Japanese have the knack, and the Governor asked some of us to say a few words. Then on a raised platform in the open there was enacted a comic interlude such as might have been seen in England in the Middle Ages. In the evening I was bidden to a dinner of the officials responsible for the day's doings. The Governor made a kindly reference to my labours and the local M.P. presented me with a kimono length of the cotton material which had been woven for the planters of the sacred rice.

III[84]

The production of rice has increased more quickly than the growth of the population. If we consider, along with the advance in population, the crops of the years 1882 and 1913, which were held to be average, and, in order to be as up-to-date as possible, the normal annual yield[85] of the five-years period 1912-18, we find that, as between 1882 and 1913, the population increased 45 per cent. and rice production increased 63 per cent., while as between 1882 and the normal annual yield period of 1912-18, the population increased 55 per cent, and the crop 75 per cent.[86]

This is a noteworthy fact. But equally noteworthy is the fact that in the 1882-1913 period, in which the production of rice increased 63 per cent. and the population only 45 per cent., the price of rice did not fall. On the contrary it rose. This was due largely[87] to the fact that people had begun to eat rice who had not before been able to afford it. Many people who grow rice eat, as has been noted, barley or barley mixed with a little rice. From the 'eighties onwards more and more rice was eaten.[88]

The reason was that, what with the cash obtained from cocoons through the enormous development of sericulture,[89] what with the money received by the girls who had gone to the factories, what with the growth of big cities causing an increased demand for vegetables, eggs and especially fruit at good prices, what with the use of better seed and more artificial manure, what with agricultural co-operation, paddy-field adjustment and the taking-in of new land, the farmer, in spite of increased taxation,[90] was doing better, or at any rate was minded to live better. In the thirty-years period 1882-1913, his crop increased 63 per cent. although his area under cultivation increased by only 17 per cent. In the following pages we shall hear more of the methods by which the farmer's receipts have been increased. We shall hear also, alas! of the ways in which his expenditure has increased. He is indeed in a trying situation. Everything depends on his character and education and on the influences, social and political, moral and religious, under which he lives. That is why this book, in devoting itself to an examination of the foundations of an agricultural country, is concerned with rural sociology rather than with the technique of crops and cropping.

The outstanding problem of the rice grower is fluctuations in price.[91] It is also the problem of the landlord, for rents are fixed not at so much money but at so many koku of rice. This means that on rent day the farmer must pay the same amount of rice whether his crop has been good or bad. It also means that when the price of rice rises the amount of rent is automatically raised. If rent were paid, not in so many koku of rice but in money at a fixed amount, the landlord would know where he was and the tenant would be in an easier position, for when the rice crop failed the price would be high and he would be able to meet his rent by selling a smaller amount of rice. The counsel of the prudent to the rice producer is to build storehouses and not to sell the whole of his crop immediately after harvest, but to extend the sale over the whole year, marketing each month about the same amount if possible. The Government Granary plan came into force in 1921, some 3 million koku of unpolished rice being bought in five grades at from 27 yen to 33 yen. In the year before the War rice was selling at 20 yen per koku (5 bushels). The previous year (1912) it had been 21 yen—had risen at times to 23 yen—an unheard-of price. Between 1894 and 1912 it had climbed merely from about 7 yen to a maximum of 16 yen.[92] In the year in which the War broke out, it dropped as low as 12 yen, and in 1915 it was only 11 yen. By 1916 it had not risen beyond 14 yen.

The fall in prices was due to exceptional harvests in 1914 and 1915 (that is, 57,006,541 koku and 55,924,590 koku as compared with the 50,255,000 koku of the year before the War, or the 51,312,000 which may be taken as the average of the seven-years period 1907-13). Such exceptional harvests as those of 1914 and 1915 showed a surplus of from 41/2 to 6 million koku over and above the needs of the country, which are roughly estimated at 1 koku per head including infants and the old and feeble. In 1916 it was established, when account was taken of stored rice, that the actual surplus was something like 6 or 7 million koku. Therefore a fall in price took place. The extent to which rice is imported and exported is shown in Appendix XXIV. This Chapter would become much more technical than is necessary if I entered into the question of the correctness of rice statistics. Roughly, the statistics show a production 15 per cent. less than the actual crops. Formerly the under-estimation was 20 per cent. The practice has its origin in the old taxation system.

The notes for the account of rural life in Japan which will be found in this book were chiefly made in the second and third years of the War. Since that time there has been an enormous rise in the price of everything. For a time the farmers prospered as they had prospered in the high rice-price years, 1912-13.[93] The high prices of all grain as well as the fabulous price of raw silk (due to increased export to America and to increased home consumption) were a great advantage.



Then came the rice riots of the city workers, the general slump and finally the commercial and industrial crash. Raw silk fell nearly to one-third of its top price, and farmers had to sell cocoons under the cost of production. Everywhere countrymen and countrywomen employed in the factories were discharged in droves. A large proportion of these unfortunates returned to their villages to dispel some rural dreams of urban Eldorado.

But this matter of the going up and coming down of prices has but a passing interest for the reader. The only economic fact of which he need lay hold is that in recent years the farmers have been led into the way of spending more money—in taxation as well as in general expenses of living—and that, when account is taken of every advantage they have gained from better methods of production, they have pressing on them the limitations imposed by the size of their farms and their farming practice. Whatever the prices obtained for the: products of the soil, climatic facts,[94] the character and social condition of the people, their attitude towards life and authority and the attitude of authority towards them remain very much the same. And thus a narrative of things seen and heard chiefly during the first years of the War is not at all out of date even if it were not supplemented as it is by a plentiful supply of notes containing the latest statistical data.

There is one curious exception only. The reader of these pages will constantly come on references to the poverty of the tenant farmers. They are, of course, practically labourers, for they cultivate two or three acres only, and at the end of the year, as has been shown, have merely a trifle in hand and sometimes not that. Influenced by the labour movement, which developed in the industrial centres during and after the War,[95] this depressed class has of late shown spirit. It has begun to assert its claims against landowners. At the end of 1920 there were as many as ninety associations of tenant farmers, and sixty of these had been started for the specific purpose of representing tenants' interests against landowners. Strikes of tenants began and continue. The end of this movement of a proverbially conservative class is not at all certain.[96]

The outstanding facts which are to be borne in mind about agricultural Japan are that the population is as thick on the ground as the population of the British Isles (thicker in reality, for so much of Japan is mountain and waste)—ten times thicker than the population of the United States[97]—that Japan is primarily an agricultural country, while Great Britain is largely a manufacturing and trading country, and that only 151/2 per cent. of Japan proper (including Hokkaido) is under cultivation against 27 per cent. in Great Britain.[98] The average area cultivated per farming family in Japan, counting paddy and upland together, is less than 3 acres. As the total population of Japan is now (1921) 56 millions (55,960,150 in 1920, plus the annual increase of 600,000), every acre has to feed close on four persons. ("Even in Hokkaido," Dr. Sato notes, "the average area per family is only 71/2 acres.") Happily the number of families cultivating less than 11/4 acres is decreasing and the number cultivating from 11/4 up to 5 acres is increasing.[99] In other words, the favourite size of farm is one which finds work for all the members of the farmer's family. As on small holdings all over the world, it is found that profits are difficult to make when help has to be paid for. The facts that in the last four years for which figures are available the number of farming families keeping silk-worms has risen by half a million and that every year the area of land under cultivation increases show that new ways of increasing income are eagerly seized on.

FOOTNOTES:

[80] For estimate of daily consumption of rice by Japanese, see Appendix XXIII.

[81] For statistics of imported and exported rice, see Appendix XXIV.

[82] Japanese. I was the only foreigner present.

[83] The old name for a considerable part of Aichi

[84] This section of the chapter was written in 1921.

[85] For the way in which "normal yield" is arrived at, see p. 70.

[86] See Appendix XXV.

[87] War with China, 1894; with Russia, 1904.

[88] For farmers' diet, see Appendix XXVI.

[89] Farmers in sericultural districts live better than the ordinary rice farmers.

[90] See Appendix XXVII.

[91] See Appendix XXVIII.

[92] For prices, see Appendix XVII.

[93] The rise in prices towards the close of the War, with the rise in the cost of living throughout the world, has been discussed on page xxv.

[94] See Appendix XXIX.

[95] See Chapter XX.

[96] Recent figures show 400 tenants' associations, of which a third are militant.

[97] See Appendix XXX and page 97.

[98] See Chapter XX.

[99] See Appendix XXXI.



BACK TO FIRST PRINCIPLES: THE APOSTLE AND THE ARTIST

CHAPTER X

A TROUBLER OF ISRAEL

The signification of this gift of life, that we should leave a better world for our successors, is being understood.—MEREDITH

To some people in Japan the countryman Kanzo Uchimura is "the Japanese Carlyle." To others he is a religious enthusiast and the Japanese equivalent of a troubler of Israel. He appeared to me in the guise of a student of rural sociology.

Uchimura is the man who as a school teacher "refused to bow before the Emperor's portrait."[100] He endured, as was to be expected, social ostracism and straitened means. But when his voice came to be heard in journalism it was recognised as the voice of a man of principle by people who heard it far from gladly. There is a seamy side to some Japanese journalism[101] and Uchimura soon resigned his editorial chair. He abandoned a second editorship because he was determined to brave the displeasure of his countrymen by opposing the war with Russia. To-day he deplores many things in the relations of Japan and China.



Uchimura has written more than two dozen books, mostly on religion. How I became a Christian has been translated into English, German, Danish, Russian and Chinese, and is to that extent a landmark in the literary history of Japan. His Christianity is an Early Christianity which places him in antagonism, not only to his own countrymen who are Shintoists, Buddhists or Confucians, or vaguely Nationalists, but to such foreign missionaries as are sectarians and literalists. His earliest training was in agricultural science, and the welfare of the Japanese countryside is near his heart. If he be a Carlyle, as his fibre and resolution, downright way of writing and speaking, hortatory gift, humour, plainness of life and dislike of officials, no less than his cast of countenance, his soft hat and long gaberdine-like coat have suggested, he is a Carlyle who is content to stay both in body and mind at Ecclefechan. He is not, however, like Carlyle, whom he calls "master," a peasant, but a samurai.

"As you penetrate into the lives of the farmers and discover the influences brought to bear on them," Uchimura said to me in his decisive way, "there will be laid bare to you the foundations of Japan. You know our proverb, of course, No wa kuni no taihon nari ('Agriculture is the basis of a nation')? Have you been to Nikko?" This seemed a little inconsequent, but I told him I had not yet been to Nikko. ("Until you have seen Nikko," runs the adage, "do not say 'splendid'.") "How many of the tourists who are delighted with Nikko," he went on, "have heard how the richest farms near that town were devastated? A century ago a minister of the Shogun, who realised that fertility depended on trees, saw to the whole range of Nikko hills being afforested. It was a tract twenty miles by twenty miles in extent. But the 'civilised' authorities of our own days sold all the timber to a copper company for 8,000 yen. The company destroyed the fertility of the district not only by cutting down the forest but by poisoning the water with which the farmers irrigated their crops. A member of Parliament gave himself with such devotion to the cause of the ruined farmers that when he died the ashes of his cremated body were divided and preserved in four shrines erected to his memory."

It was a sad thing, said Uchimura, that the farmers of Japan, because of the decreased fertility of the land due to the denudation of the hills of trees, and because of their increased expenses, should be laying out "a quarter of their incomes on artificial manures." "The enemies which Japan has most to fear to-day," Uchimura declared, "are impaired fertility and floods."

It may be well, perhaps, to explain for a few readers how floods do their ill work. The rain which falls on treeless mountains is not absorbed there. The water washes down the mountain sides, bringing with it first good soil and then subsoil, stones and rock. The hills eventually become those peaked deserts the queer look of which must have puzzled many students of Japanese pictures. The debris washed away is carried into the rivers, along with trees from the lower slopes, and the level of the river beds is raised. Because there is less space in the river beds for water the rivers overflow their banks, and disastrous floods take place. The farmers, the local authorities and the State raise embankments higher and higher, but embankment building is costly and cannot go on indefinitely. The real remedy is to decrease the supply of water by planting forests in the mountains[102]. In many places the rivers are flowing above the level of the surrounding country. The imagination is caught by the fact that there are four earthquakes a day in Japan[103] and that within a twelvemonth fires destroy 400 acres or so of buildings; but every year, on an average, floods, tidal waves and typhoons together drown more than 600 people and cause a money loss of 25 million yen! Every year 101/2 million yen are spent by the State and the prefectures on river control alone.

Uchimura put on his famous wideawake and we went out for a walk. "I should like," he said, "to press the view that the vaunted expansion of Japan has meant to the farmers an increase of prices and taxes and of armaments out of all proportion to our population[104]."

Uchimura stood stock still in the little wood we had entered. "There is one thing more," he added gravely. "Before you can get deeply into your subject you must touch religion. There you see the depths of the people. A large part of the deterioration of the countryside is due to the deterioration of Buddhism. You must ask about it. You will see in the villages much of what your old writers used to call 'priestcraft.' You will hear of the thraldom of many of the people. You will see with your own eyes that real Christianity may be a moral bath for a rural district."

"The essentials, not the forms of Christianity," he declared, would save the countryside by "brotherly union." "Brotherly union" would make a better life and a better agriculture. The rural class, he explained, was more sharply divided than foreigners understood into owners of land who lived on their rents and farmers who farmed[105]. The division between the two classes was "as great as an Indian caste division." "To the landowner who lives in his village like a feudal lord the simple Gospel, with its insistence on the sacredness of work, comes as an intellectual revolution." Women as well as men of means received from Christianity "a new conception of humanity." They ceased to "look upon their own glory and to take delight in the flattery of poor people." They changed their way of speaking to the peasants. They developed an interest, of which they knew nothing before, in the spiritual and material betterment of the men, women and children of their village.

I went a two-days journey into the country with Uchimura. We stayed at the house of a landowner who was one of his adherents. I found myself in a large room where two swallows were flitting, intent on building on a beam which yearly bore a nest. In this room stood a shrine containing the ancestral tablets. The daily offerings were no longer made, but Uchimura's counsel, unlike that of some zealots, was to preserve not only this shrine but the large family shrine in the courtyard. Near by was an engraving of Luther.



Uchimura spoke in the house to some thirty or more "people of the district who had accepted Christianity." His appeal was to "live Christianity as given to the world by its founder." The address, which was delivered from an arm-chair, was based on the fifth chapter of Matthew, which in the preacher's copy appeared to contain cross-references to two disciples called Tolstoy and Carlyle. When I was asked to speak I found that the women in the gathering had places in front. "The remarkable effect of Christianity among those who have come to think with us," Uchimura told me afterwards, "is seen most in their treatment of women. Our host, had he not been a Christian, would have been credited by public opinion with the possession of a concubine, and would not have been blamed for it." When, after the speaking, we knelt in a circle and talked less formally of how best to benefit rural people, we were joined by the women folk. Later, when a dozen of the neighbours were invited to dinner, it was not served at separate tables for each kneeling guest, but at one long table, an innovation "to indicate the brotherly relation."



"So you see," said Uchimura, as we walked to the station in the morning, "in an antiquated book, which, I suppose, stands dusty on the shelves of some of your reformers, there is power to achieve the very things they aim at." He went on to explain that he looked "in the lives of hearers, not in what they say," for results from his teaching. He believed in liberty and freedom, in sowing the seed of change and reform and allowing people to develop as they would. "Let men and women believe as they have light."

He spoke in his kindly way of how "the bond of a common faith enables Japanese to get closer to the foreigner and the foreigner closer to the Japanese." There were many things we foreigners did not understand. We did not understand, for example, that "A man's a man for a' that" was an unfamiliar conception to a Japanese. I was to remember, when I interrogated Japanese about the problems of rural life, that they had had to coin a word for "problems." Above all, I must be careful not to "exaggerate the quality of Eastern morality." Uchimura asserted sweepingly that "morality in the Anglo-Saxon sense is not found in Japan." We of the West underrated the value of the part played by the Puritans in our development. Our moral life had been evolved by the soul-stirring power of the Hebrew prophets and of Christ. To deny this was "kicking your own mother." Just as it was not possible for the Briton or American to get his present morality from Greece and Rome exclusively, it was not possible for the Japanese to obtain it from the sources at his disposal.

The faults of the Eastern were that he thought too much of outward conduct. Good political and neighbourly-relations, kindliness, honesty and thrift were his idea of morality. "To love goodness and to hate evil with one's whole soul is a Christian conception for which you may search in vain through heathendom." The horror which the Western man of high character felt when he thought of the future of the little girls in attendance on geisha was not a horror generated by Plato. "Heathen life looks nice on the outside to foreigners," but Confucianism, Buddhism and Shintoism had all been weak in their attitude towards immorality. It was Christianity alone which controlled sexual life. Without deep-seated love of and joy in goodness and deep-seated horror of evil it was impossible to reform society.

Uchimura said that it had taken him thirty years to reach the conviction that the best way of raising his countrymen was by preaching the religion of "a despised foreign peasant." Many things he had been told by exponents of Christianity now seemed "very strange," but there remained in the first four books of the New Testament, in the essence of Christianity, principles "which would give new life to all men." Moved by this belief, Uchimura and his friends gave their lives to the work of the Gospel, to a work attended by humiliations; "but this is our glory."

Japanese civilisation, he reiterated, was "only good in the sense that Greek and Roman civilisations were good." Modern Japan represented "the best of Europe minus Christianity; the moral backbone of Christianity is lacking." "Probe a dozen Buddhist priests in turn," he said, "and you find something lacking; you don't find the Buddhist or Confucian really to be your brother[106]."

"The greatness of England," he went on, "is not due to the inherent greatness of the English people, but to the greatness of the truths which they have received." In considering the sources of national greatness, it was idle to believe that some peoples were original and some not original in their ideas and methods. Where were the people to be found who were without extraneous influence? Where would England be without Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christianity?

Our talk broke off as several peasant women passed us on the narrow way by the rice fields. The mattocks they carried were the same weight as their husbands' mattocks and the women were going to do the same work as the men. But the women were nearly all handicapped by having a child tied on their backs. Uchimura, returning to his objection to foreign political adventure, said that Japan, properly cultivated, could support twice its present population. There were many marshy districts which could be brought into cultivation by drainage. Then what might not forestry do? But the progress could not be made because of lack of money. The money was needed for "national defence."

"For myself," said Uchimura, "I find it still possible to believe in some power which will take care of inoffensive, quiet, humble, industrious people. If all the high virtues of mankind are not safeguarded somehow, then let us take leave of all the ennobling aspirations, all the poetry, and all the deepest hopes we have, and cease to struggle upward. The question is whether we have faith." We still waited, he declared, for the nation which would be Christian enough to take its stand on the Gospel and sacrifice itself materially, if need be, to its faith that right was greater than might.

And so "impractical, outspoken to rashness, but thoroughly sincere and experienced," as one of his appreciative countrymen characterised him to me, we take leave of the "Japanese Carlyle." With whom could I have gone more provocatively towards the foundation of things at the beginning of my investigation in farther Japan?

FOOTNOTES:

[100] The statement is, he told me, a calumny. He explained that he lost his post for refusing to bow, not to the portrait, but to the signature of the Emperor, the signature appended to that famous Imperial rescript on education which is appointed to be read in schools. Uchimura is very willing, he said, to show the respect which loyal Japanese are at all times ready to manifest to the Emperor, and he would certainly bow before the portrait of His Majesty; but in the proposal that reverence should be paid to the Imperial autograph he thought he saw the demands of a "Kaiserism"—his word, he speaks vigorous English—which was foreign to the Japanese conception of their sovereign, which would be inimical to the Emperor's influence and would be bad for the nation.

[101] But journalism is one of the most powerful influences for good, and some of the best brains of the country is represented in it. Papers like the Jiji, Asahi, Nichi Nichi, and the Osaka papers run in conjunction with them have altogether a circulation approaching two millions.

[102] For statistics of forests, see Appendix XXXII.

[103] A severe shook occurs on an average about every six years. The eminent seismologist, Professor Omori, told me that he does not expect an earthquake of a dangerous sort for a generation.

[104] The Oriental Economist, a Japanese publication, in the autumn of 1921 suggested the abandonment of all the extensions to the Empire on the score that they had not been a benefit to Japan, and that she was in no way dependent on them. See also Appendix XXXIII.

[105] See Appendix XXXIV.

[106] What of the old story which I have heard from Uchimura and others of the Confucian missionary to certain head hunters of Formosa? After many years of labour among them they promised to give up head hunting if they might take just one more head. At last the good man yielded, and told them that a Chinaman in a red robe was coming towards the village the next day and his head might be taken. On the morrow the men lay in wait for the stranger, sprang on him and cut off his head, only to find that it was the head of their beloved missionary. Struck with remorse and realising the evil of head taking, the tribe gave up head hunting for ever.



CHAPTER XI

THE IDEA OF A GAP

Bold is the donkey driver, O Khedive, and bold is the Khedive who dares to say what he will believe, not knowing in any wise the mind of Allah, not knowing in any wise his own heart.

The "Japanese Carlyle" is getting grey. It seemed well to seek out some young Japanese thinker and take his view of that "heathenism" concerning which Uchimura had delivered himself so unsparingly. Let me speak of my first visit to my friend Yanagi.

As a youth Yanagi was a lonely student. He took his own way to knowledge and religion. The famed General Nogi had been given by the Emperor the direction of the Peers' School, but even under such distinguished tutelage the stripling made his stand. His reading led him to write for the school magazine an anti-militarist article. The veteran, as I once learned from a friend of Yanagi, promptly paraded the school, boys and masters. He spoke of disloyal, immoral, subversive ideas, and bade the youthful disturber of the peace attend him at his own house. When Yanagi stood before Nogi and was asked what he had to say, he replied with the question, "Don't you feel pain because of sending so many men to death before Port Arthur[107]?"

Again I found my prophet in a cottage. It was a cottage overlooking rice fields and a lagoon. From the Japanese scene outdoors I passed indoors to a new Japan. Cezanne, Puvis de Chavannes, Beardsley, Van Gogh, Henry Lamb, Augustus John, Matisse and Blake—Yanagi has written a big book on Blake which is in a second edition—hung within sight of a grand piano and a fine collection of European music[108]. Chinese, Korean and Japanese pottery and paintings filled the places in the dwelling not occupied by Western pictures and the Western library of a man well advanced with an interpretative history of Eastern and Western mysticism. An armful of books about Blake and Boehme, all Swedenborg, all Carlyle, all Emerson, all Whitman, all Shelley, all Maeterlinck, all Francis Thompson, and all Tagore, and plenty of other complete editions; early Christian mystics; much of William Law, Bergson, Eucken, Caird, James, Haldane, Bertrand Russell, Jefferies, Havelock Ellis, Carpenter, Strindberg, "AE," Yeats, Synge and Shaw; not a little poetry of the fashion of Vaughan, Traherne and Crashaw; a well-thumbed Emily Bronte; all the great Russian novelists; numbers of books on art and artists—it was an arresting collection to come on in a Japanese hamlet, and odd to sit down beside it in order to talk of "heathen."

"Yes," said Yanagi—he speaks an English which reflects his wide reading—"our young maid, on being shown the full moon the other night, bowed her head. I find this natural instinct of some value. Our people have much natural feeling towards Nature. If modern Japanese art has degenerated it is because it does not sufficiently find out life in things. The sough of the wind in the trees may have only a slight influence on character, but it is a vital influence. I do not like, of course, the word 'heathendom' of which Uchimura seems so fond. I dearly admire Christ, but most of the Christianity of to-day is not Christ. It is largely Paul. It is a mixture. It is not the clear, pure, original thing. Christians must reform their Christianity before it can satisfy us. In the East we now see clearly enough to seek only the best that the West can offer."

Yanagi said that the spontaneity and naturalness of Eastern religions ought to be recognised. "You will find Christians admiring Walt Whitman, but it is Whitman the democrat they admire, not Whitman the prophet of naturalness." He spoke with appreciation of the Zen sect of Buddhists. Many of the Zen devotees were "noble and had a profound idea." He was unable to see "any difference at all" between the best part of Buddhism and the best part of Christianity. He said that his own mysticism was based on science, art, religion and philosophy. "My sincerest wish," he declared, "is to produce a beautiful reconciliation of these four. As it is, too often scientists and philosophers have no deep knowledge of religion or art, artists have no deep knowledge of religion or science, and the religious have no idea of art. Surely the deepest religious idea is the deepest artistic and philosophic idea. Perhaps our scientists are in the poorest state just now with no understanding of art or religion. Our scientists are immersed in the problem of matter, our religious people in the problem of spirit, and our artists forget that in dealing with nature they are dealing with spirit as well as body."

Faced by force and science when Commander Perry came, Japan, in order to save herself from foreign colonisation, had had to concentrate all her attention on force and science. She had concentrated her attention with signal success. But naturally she had had, in the process, to slacken her hold somewhat on the spiritual life.

"Always remember how difficult the Japanese find it to know which way to take. Their whole basis has been shaken and on the surface all has become chaotic. Ten years hence it will be possible to take a just view. There is much reason for high hopes. For one thing, the burden of old thought does not rest so heavily on us as might be supposed. We are very free in many ways. In the matter of religion Japan is the most free nation in the world. If England were to become Buddhist it would sound strange or exotic, but Japan is free to become what she may."

"There may be a great difference between one of our temples and shrines and an English church," Yanagi proceeded, "but I cannot believe in the gap which some people seem to see yawning between East and West. It is deplorable that the world should think that there is such a complete difference between East and West. It is usually said that self-denial, asceticism, sacrifice, negation are opposed to self-affirmation, individualism, self-realisation; but I do not believe in such a gap. I wish to destroy the idea of a gap. It is an idea which was obtained analytically. The meeting of East and West will not be upon a bridge over a gap, but upon the destruction of the idea of a gap.

"In future, religion cannot be limited by this or that sect or idea. Religion cannot be limited to Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism or Mahomedanism. Uchimura says that it is the essence of Christianity which has the power to rescue Japan from its chaotic state. But the essence of Buddhism can also contribute some important element to the future of Japan. The notion that the essence of Christianity and the essence of Buddhism are far apart is artificial and prejudiced."

One day some weeks later I walked with Yanagi on the hills. He said: "The weakest point in the Japanese character is the lack of the power of questioning. We are repressed by our educational system. And so many things come here at one time that it makes confusion. What is so often taken for a lack of originality in us is a state resulting from an immense importation of foreign ideas. They have been overpowering. Many of us have no clear ideas on life, society, sex and so on, and you will find it difficult to get satisfactory answers to many questions which you will want to ask."

As to morality, it was dangerous to say "this or that is immoral." Morality was often merely custom. Ordinary morality had scant authority. Critics of Japanese morality should not forget that, in the opinion of Japanese, Western people were more erotic than they were. Western dancing—not to speak of Western women's evening costumes—was undoubtedly more erotic than Japanese dancing. Again, the sexual curiosity of foreigners seemed stronger than that manifested by Japanese. It was a well-known fact that the girls at many hotels and restaurants had not a little to complain of from foreign men who misjudged their naive ways. It must be remembered that Japanese were franker in sexual matters than Europeans and Americans. Sexual ill-doing was not so much concealed as in Europe. A wrong impression of Japanese morality was taken away by tourists whose guides showed them, as in Paris, what they expected to see.

"I wonder," he said, "that Western visitors to Tokyo who talk of our immorality are not struck by the fact that in an Eastern capital a foreign lady may walk home at night and be practically safe from being spoken to. The Japanese are undoubtedly a very kind people. They may be unmoral, but they are not immoral."

"Most of our people do not understand liberty in the mental sexual relations. Love is not free. In a very large proportion of cases, indeed, parents would oppose a match because a son or daughter had fallen in love. And if it is difficult to marry for love it is not easy to fall in love.[109] Society in which young men and young women meet is restricted; there are few opportunities of conversation. Without liberty towards women there can be no perfect sense of responsibility towards them."

What had been taught to women as the supreme virtue was the virtue of sacrifice for father, husband, children. It was most important to let women know the significance of individualism. They were always offering themselves for others before they became themselves. But the idea of individuality was very little clearer to the Japanese man than to the Japanese woman. People were too prone to wish to give 100 yen before they had 100 yen. The Japanese were the most devotional people in the world, but they hardly knew yet the things to be devoted to.

Yanagi is a leading member of a small association of literary men, artists and students who graduated together from the Peers' School. They call themselves for no obvious reason the Shirakaba or Silver Birch Society. The intelligent and consistent efforts of these young men to introduce vital Western work in literature, philosophy, painting, sculpture, draughtsmanship and music, and the large measure of success they have attained is of some significance. Several members of the group belong to the old Kuge families, that is the ancient nobility which surrounded the Emperor at Kyoto before the Restoration. Cut off for centuries from military and administrative activities by the dominance of the Shogunate Government, the Kuge devoted themselves to the arts and the refinements of life. For the exclusiveness of the past some of their descendants substitute artistic integrity. The Shirakaba has had for several years a remarkable magazine. Its editor and its publisher, its size, its price and its date of publication are continually changed; it never makes any bid for popularity; it expresses its sentiments in a downright way and it has always been anti-official: yet it survives and pays its way. Beyond the magazine, the Society has had every year at least one exhibition of what its members conceive to be significant modern European work. The members have also supported a few Japanese artists of outstanding sincerity. Through the Shirakaba the influence of Cezanne, Van Gogh, Rodin, Blake, Delacroix, Matisse, Augustus John, Beardsley, Courbet, Daumier, Maillol, Chavannes and Millet, particularly Cezanne, Van Gogh, Rodin and Blake, has been marked. The Silver Birch group has never tired of extolling the great names of Rembrandt, Duerer, El Greco, Van Eyck, Goya, Leonardo, Michael Angelo, Tintoretto, Giotto and Mantegna[110].

While an ardent Young Japan has formed and dissolved many societies, movements and fashions, this Shirakaba group has held fast and has gained friends by its sincerity, its vision and its audacity[111]. Rodin encouraged the Shirakaba efforts to reproduce the best Western art by presenting it with three pieces of sculpture.

"The intellectual man does no fighting," Froude has written. Why do not Yanagi and his friends make a stand on public questions? "Because," he said, "at the present stage of our development it is almost impossible to take up a strong attitude, and because, important though political and social questions are, they are not, in our opinion, of the first importance. To artists, philosophers, students of religion, such problems are secondary. More important problems are: What is the meaning of this world? What is God? What is the essence of religion? How can we best nourish ourselves so as to realise our own personalities? Political and social problems are secondary for us at present; they are not related emotionally to our present conditions[112].

For the East the Root, For the West the Fruit.

"If we faced such problems directly we should probably make them primary problems, as you do in Great Britain. Our present attitude does not prove, however, that we are cold to political and social problems. In fact, when we think of these terrible political and social questions they make us boil. But you will understand that in order to have something to give to others, we must have that something. We are seeking after that something."

Yanagi, continuing, spoke of the direct contribution which the new artistic movement in Japan, under the influence of modern Western art, was making to the solution of political and social questions[113]. The interest of the younger generation in Post Impressionism was "quite disharmonious with the ordinary attitude towards militarism." European art broke down barriers in the Japanese mind. When the younger generation, nourished on higher ideals, grew up, it would be the State, and there would be a more hopeful condition of affairs. People generally supposed that social questions were the most practical; but religious, artistic, philosophic questions were, in the truest sense of the word, the most practical.

Yanagi went on to tell of his devotion to Blake. He could not understand "why Englishmen are so cool to him." He asked me how it was that there was no word about Blake in Andrew Lang's work on English literature. "I cannot imagine," he said, "why such an intelligent man could not appreciate Blake." Yanagi regarded Blake as "the artist of immense will, of immense desire, and a man in whom can be seen that affirmative attitude towards life, exhibited later by Whitman." Yanagi spoke also of "Anglo-Saxon nobility, liberty, depth of character and healthiness," and of "a deep and noble character" in English literature which he did not find elsewhere. Whitman, Emerson, Poe and William James were "the crown of America."

As I close this chapter I recall Yanagi's library, in the service of which, bettering Mark Pattison's example, two-thirds of its owner's income was for some time expended. I remember the thatched dwelling overlooking the quiet reed-bound lagoon with its frosty sunrises, red moonrises and apparitions of Fuji above the clouds seventy miles away. No Western visitor whom I took to Abiko failed to be moved by that room, designed by Yanagi himself in every detail, wherein East meets West in harmony. I have made note of his Western books but not of the classics and strange mystic writings of Chinese and Korean priests in piles of thin volumes in soft bindings of blue or brown. I have not mentioned a Rembrandt drawing and next to it the vigorous but restful brush lines of an artist priest of the century that brought Buddhism to Japan; severe little gilt-bronze figures of deities from China, a little older; pottery figures of exquisite beauty from the tombs of Tang, a little later; Sung pottery, a dynasty farther on; Korai celadons from Korean tombs of the same epoch; and whites and blue and whites of Ming and Korean Richo. On the wall a black and yellow tiger is "burning bright" on a strip of blood-red silk tapestry woven on a Chinese loom for a Taoist priest 500 years ago. Cimabue's portrait of St. Francis breathes over Yanagi's writing desk from one side, while from the other Blake's amazing life mask looks down "with its Egyptian power of form added to the intensity of Western individualism." These are Yanagi's silent friends. His less quiet friends of the flesh have felt that this room was a sanctuary and Yanagi a priest of eternal things, but a priest without priestcraft, a priest living joyously in the world. Above his desk is inscribed the line of Blake:

Thou also, dwellest in eternity

and Kepler's aspiration, "My wish is that I may perceive God whom I find everywhere in the external world in like manner within and without me."

FOOTNOTES:

[107] One of the reasons assigned for the suicide of the General was thoughts of his responsibility for the terrible slaughter in the assaults on Port Arthur.

[108] Mrs. Yanagi is one of the best contraltos heard at the now numerous Japanese concerts of Western music.

[109] Shinju, or suicide for love, the girl often being a geisha, is common.

[110] "I am inclined to think," wrote Yanagi in 1921, in a paper on Korean art, "that we have paid if anything rather too much attention to European works while making little effort to pay attention to what lies much nearer to us."

[111] POLICE STANDARDS.—The sale of one issue of the magazine was prohibited by the police, who found a nude "antagonistic to the ordinary standard of public morals." The editors' answer next month—the police standard being, "No front views"—was to publish half a dozen more nudes with their backs to the reader.

[112] It will be remembered that this conversation took place in the summer of 1915 at the outset of my investigation. Since then, as noted throughout this book, economic questions have increasingly pressed themselves forward. I may mention that in 1919 Yanagi wrote a vigorous and moving protest against misgovernment in Korea. In a recent letter to me he says: "You know that I am going to establish a Korean Folk Art Society in Seoul. This is a big work, but I want to do it with all my power for love of Korea. I approach the solution of the Korean question by the way of Art. Politics can never solve the question. I want to use the gallery as a meeting-place of Koreans and Japanese. People cannot quarrel in beauty. This is my simple yet definite belief." Yanagi's manifesto on his project made one think of the age when the great culture of China and India glowed across the straits of Tsushima in the wake of early Buddhism.

[113] A well-known member of the Shirakaba group started two years ago an "ideal village" among the mountains. It is an effort towards social freedom in which the police manifest a continuous interest.



ACROSS JAPAN (TOKYO TO NIIGATA AND BACK)

CHAPTER XII

TO THE HILLS

(TOKYO, SAITAMA, TOCHIGI AND FUKUSHIMA)

Nothing which concerns a countryman is a matter of unconcern to me.—TERENCE

During the month of July I went from one side of Japan to the other, starting from Tokyo, across the sea from which lies America, and coming out at Niigata, across the sea from which lies Siberia.

We first made a four hours' railway run through the great Kwanto plain (6,000 square miles). Travelling is comfortable on such a trip, for travellers take off their coats and waistcoats, and the train-boy—he has the word "Boy" on his collar in English—brings fans and bedroom slippers. The fans, which on one side advertised "Hotels in European style, directly managed by the Imperial Government Railway[114]," offered on the other a poem and a drawing. A poem addressed to a snail played with the idea of its giving its life to climbing Fuji. The poem was composed by a poet who wrote many delightful hokku (seventeen-syllable poems), showing a humorous sympathy with the humblest creatures. One poem is:

Come and play with me, Thou orphan sparrow!

Like Burns, Issa addressed a poem to a louse.

As we climbed from the vicinity of the sea to higher lands someone recalled the saying about saints living in the mountains and sages by the sea. Speaking of religion, one man said that he had known of people giving half their income to religious purposes. He also mentioned that for some years his mother had gone to hear a sermon in a Japanese Christian church every Sunday, but she still served her Buddhist shrine.

It was at an inn at the hot spring near the Mount Nasu volcano—the odour of the sulphurous hot water was everywhere in the district—that I first enjoyed the attentions of the blind amma (masseur or masseuse), the call of whose plaintive pipe is heard every evening in the smallest community. Amma san rubbed and pommelled me for an hour for 28 sen. The amma does not massage the skin, but works through the yukata (bath gown) of the patient. I had my massaging as I knelt with the other guests of the inn at an entertainment arranged for the benefit of residents. The entertainers, professional and non-professional—the non-professionals were local farmers—knelt on a low platform or danced in front of it. They were extraordinarily able. A dramatic tale by one of the story-tellers was about a yokelish young wrestler and a daimyo. Another described the woes and suicide of an old-time Court lady.

The next day we started on foot on a seven miles' climb of the volcano. Its lower slopes were covered with a variety of that knee-high bamboo with a creeping root, which is so troublesome to farmers when they break up new ground. One variety is said to blossom and fruit once in sixty years and then die. An ingenious professor has traced mice plagues to this habit. In the year in which the bamboo fruits the mice increase and multiply exceedingly. Suddenly their food supply gives out and they descend to the plains to live with the farmers.

At length we came in sight of the smoke and vapour of the volcano. Soon we were near the top, where the white trunks and branches of dead trees and scrub, killed by falling ash or gusts of vapour, dotted an awesome desolation of calcined and fused stone and solidified mud. At the summit we looked down into the churning horror of the volcano's vat and at different spots saw the treacly sulphur pouring out, brilliant yellow with red streaks. The man to whom there first came the idea of hell and a prisoned revengeful power must surely have looked into a crater. In the throat of this crater there seethed and spluttered an ugliness that was scarlet, green, brown and yellow. The sound of the steam blowing off was like the roar of the sea. The air was stifling. It was very hot, and there was a high eerie wind.

Adventurous men had built rude bulwarks of stone over some of the orifices, and in this way had compelled the volcano to furnish them with sulphur free from dirt. The production of sulphur in Japan is valued at close on three million yen.

As we went on our journey we spoke of the sturdiness and cheeriness of our chief carrier, who had told us that he was seventy. I asked him if he thought it fair that he should have to walk so far on a hot day with so much to carry while we were empty-handed. He replied that it might appear to be unjust, but that he was happy enough. He said that he had lived long and seen many things, and he knew that to be rich was not always to be happy. He quoted the proverb, "Sunshine and rice may be found everywhere," and the poem which may be rendered, "If you look at a water-fowl thoughtlessly you may imagine that she has nothing to do but float quietly on the water, yet she is moving her feet ceaselessly beneath the surface."

At the little hot spring inn where we next stayed, insect powder was on sale, not without reasonable hope of patronage by the guests. The Asahi once facetiously reported that I had taken on a journey three to (six pecks) of insect powder. The chief protector of the prudent traveller in remote Japan is a giant pillowslip of cotton. He gets into it and ties the strings together under his chin. The mats and futon of old-fashioned hotels are full of fleas. The hard cylindrical Japanese pillow has no doubt its tenants also, but I never got accustomed to using it, and laid my head on a doubled-up kneeling cushion.

A foot-high partition separated the men's hot bath from the women's. My cold bath in the morning I found I had to take unselfconsciously at a water-gush in front of the house. As the food was poor here, we were glad of our tinned food and ship's biscuits. This was of course in a remote part. Apart from ordinary Japanese food, there are usually available at the inns chicken, fish of some sort, eggs, omelettes and soups. With a pot of jam or two and some powdered milk in one's bag, one can live fairly well. Fresh milk can now be got in unlikely places on giving notice overnight. It is produced for invalids and children. If one makes no fuss, remembers one is a traveller who has resolved to see rural Japan, and realises that the inn people will try to do their best, one will not fare so badly. On the railway one is well catered for by the provision of bento (lunch) boxes, sold on the platforms of stations. These chip boxes contain rice (hot), cold omelette, cold fish or chicken and assorted pickles, and provide an appetising and inexpensive meal.

Monkeys, bears and antelopes are shot in this district. One man spoke of a troop of eighty monkeys. In the high mountain regions there are still people who escape the census and live a wild life. The records of a gipsy folk called Sanka have a history going back 700 or 800 years.

As we wound our way up and down the hill-sides we saw evidence of "fire-farming." It is the simple method by which a small tract with a favourable aspect is cleared by fire and cultivated, and then, when the fertility is exhausted, abandoned. I was assured that after fire-farming "tea springs up naturally," and that though tea-drinking may have been introduced from China there could not be such large areas of tea growing wild if tea were not indigenous.

Most of our paths lay through woods and matted vegetation. I noticed that trees were often felled in order that mushrooms might be grown on and around their trunks. There is a large consumption of these tree-grown mushrooms in Japan and an export trade worth two and a half million yen.



An inscribed stone by our path was a reminder of the belief in "mountain maidens." They have the undoubted merit of not being "so peevish as fairies." At another stone, before which was a pile of small stones, a farmer told us that when a traveller threw a stone on the heap he "left behind his tiredness."



In the first house we came to we found a young widow turning bowls with power from a water-wheel. She could finish 400 bowls in a day and got from one to five sen apiece. She said that she had often wished to see a foreigner. Like nearly all the girls and women of the hills, she wore close-fitting blue cotton trousers.

We descended to a kind of prairie which had a tree here and there and roughly wooded hills on either side. This brought us to the problem of the wise method of dealing with the enormous wood-bearing areas of the country, the timber crop of which is so irregular in quality. Japan requires many more scientifically planned forests. As coal is not in domestic use, however, large quantities of cheap wood are needed for burning and for charcoal making. The demand for hill pasture is also increasing. How shall the claims of good timber, good firewood, good charcoal-making material and good pasture be reconciled? In the county through which we were passing—a county which, owing to its large consumption of wood fuel, needs relatively little charcoal—the charcoal output was worth as much as 35,000 yen a year.

We saw "buckwheat in full bloom as white as snow," as the Chinese poem says. At a farmhouse there was a box fixed on a barn wall. It was for communications for the police from persons who desired to make their suggestions for the public welfare privately.

Towards evening, when we had done about twenty miles, I managed to twist an ankle. Happily I had the chance of a ride. It was on the back of a dour-looking mare which was accompanied by her foal and tied by a halter to the saddle of a led pack-horse which was carrying two large boxes. Thus impressively I did several miles in descending darkness and across the rocky beds of two rivers. The horse of this district is a downcast-looking animal in spite of the fact that it is stalled under the same roof as its owner and is thus able to share to some extent in his family life.

At the town at which we at last arrived, the comfort of the hot bath was enhanced by a sturdy lass of the inn who unasked and unannounced came and applied herself resolutely to scrubbing and knuckling our backs.

The next day I went to the principal school. There were in the place three primary schools, one with a branch for agricultural work. The "attendance" at the principal school, where there were 379 boys and girls, was 98 per cent, for the boys and 94 per cent, for the girls.[115] The buildings were most creditable to a small place fifty miles from a railway station. The community had met the whole cost out of its official funds and by subscriptions. More than half the expenditure of many a village is on education, which in Japan is compulsory but not free. One cannot but be impressed by the pride which is taken in the local schools. The dominating man-made feature of the landscape is less frequently than might be supposed a temple or a shrine: where the picture which catches the eye is not the vast expanse of the crops of the plain or the marvels of terracing for hill crops, it is the long, low school building, set almost invariably on the best possible site. The poorly paid men and women teachers are earnest and devoted, and their influence must be far-reaching. They are rewarded in part, no doubt, by the respect which pupils and the general public give to the sensei (teacher).[116] At the school I visited, the children, as is customary, swept and washed out the schoolrooms and kept the playground trim. Above one teacher's desk were the following admonitions:

Be obedient. Be decent. Be active. Be social. Be serious.

"Be serious"!—graver small folk sit in no schools in the world. Here, as usual, corporal punishment was never given. I suggested to teachers all sorts of juvenile delinquencies, but their faith in the sufficiency of reprimands, of "standing out" and of detention after school hours was unshaken.

A new wing, a beautiful piece of carpenter's work, had cost 4,000 yen, a large sum in Japan, where wood and village labour are equally cheap. It was to be used chiefly for the gymnastics which are steadily adding to the stature of the Japanese people. At one end there was an opening, about 20 ft. across and 5 ft. deep, designed as an honourable place for the portraits of the Emperor and Empress, which are solemnly exposed to view on Imperial birthdays[117].

Apart from a local spirit of pride and emulation and a belief in education, one of the reasons for the building of new schools and adding to old ones is to be found in the recent extension of the period of compulsory attendance. It used to be from six to ten years of age; it is now from six to twelve. The visitor to Japan usually under-estimates the ages of children because they are so small. Japanese boys grow suddenly from about fifteen to sixteen.

In the whole of this county, with a population of 35,000, there were, I learnt at the county offices, 22 elementary schools with 36 branch schools, 3 secondary schools and 17 winter schools. Within the same area there were 46 Buddhist temples with about 60 priests, and 125 Shinto shrines with 11 priests.

The chief police officer, in chatting with me, mentioned that, out of 71 charges of theft, only 47 were proceeded with. When charges were not proceeded with it was either because restitution had been made or the chief constable had exercised his discretion and dismissed the offender with a reprimand. When transgressors are dismissed with a reprimand an eye is kept on them for a year. As the Japanese are in considerable awe of their police, I have no doubt that, as was explained to me, those who have lapsed into evil-doing, but are released from custody with a warning, may "tremble and correct their conduct." In the whole county in a year 14,400 admonitions were given at 14 police stations. The noteworthy thing in the criminal statistics is the small proportion of crime against women and children.

The fact that the county was in a remote part of Japan may be held, perhaps, to account for the fact that there were in it, I was assured, only 14 geisha and 8 women known to be of immoral character. All of them were living in the town and they were said to be chiefly patronised by commercial travellers and imported labourers. I was told that there were pre-nuptial relations between many young men and young women. Two undoubted authorities in the district agreed that they could not answer for the chastity of any young men before marriage or of "as many as 10 per cent." of the young women. In an effort to save the reputation of their daughters, fathers sometimes register illegitimate children as the offspring of themselves and their wives. Or when an unmarried girl is about to have a child her father may call the neighbours to a feast and announce to them the marriage of his daughter to her lover. The figures for illegitimate births are vitiated by the fact that in Japan children are recorded as illegitimate who are born to people who have omitted to register their otherwise respectable unions.[118]

In the county in which I was travelling I was assured that half the still births might be put down to immoral relations and half to imperfect nourishment or overworking of the mother. In this district girls marry from 17 or 18, men from 18 to 30.

The town was full of country people who had come to see the festival. One feature of it was the performance of plays on four ancient wheeled stages of a simplicity in construction that would have delighted William Poel. Formerly these plays were given by the local youths; now professional actors are employed. The different acts of the historical dramas which were performed were divided into half a dozen scenes, and when one of these scenes had been enacted the stage was wheeled farther along the street. At the conclusion of each scene some three dozen small boys, all wearing the white-and-black speckled cotton kimono and German caps which are the common wear of lads throughout Japan, would swarm up on the stage, and, with fans waved downwards, would yell at the pitch of their voices an ancient jingle, which seemed to signify "Push, push, push and go on!" This was addressed to a score or so of young men who with loud shouts hauled the heavy stage-wagon along the street. The performances on the four moving theatres went on simultaneously and sometimes the cars passed one another. The performances were given on the eve and on the day and through the night of the festival. The acting was amazingly good, considering the July heat and the cramped conditions in which the actors worked. Happy boys sat at the back of the scenes fanning the players. Our kindly and voluble landlady was not satisfied with the number of times the stages stopped before her inn. She loudly threatened the youths who were dragging them that she would reclaim some properties she had lent and tell her dead husband of their ingratitude!

At one of the booths which had been opened for the festival by a strolling company there were women actors, contrary to the convention of the Japanese stage on which men enact female roles and in doing so use a special falsetto. Some of these actresses performed men's parts. At every performance in a Japanese theatre, as I have already mentioned, a policeman is provided with a chair on a special platform, or in an otherwise favourable position, so that he can view and if necessary censor what is going on. The constable at this particular play was kind enough to offer me his seat. The rest of the audience was content with the floor. The poor little company of players brought to their work both ability and an artistic conscience, but they had to do everything in the rudest way. They were in no way embarrassed by the attendants frequently trimming the inferior oil lamps on the stage. A little girl on the floor, entranced by the performance on the stage, or curious about some detail of it, ran forward and laid her chin on the boards and studied the actors at leisure. The folk in the front row of the gallery dangled their naked legs for coolness.

One of my friends asked me how we managed in the West to identify the people who wanted to leave the theatre between the acts. I explained that as our performances did not last from early afternoon until nearly midnight it was rare for anyone to wish to leave a theatre until the play was over. At a Japanese playhouse, however, a portion of the audience may be disposed to go home at some stage of the proceedings and return later. The careful manager of a small theatre identifies these patrons by impressing a small stamp on the palms of their hands.

From the theatre we went to the travelling shows. They charged 2 sen. We were shown a mermaid, peepshows, a snake, an unhappy bear, three doleful monkeys and some stuffed animals which may or may not have had in life an uncommon number of legs. There was a barefaced imposture by a young and pretty show-woman who insisted that two marmots in her lap were the offspring of a girl. "Look," she cried, "at two sisters, the daughters of one mother. See their hands!" And she held up their paws. She rounded off the fraud by feeding the creatures with condensed milk.

As I returned to the inn from these Elizabethan scenes I noticed that I was preceded in the crowd by a spectacled policeman who carried a paper lantern. Although, as I have explained, the stage plays given in the street were continued all night, only one arrest was made. The prisoner was a drunkard who proved to be a medicine seller but described himself as a journalist. I went to see the clean wooden cell where topers are confined until they are sober. It had a very low door, so that culprits might be compelled to enter and leave humbly on their knees.

We had begun our festival day at six in the morning by attending a celebration at the Shinto shrine. "Although it is no longer necessary, perhaps, to attend the ceremony in a special kind of geta," said our landlady, "it would be as well if you observed the old rule not to attend without taking a bath in the early morning."[119]

At the ancient shrine the townspeople whose turn it was to attend the annual function had assembled in ceremonial costumes. One man wore his hair tied up in the fashion of the old prints. The plaintive strains of old instruments made the strange appeal of all folk music. A decorous procession was headed by the piebald pony of the shrine. Youths and maidens carried aloft tubs of rice, vegetables, fish and sake. These were received by the chief priest. He carefully placed a strip of cloth before his mouth and nose[120] and addressed the chief deity, all heads being bowed. Then the priest placed the offerings in the darkened interior of the shrine. There was a cheery naturalness in all the proceedings. A few small children in gay holiday dress ran freely among the worshippers and encountered indulgent smiles. When an end had been made of offering food and drink the priest within the shrine read a second message to the deity. Again all heads were bowed. His thin voice was heard in the morning quiet, interrupted only by a child's cry, the twittering of birds and the wind rustling the cryptomeria, dark against the blue of the hills.

After the ceremony the food and drink which had been brought by the people were consumed by the priests and the country folk in a large room of the chief priest's house. We were given ceremonial sake to which rice had been added and as mementoes little cakes and dried fish. Not so long ago the presence of a foreigner would have been unwelcome at such a ceremony as we had witnessed: the fear of "contagion of foreigners" extended even to people from another prefecture. To-day the amiable priest placed in our hands for a few moments a small Buddha supposed to be six centuries old.

Before the festival the priest had observed certain taboos for eight days. He had avoided meeting persons in mourning and his food had been cooked at a specially prepared fire. He had been careful not to touch other persons, particularly women; he had bathed several times daily in cold water and he had said many prayers. The heads of the household in the community whose turn it was to attend at the shrine were also supposed to have observed some of the same taboos. Only those persons might make offerings at the shrine whose fathers and mothers were living.[121] Formerly portions of the offerings of rice and sake at the shrine were solemnly given to a young girl.