In this district, when we discussed the influences which made for moral or non-material improvement, everyone put the school first. Then came home training. In this part of the world the Buddhist priest was too often indifferent; the Shinto priest worked at his farm. One person well qualified to express an opinion said that a "wise and benevolent" chief constable could exercise a good moral influence. Others believed in public opinion. A policeman said, "The first thing is for people to have food and clothes; without such primary satisfaction it is very difficult to expect them to be moral." In considering the influence of the police and the schoolmaster it is not without interest to remember that a chief of police and the head of a school receive about the same salary. Assistant teachers and plain constables are also on an equality. I found the salary of the administrative head of one county, the guncho, to be only 2,000 yen a year.

I was told that in the prefecture we were passing through there were no fewer than 360 co-operative societies. The credit branches had a capital of two million yen; the purchase and sale branches showed a turnover of three million yen. In time of famine, due to too low a temperature for the rice or to floods which drown the crop, co-operation had proved its value. The prefectures north of Tokyo facing the Pacific are the chief victims of famine, for near Sendai the warm current from the south turns off towards America. I was told that the number of persons who actually die as the result of famine has been "exaggerated." The number in 1905 was "not more than a hundred." These unfortunates were infants "and infirm people who suffered from lack of suitable nourishment." Every year the development of railway and steam communications makes easier the task of relieving famine sufferers.[122] In the old days people were often found dead who had money but were unable to get food for it. As Japan is a long island with varying climates there is never general scarcity.

FOOTNOTES:

[114] For statistics of railways, see Appendix XXXV.

[115] The percentage of children "attending" school for the whole of Japan is officially reported in 1918 as: cities, 98.18 per cent.; villages, 99.23 per cent.; but this does not mean daily attendance.

[116] Since 1919 the salaries of elementary school teachers have been raised to 26, 16 and 15 yen per month, according to grade.

[117] Only last year (1921) another schoolmaster lost his life in an endeavour to save the Emperor's portrait from his burning school.

[118] See Appendix XXXVI.

[119] A hot bath is ordinarily obtainable only in the afternoon and evening in most Japanese hotels. In the morning people are content merely with rinsing their hands and face.

[120] In addressing a superior, many Japanese still draw in their breath from time to time audibly.

[121] That is, persons who might be considered not to have failed in their filial duties.

[122] After the failure of the 1918-19 crop in India, 600,000 persons were in receipt of famine relief.



CHAPTER XIII

THE DWELLERS IN THE HILLS (FUKUSHIMA)

I didn't visit this place in the hope of seeing fine prospects—my study is man.—BORROW

Before I left the town I had a chat with a landowner who turned his tenants' rent rice into sake. He was of the fifth generation of brewers. He said that in his childhood drunken men often lay about the street; now, he said, drunken men were only to be seen on festival days.

There had been a remarkable development in the trade in flavoured aerated waters, "lemonade" and "cider champagne" chiefly. I found these beverages on sale in the remotest places, for the Japanese have the knack of tying a number of bottles together with rope, which makes them easily transportable. The new lager beers, which are advertised everywhere, have also affected the consumption of sake.[123] Sake is usually compared with sherry. It is drunk mulled. At a banquet, lasting five or six hours or longer, a man "strong in sake" may conceivably drink ten go (a go is about one-third of a pint) before achieving drunkenness, but most people would be affected by three go. Some of the topers who boast of the quantity of sake they can consume—I have heard of men declaring that they could drink twenty go—are cheated late in the evening by the waiting-maids. The little sake bottles are opaque, and it is easy to remove them for refilling before they are quite empty.

The brewer, who was a firm adherent of the Jishu sect of Buddhists, was accustomed to burn incense with his family at the domestic shrine every morning. But this was not the habit of all the adherents of his denomination. As to the moral advancement of the neighbourhood, his grandfather "tried very earnestly to improve the district by means of religion, but without result." He himself attached most value to education and after that to young men's associations.

As we left the town we passed a "woman priest" who was walking to Nikko, eighty miles away. Portraits of dead people, entrusted to her by their relatives for conveyance to distant shrines, were hung round her body.

As the route became more and more hilly I realised how accurate is that representation of hills in Japanese art which seems odd before one has been in Japan: the landscape stands out as if seen in a flash of lightning.

Three things by the way were arresting: the number of shrines, mostly dedicated to the fox god; the rice suspended round the farm buildings or drying on racks; and the masses of evening primroses, called in Japan "moon-seeing flowers."

A feature of every village was one or more barred wooden sheds containing fire-extinguishing apparatus, often provided and worked by the young men's association. Sometimes a piece of ground was described to me as "the training ground of the fire defenders." The night patrols of the village were young fellows chosen in turn by the constable from the fire-prevention parties, made up by the youths of the village. There stood up in every village a high perpendicular ladder with a bell or wooden clapper at the top to give the alarm. The emblem of the fire brigade, a pole with white paper streamers attached, was sometimes distinguished by a yellow paper streamer awarded by the prefecture.

On a sweltering July day it was difficult to realise that the villages we passed through, now half hidden in foliage, might be under 7 ft. of snow in winter. In travelling in this hillier region one has an extra kurumaya, who pushes behind or acts as brakeman.

At the "place of the seven peaks" we found a stone dedicated to the worship of the stars which form the Plough. Again and again I noticed shrines which had before them two tall trees, one larger than the other, called "man and wife." It was explained to me that "there cannot be a more sacred place than where husband and wife stand together." A small tract of cryptomeria on the lower slopes of a hill belonged to the school. The children had planted it in honour of the marriage of the Emperor when he was Crown Prince.

Often the burial-grounds, the stones of which are seldom more than about 2 ft. high by 6 ins. wide, are on narrow strips of roadside waste. (The coffin is commonly square, and the body is placed in it in the kneeling position so often assumed in life.) Here, as elsewhere, there seemed to be rice fields in every spot where rice fields could possibly be made.

On approaching a village the traveller is flattered by receiving the bows of small girls and boys who range themselves in threes and fours to perform their act of courtesy. I was told that the children are taught at school to bow to foreigners. I remember that in the remoter villages of Holland the stranger also received the bows of young people.

On the house of the headman of one village were displayed charms for protection from fire, theft and epidemic. We spoke of weather signs, and he quoted a proverb, "Never rely on the glory of the morning or on the smile of your mother-in-law."

We had before us a week's travel by kuruma. Otherwise we should have liked to have brought away specimens of the wooden utensils of some of the villages. The travelling woodworker whom we often encountered—he has to travel about in order to reach new sources of wood supply—has been despised because of his unsettled habits, but I was told that there was a special deity to look after him. In the town we had left there was delightful woodwork, but most of the draper's stuff was pitiful trash made after what was supposed to be foreign fashions. I may also mention the large collection of blood-and-thunder stories upon Western models which were piled up in the stationers' shops.

As we walked up into the hills—the kuruma men were sent by an easier route—we passed plenty of sweet chestnuts and saw large masses of blue single hydrangea and white and pink spirea. We came on the ruined huts of those who had burnt a bit of hillside and taken from it a few crops of buckwheat. The charred trunks of trees stood up among the green undergrowth that had invaded the patches. There was a great deal of plantain and a kurumaya mentioned that sometimes when children found a dead frog they buried it in leaves of that plant. Japanese children are also in the habit of angling for frogs with a piece of plantain. The frogs seize the plantain and are jerked ashore.

We took our lunch on a hill top. It had been a stiff climb and we marvelled at the expense to which a poor county must be put for the maintenance of roads which so often hang on cliff sides or span torrents. The great piles of wood accumulated at the summit turned the talk to "silent trade." In "silent trade" people on one side of a hill traded with people on the other side without meeting. The products were taken to the hill top and left there, usually in a rough shed built to protect the goods from rain. The exchange might be on the principle of barter or of cash payment. But the amount of goods given in exchange or the cash payment made was left to honour. "Silent trade" still continues in certain parts of Japan. Sometimes the price expected for goods is written up in the shed. "Silent trade" originated because of fears of infectious disease; it survives because it is more convenient for one who has goods to sell or to buy to travel up and down one side of a mountain than up and down two sides.

As we proceeded on our way we were once more struck by the extraordinary wealth of wood. Here is a country where every household is burning wood and charcoal daily, a country where not only the houses but most of the things in common use are made of wood; and there seems to be no end to the trees that remain. It is little wonder that in many parts there has been and is improvident use of wood. Happily every year the regulation of timber areas and wise planting make progress. But for many square miles of hillside I saw there is no fitting word but jungle.

At the small ramshackle hot-spring inns of the remote hills the guests are mostly country folk. Many of them carefully bring their own rice and miso, and are put up at a cost of about 10 sen a day. In the passage ways one finds rough boxes about 4 ft. square full of wood ash in the centre of which charcoal may be burned and kettles boiled.

We were in a region where there is snow from the middle of November to the middle of April. For two-thirds of December and January the snow is never less than 2 ft. deep. The attendance of the children at one school during the winter was 95 per cent. for boys and 90 per cent. for girls. (See note, p. 112.)

My kurumaya pointed to a mountain top where, he said, there were nearly three acres of beautiful flowers. The rice fields in the hills were suffering from lack of water and a deputation of villagers had gone ten miles into the mountains to pray for rain. It is wonderful at what altitudes rice fields are contrived. I noted some at 2,500 ft. In looking down from a place where the cliff road hung out over the river that flowed a hundred feet below I noticed a stone image lying on its back in the water. It may have come there by accident, but the ducking of such a figure in order to procure rain is not unknown.

At an inn I asked one of the greybeards who courteously visited us if there would be much competition for his seat when he retired from the village assembly. He thought that there would be several candidates. In the town from which we had set out on our journey through the highlands a doctor had spent 500 yen in trying to get on the assembly.

The tea at this resting place was poor and someone quoted the proverb, "Even the devil was once eighteen and bad tea has its tolerable first cup." On going to the village office I found that for a population of 2,000 there were, in addition to the village shrine, sixteen other shrines and three Buddhist temples. Against fire there were four fire pumps and 155 "fire defenders." A dozen of the young men of the village were serving in the army, four were home on furlough, six were invalided and forty were of the reserve. As many as thirty-seven had medals. The doctors were two in number and the midwives three. There was a sanitary committee of twenty-three members. The revenue of the village was 5,740 yen. It had a fund of 740 yen "against time of famine." The taxes paid were 2,330 yen for State tax, 2,460 yen for prefectural tax and 4,350 yen for village tax. The village possessed two co-operative societies, a young men's association, a Buddhist young men's association, a Buddhist young women's association, a society for the development of knowledge, a society of the graduates of the primary school, two thrift organisations, a society for "promoting knowledge and virtue," and an association the members of which "aimed at becoming distinguished." There were in the village ninety subscribers to the Red Cross and two dozen members of the national Patriotic Women's Association.

In the county through which we were moving there was gold, silver and copper mining.[124] Out of its population of 36,000 only 632 were entitled to vote for an M.P.

We rested at a school where the motto was, "Even in this good reign I pray because I wish to make our country more glorious." There were portraits of four deceased local celebrities and of Peter the Great, Franklin, Lincoln, Commander Perry and Bismarck. Illustrated wall charts showed how to sit on a school seat, how to identify poisonous plants and how to conform to the requirements of etiquette. The following admonitions were also displayed—a copy of them is given to each child, who is expected to read the twelve counsels every morning before coming to school:

1.—Do your own work and don't rely on others to do it.

2.—Be ardent when you learn or play.

3.—Endeavour to do away with your bad habits and cultivate good ones.

4.—Never tell a lie and be careful when you speak.

5.—Do what you think right in your heart and at the same time have good manners.

6.—Overcome difficulties and never hold back from hard work.

7.—Do not make appointments which you are uncertain to keep.

8.—Do not carelessly lend or borrow.

9.—Do not pass by another's difficulties and do not give another much trouble.

10.—Be careful about things belonging to the public as well as about things belonging to yourself.

11.—Keep the outside and inside of the school clean and also take care of waste paper.

12.—Never play with a grumbling spirit.

There was stuck on the roofs of many houses a rod with a piece of white paper attached, a charm against fire. One house so provided was next door to the fire station. Frequently we passed a children's jizo or Buddha, comically decked in the hat and miscellaneous garments of youngsters whose grateful mothers believed them to have been cured by the power of the deity.

Speaking of clothes, it was the hottest July weather and the natural garment was at most a loin cloth. The women wore a piece of red or coloured cotton from their waist to their knees. The backs of the men and women who were working in the open were protected by a flapping ricestraw mat or by an armful of green stuff. The boys under ten or so were naked and so were many little girls. But the influence of the Westernising period ideas of what was "decent" in the presence of foreigners survives. So, whenever a policeman was near, people of all ages were to be seen huddling on their kimonos. I was sorry for a merry group of boys and girls aged 12 or 13 who in that torrid weather[125] were bathing at an ideal spot in the river and suddenly caught sight of a policeman. It is deplorable that a consciousness of nakedness should be cultivated when nakedness is natural, traditional and hygienic. (Even in the schools the girls are taught to make their kimonos meet at the neck—with a pin![126]—much higher than they used to be worn.) It is only fair to bear in mind, however, that some hurrying on of clothes by villagers is done out of respect to the passing superior, before whom it is impolite to appear without permission half dressed or wearing other than the usual clothing.

At a hot spring we found many patrons because, as I was told, "Ox-day is very suitable for bathing." The old pre-Meiji days of the week were twelve: Rat-, Ox-, Tiger-, Hare-, Dragon-, Snake-, Horse-, Sheep-, Monkey-, Fowl-, Dog-and Boar-day. When the Western seven days of the week were adopted they were rendered into Japanese as: Sun, Moon, Fire, Water, Wood, Metal and Earth, followed by the word meaning star or planet and day. For instance, Sunday is Nichi (Sun) yo (star) bi (day), and Monday, Getsu (Moon) yo (planet) bi (day), or Nichi-yo-bi and Getsu-yo-bi. For brevity the bi is often dropped off.

The headman of a village we passed through told me that the occasion of my coming was the first on which English had been heard in those parts. Talking about the people of his village, he said that there had been four divorces in the year. Once in four or five years a child was born within a few months of marriage. In the whole county there had been among 310 young men examined for the army only four cases of "disgraceful disease." There was no immoral woman in the 75-miles-long valley. Elsewhere in the county many young men were in debt, but in the headman's village no youth was without a savings-bank book. And the local men-folk "did not use women's savings as in some places."

One shrine we passed seemed to be dedicated to the moon. Another was intended to propitiate the horsefly. Several villages had boxes fastened on posts for the reception of broken glass. As we approached one village I saw an inscription put up by the young men's association, "Good Crops and Prosperity to the Village." When we came to the next village the schoolmaster was responsible for an inscription, "Peace to the World and Safety to the State." In other places I found young men's society notice boards giving information about the area of land in a village, how it was cropped, the kind of crops, the area of forest, lists of famous places, etc.



In the gorges we rode over many suspension bridges and crossed the backbone of Japan in unforgettable scenes of romantic beauty. From the craggy paths of our highlands, amid a wealth not only of gorgeous flowers and greenery but of great velvety butterflies, we saw the far-off snow-clad Japanese Alps.



At one of the schools where we lunched I noticed that the large wall maps were of Siam and Malaya, Borneo, Australia and China (two). The portraits were of Florence Nightingale, Lincoln, Napoleon and Christ as the Good Shepherd, the last named being "a present from a believer friend of the schoolmaster."[127] This school closed at noon from July 10 to July 31, and had twenty days' vacation in August and another twenty days in the rice-planting and busy sericultural season. The sewing-room of the school was used in winter as a dormitory for boys who lived at a distance. Accommodation for girls was provided in the village. The children brought their rice with them. The products of the school farm were also eaten by the boarding pupils. It was estimated that the cost of maintaining the girls was 10 sen a day. Three-fourths of this expense was borne by the village. The regularity and strictness of the dormitory management were found to have an excellent effect. At the winter school, an adjunct of the day school, there was an attendance of a score of youths and sixty girls.

Speaking of a place where we stayed for the night, one who had a wide knowledge of rural Japan said that he did not think that there was a lonelier spot where farming was carried on. There was no market or fair for 80 or 90 miles and the little groups of houses were 2 or 3 miles apart. In this district, it was explained, "the rich are not so rich and the poor are not so poor."

We passed somewhere a fine shrine for the welfare of horses. At a certain festival hundreds of horses are driven down there to gallop round and round the sacred buildings. Thousands of people attend this festival, but it was declared that no one was ever hurt by the horses.

The poetical names of country inns would make an interesting collection. I remember that it was at "the inn of cold spring water" that the waiting-maid had never seen cow's milk. She proved to be the daughter of the host and wore a gold ring by way of marking the fact. This girl told us that on the banks of the river there was only one house in 70 miles. The village was having the usual holiday to celebrate the end of the toilsome sericultural season.

On our way to the next village we met two far-travelled young women selling the dried seaweed which, in many varieties, figures in the Japanese dietary.[128] (There are shops which sell nothing but prepared seaweeds.) A notice board there informed us that the road was maintained at the cost of the local young men's society. As we were on foot we felt grateful, for the road was well kept. We passed for miles over planking hung on the cliff side or on roadway carried on embankments. On the suspended pathways there was now and then a plank loose or broken, and there was no rail between the pedestrian and the torrent dashing below. Where there was embanked roadway it was almost always uphill and downhill and it frequently swung sharply round the corner of a cliff. As the river increased in volume we saw many rafts of timber shooting the rapids. At one place twenty-six raftsmen had been drowned. The remnants of two bridges showed the force of the floods.

In this region the kurumaya were hard put to it at times and once a kuruma broke down. Its owner cheerfully detached its broken axle and went off with it at a trot ten miles or so to a blacksmith. Later he traversed the ten miles once more to refit his kuruma, afterwards coming on fifteen more miles to our inn. The endurance and cheeriness of the kurumaya were surprising. It was usually in face of their protests that we got out to ease them while going uphill. Every morning they wanted to arrange to go farther than we thought reasonable. Each man had not only his passenger but his passenger's heavy bag. One day we did thirty-six miles over rough roads. The kurumaya proposed to cover fifty. They showed spirit, good nature and loyalty. The character of their conversation is worth mentioning. At one point they were discussing the plays we had witnessed, at other times the scenery, local legends, the best routes and the crops, material condition and disposition of the villagers. Our kurumaya compared very favourably indeed with men of an equal social class at home. Their manners were perfect. They stayed at the same inns as we did—once in the next room—and behaved admirably. Every evening the men washed their white cotton shorts and jackets—their whole costume except for a wide-brimmed sun hat and straw waraji. Tied to the axle of each kuruma were several pairs of waraji, for on the rough hill roads this simple form of footgear soon wears out. Discarded waraji are to be seen on every roadside in Japan.

The inscriptions on some of the wayside stones we passed had been written by priests so ignorant that the wording was either ridiculous or almost without meaning. But there was no difficulty in deciphering an inscription on a stone which declared that it had been erected by a company of Buddhists who claimed to have repeated the holy name of Amida 2,000,000 times. (The idea is that salvation may be obtained by the repetition of the phrase Namu Amida Butsu.) A small stone set up on a rock in the middle of paddy fields intimated that at that spot "people gathered to see the moon one night every month." A third stone was dedicated to the monkey as the messenger of a certain god, just as the fox is regarded as the messenger of Inari.

We saw during our journey large numbers of kiri (Paulownia) used for making geta and bride's chests. Some farmers seem to plant kiri trees at the birth of a daughter so as to have wood for her wedding chest or money for her outfit[129]. Kiri seems to be increasingly grown. On the other hand in the same districts lacquer trees were now seldom planted. The farmers complained that they were cheated by the collectors of lacquer who come round to cut the trees. The age of cutting was given me as the eighth or ninth year, but poor farmers sometimes allowed a young tree to be cut. A tree may be cut once a year for three or four years. After that it is useless even for fuel, owing to the smell it gives off, and is often left standing. The old scarred trunks, sometimes headless, suggested the tattooed faces and bodies of Maori veterans. As lacquer is poisonous to the skin the wood calls for careful handling. I saw one of the itinerant lacquer collectors, his hands wrapped in cotton, operating on a tree.

During a particularly hot run we had the good fortune to come on a soda-water spring from which we all drank freely. A factory erected to tap the spring was in ruins. Evidently the cost of carriage was prohibitive.

In these hills the rice was planted farther apart than is usual so that the sun might warm the water. Here as elsewhere daikon were hung up to dry on walls and trees, and looked like giant tallow candles. Below a bridge, which marked the village boundary, flags had been flung down by way of keeping off epidemics. Evil spirits were warded off by special dances.

The porch of a little tea-house where we rested was covered with grapes. Soon after leaving it we reached our destination for the night, a small town of houses of several storeys which clustered on a hillside under the shadow of a Zen temple. Meat and eggs were forbidden to the town, but as the residents were all Zen Buddhists the restriction was no hardship. There was no cow in the place, but condensed milk was allowed. A man at the inn told me that he knew of ten Shinto shrines which forbade the use of chickens and eggs in their localities. The view from the temple, perched high on its rock above the wide riverway, was exceptionally fine. Parties of boys and girls of thirteen paid visits to this temple "because thirteen is known as a perilous age." The people of the vegetarian town, instead of feeding on the fish in the river, fed them. I saw a shoal of fish being given scraps at the water edge.

As we went on our way and spoke of the bad roads it was suggested that in the old days roads were purposely left uphill and downhill in order that the advance of enemies might be hindered. We came to a dilapidated tea-house kept by an ugly old woman who showed a touching fondness for a cat and a dog. From her shack we had a view of a volcano which had destroyed two villages a few years before. Our hostess, who made much of us, said that the catastrophe had been preceded by "horrible da-da-da-bang" sounds and lightnings, and that it was accompanied by "thunderbolts and heavy thick smoke." The old woman had beheld "soil boiling and cracking."

Along our route we had more evidences of "fire farming." The procedure was to sow buckwheat the first year and rape and millet the second year. In the cryptomeria forests there was a variety which, when cut, sprouts from the ground and makes a new growth like an elm. One crop we saw was ginseng, protected by low structures covered by matting.

At length we heard the distant sound of a locomotive whistle. We were approaching the newly opened railway which was to take us the short run to the sea. Soon we were in a rather unkempt village which had hardly recovered from its surprise at finding that it had a railway station. We paid our kurumaya the sum contracted for and something over for their faithful service and for their long return run, and having exchanged bows and cordial greetings, we left for a time the glorified perambulators which a foreign missionary is supposed to have introduced half a century ago. (The Japanese claim the honour of "inventing" the jinrikisha.)

FOOTNOTES:

[123] See Appendix XXXVII.

[124] See Appendix XXXVIII.

[125] In Tokyo one may sleep night after night in summer with no covering but the thinnest loose cotton kimono and have an electric fan going within the mosquito curtain, and still feel the heat.

[126] The kimono has no button, hook, tie, or fastening of any kind, and is kept in place by the waist string and obi.

[127] It is an illustration of the difficulty of using a foreign symbolism that it is unlikely that a single child in the school had ever seen a shepherd or a sheep.

[128] In 1918 the value of seaweed was returned at 13,600,000 yen.

[129] In fifteen years a kiri tree may be about 20 ft. high and 3 ft. in circumference and be worth 30 yen. Kiri trees to the value of 3 million yen were felled in 1918.



CHAPTER XIV

SHRINES AND POETRY

(NIIGATA AND TOYAMA)

Sir, I am talking of the mass of the people.—JOHNSON

The railway made its way through snow stockades and through many tunnels which pierced cryptomeria-clad hills. Eventually we descended to the wonderful Kambara plains, a sea of emerald rice. Fourteen million bushels of rice are produced on the flats of Niigata prefecture, which grows more rice than any other. The rice, grown under 800 different names, is officially graded into half a dozen qualities. The problem of the high country we had come from was how to keep its paddy fields from drying up; the problem of Niigata is chiefly to keep the water in its fields at a sufficiently low level. Almost every available square yard of the prefecture is paddy.

At Gosen there were depressing-looking weaving sheds, but the Black Country created by the oil fields farther on was in even more striking contrast with the beautiful region we had left. The petroleum yield was 65 million gallons, and the smell of the oil went with us to the capital city.

Niigata has a dark reputation for exporting farmers' daughters to other parts of Japan, but I have also heard that the percentage of attendance made by the children at the primary schools of the prefecture is higher than anywhere else. Like Amsterdam, Niigata is a city of bridges. There must be 200 of them. The big timber bridge across the estuary is nearly half a mile long. One finds in Niigata a Manchester-like spirit of business enterprise. Our hotel was excellent.

Because they speak with all sorts of people and hear a great deal of conversation the blind amma are full of interesting gossip. A clever amma who ran his knuckles up and down my back said that farm land a good way from Niigata was sold at from 200 yen to 300 yen and sometimes at 400 yen per quarter acre.[130] Prefectural officials who called on me explained that drainage operations on a large scale were being completed. The water of which the low land was relieved would be used to extend farming in the hills. An effort was also being made to develop stock-keeping in the uplands. It was proposed "to supply every farmer with a scheme for increasing his live stock." The optimistic authorities were particularly attracted by the notion of keeping sheep. The plan was to arrange for co-operation in hill pasturing and in wool and meat production. Mutton was as yet unknown, however, in Niigata. (The mutton eaten by foreigners in Japan usually comes from Shanghai.)

I went into the country to a little place where the natural gas from the soil was used by the farmers for lighting and cooking. I heard talk in this village and in others of the influence of the local army reservists' society. "Young men on returning from their army service are always influential. They are much respected by the youths and are talkative indeed in the village assembly."

As our host was the village headman he kindly brought the assembly together to meet me. I asked the assembled fathers about two stones erected in the village. Somebody had kindled a fire of rice screenings near one of them and it had been scorched. On the other stone a kimono had been hung to dry. The explanation was that the stones were monuments not shrines, and that the people who had set them up had left the district. The stones were no doubt respected while the donors lived. It was not uncommon for a pilgrim to a shrine to erect a memorial on his return home.

In this village fifty Shinto shrines of the fifth class had been closed under the influence of the Home Office. They were shrines which had no offering from the village to support them. They had only a few worshippers. All the remaining shrines were of the fifth class but one, and it was of the fourth class. In the county there was a second-class shrine and in the whole prefecture there were two or three first-class shrines. The villagers had agreed among themselves which of their own shrines should be made an end of. A shrine which was dispensed with was burnt. The stone steps approaching it were also removed. Burning was not sacrilege but purification. On the closing of a shrine there might be complaints on the part of some old man or woman, but the majority of people approved. One Shinto shrine guardian lived at the fourth-class shrine and conducted a ceremony at the sixteen fifth-class shrines. Of the twenty Buddhist temples in the village (300 families cultivating an average of a cho apiece), twelve were Hokke, five Shingon, two Shinshu and one Zen. All the priests were married.[131]

I have used the phrase "Buddhist temple" loosely and may do so again, for it conveys an idea which "Buddhist church" does not. A temple (do) is properly an edifice in which a Buddha is enshrined. This building is not for services or burial ceremonies or anniversary offerings for departed souls. It may or may not have a guardian (domori). He is never a priest with a shaven head. A Buddhist church (tera) is a place where adherents go as anniversaries come round or for sermons. It possesses a priest. There is a considerable difference in the style of Buddhist edifices according to their denomination—Zen buildings are particularly plain—but all are more elaborate than Shinto shrines.

A large Shinto shrine is called yashiro (house of god); a small one hokora. A hokora is transportable. Originally it was and in some places it still is a perishable wooden shrine thatched with reed or grass straw which is renewed at the spring and autumn festivals. It may be less than two feet high and may be made of stone or wood. But it cannot be regarded as a building. Inside there are gohei (upright sticks with paper streamers). In a rich man's house a hokora may be seven or eight feet high or bigger than the smallest yashiro, and may be embellished with colour and metal.

Returning to Buddhism, if a priest has a son he may be succeeded by him. But many Buddhist priests marry late and have no children. Or their children do not want to be priests. So the priest adopts a successor. Sometimes he maintains an orphan as acolyte or coadjutor. During the day this assistant goes to school. In the evenings and during holidays he is taught to become a priest. When the primary-school education is finished the lad may be sent by his patron, if he is well enough off, to a school of his sect at Kyoto or Tokyo.

My travelling companion spoke of the infiltration of new ideas in town and country. "A mixing is taking place in the heart and head of everybody who is not a bigot. But I don't know that some kinds of Christianity are to do much for us. I heard the other day of a Japanese Presbyterian who was preaching with zest about hell fire. Generally speaking, our old men are looking to the past and our young men are aspiring, but not all. Some are content if they can live uncriticised by their neighbours. When they become old they may begin to think of a future life and visit temples. But as young men their thoughts are fully occupied by things of this world."

In the office of the headman whom I mentioned a page or so back, there was behind his chair a kakemono which read, "Reflecting and Examining One's Inner Spirit." We passed a night in the old house of this headman, who was a poet and a country gentleman of a delightful type. Being an eldest son he had married young, and his relations with his eldest boy, a frank and clever lad, were pleasant to see. The garden, instead of being shut in by a wall with a tiled coping or by a palisade of bamboo stems in the ordinary way, was open towards the rice fields, a scene of restful beauty. As our kuruma drew near the house, the steward appeared, a broom in his hand. Running for a short distance before us until we entered the courtyard, he symbolically swept the ground according to old custom. After a delightful hot bath and an elaborate supper, which my fellow traveller afterwards assured me had meant a week's work for the women of the household—snapping turtle and choice bamboo shoots were among the honourable dishes—we gathered at the open side of the room overlooking the garden. Fireflies glowed in the paddies and in the garden two stone lanterns had been lighted. One of them, which had a crescent-shaped opening cut in it, gleamed like the moon; the other, which had a small serrated opening, represented a star.

I paid a visit to the local agricultural co-operative store which did business under the motto, "Faith is the Mother of all Virtue." More than half the money taken at the store was for artificial manures. Next came purchases of imported rice, for, like the Danish peasants who export their butter and eat margarine, the local peasants sold their own rice and bought the Saigon variety. The society sold in a year a considerable quantity of sake. Stretched over the doorway of the building in which the goods of the society were stored were the rope and paper streamers which are seen before Shinto shrines and consecrated places. The society had a large flag post for weather signals, a white flag for a fine day, a red one for cloudy weather and a blue one for rain.

I brought away from this village a calendar of agricultural operations with poems or mottoes for each month, in the collection of which I suspect the poet had a hand:

January: Future of the day determined in the morning.

February: The voice of one reading a farming book coming from the snow-covered window.

March: Grafting these young trees, thinking of the days of my grandchildren.

April: Digging the soil of the paddy field, sincerity concentrated on the edge of the mattock.

May: Returning home with the dim moonlight glinting on the edges of our mattocks.

June: Boundless wealth stored up by gracious heaven: dig it out with your mattock, take it away with your sickle.

July: Weeding the paddy field[132] in a happiness and contentment which townspeople do not know.

August: Standing peasant worthier than resting rich man.

September: Ears of rice bend their heads as they ripen. (An allusion to wisdom and meekness.)

October: White steam coming out of a manure house on an autumn morning.

November: Moon clear and bright above neatly divided paddy fields.

December: All the members of the family smiling and celebrating the year's end, piling up many bales of rice.

In this district I first noticed cotton. It is sown in June and is picked from time to time between early September and early November. Cotton has been grown for centuries in Japan, but nowadays it is produced for household weaving only, the needs of the factories being met by foreign imports. The plant has a beautiful yellow flower with a dark brown eye.

In one village I asked how many people smoked. The answer was 60 per cent. of the men and 10 per cent. of the women. In the same village, which did not seem particularly well off, I was told that 200 daily papers might be taken among 1,300 families. Eighty per cent. of the local papers were dailies and cost 35 sen a month. Tokyo papers cost 45 or 50 sen a month.

I visited a school, half of which was in a building adjoining a temple and half in the temple itself. In the same county there were two other schools housed in temples. The small Shinto shrine in this temple held the Imperial Rescript on education. On one side of it was an ugly American clock and on the other a thermometer. In the temple (Zen) two Tokyo University students were staying in ideal conditions for vacation study.

I saw at one place a very tired, unslept-looking peasant with a small closed tub carried over his shoulder by means of a pole. On the tub was tied a white streamer, such as is supplied at a Shinto shrine, and a branch of sakaki (Eurya ochnacea, the sacred tree). The traveller was the delegate of his village. He had been to a mountain shrine in the next prefecture and the tub held the water he had got there. The idea is that if he succeeds in making the journey home without stopping anywhere his efforts will result in rain coming down at his village. If he should stop at any place to rest or sleep, and there should be the slightest drip from his tub there, then the rain will be procured not for his own village but for the community in which he has tarried. So our voyager had walked not only for a whole day but through the night. I heard of a rain delegate who had stamina enough to keep walking for three or four days without sleeping.

Another way of obtaining rain has principally to do with tugging at a rock with a straw rope. Then there is the plan already referred to of tying straw ropes to a stone image and flinging it into the river, saying, "If you don't give us rain you will stay there; if you do give us rain you shall come out." There is also the method of paying someone liberally to throw the split open head of an ox into the deep pool of a waterfall. "Then the water god being much angry," said my informant, "he send his dragon to that village, so storm and rain come necessarily." Yet another plan is for the villagers simply to ascend to a particular mountain top crying, "Give us rain! Give us rain!" While dealing with these magic arts I may reproduce the following rendering of a printed "fortune" which I received from a rural shrine: "Wish to agree but now somewhat difficult. Wait patiently for a while. Do nothing wrong. Wait for the spring to come. Everything will be completed and will become better. Endeavouring to accomplish it soon will be fruitless."

It was a student of agricultural conditions, in Toyama who gossiped to me of the large expenditure by farmers of that prefecture on the marriage of their daughters. "It is not so costly as the boys' education and it procures a good reception for the girl from father-and mother-in-law. The pinch comes when there is a second and third daughter, for the average balance in hand of a peasant proprietor in this prefecture at the end of the year is only 48 yen. Borrowing is necessary and I heard of one bankruptcy. The Governor tried to stop the custom but it is too old. They say Toyama people spend more proportionately than the people in other prefectures. In general they do not keep a horse or ox. I heard of young farmers stealing each other's crops. Parents are very severe upon a daughter who becomes ill-famed, for when they seek a husband for her they must spend more. So mostly daughters keep their purity before marriage. But I know parts of Japan where a large number of the girls have ceased to be virtuous. Concerning the priests, those of Toyama are the worst. A peasant proprietor with seven of a family and a balance at the end of the year of 100 yen must pay 30 to 40 yen to the temple. Some priests threaten the farmer, saying that if he does not pay as much as is imposed on him by the collector an inferior Buddha will go past his door. Priests want to keep farmers foolish as long as they can."

FOOTNOTES:

[130] For prices of land, see Appendix LIV.

[131] There are about 116,000 Shinto shrines of all grades and 14,000 priests, and 71,000 temples and 51,000 priests. There are about a dozen Shinto sects and about thirty Buddhist sects and sub-sects.

[132] It is done by wading in leech-infested water under a burning sun and pulling out the weeds by hand and pushing them down into the sludge.



CHAPTER XV

THE NUN'S CELL

(NAGANO)

It is one more incitement to a man to do well.—BOSWELL

Eighty per cent. of Nagano is slope. Hence its dependence on sericulture. The low stone-strewn roofs of the houses, the railway snow shelters and the zig-zag track which the train takes, hint at the climatic conditions in winter time. Despite the snow—ski-ing has been practised for some years—the summer climate of Nagano has been compared with that of Champagne and there is one vineyard of 60,000 vines.

I was invited to join a circle of administrators who were discussing rural morality and religion. One man said that there was not 20 per cent. of the villages in which the priests were "active for social development." Another speaker of experience declared that "the four pillars of an agricultural village" were "the soncho (headman), the schoolmaster, the policeman and the most influential villager." He went on: "In Europe religion does many things for the support and development of morality, but we look to education, for it aims not at only developing intelligence and giving knowledge, but at teaching virtue and honesty. But there is something beyond that. Thousands of our soldiers died willingly in the Russian war. There must have been something at the bottom of their hearts. That something is a certain sentiment which penetrates deeply the characters of our countrymen. Our morality and customs have it in their foundations. This spirit is Yamato damashii (Japanese spirit). It appeared among our warriors as bushido (the way of the soldier), but it is not the monopoly of soldiers. Every Japanese has some of this spirit. It is the moral backbone of Japan."

"I should like to say," another speaker declared, "that I read many European and American books, but I remain Japanese. Mr. Uchimura sees the darkest side of Buddhism and Mr. Lafcadio Hearn expected too much from it. 'So mysterious,' Hearn said, but it is not so mysterious to us. We must be grateful to him for seeing something of the essence of our life. Sometimes, however, we may be ashamed of his beautifying sentences. I am a modern man, but I am not ashamed when my wife is with child to pray that it may be healthy and wise. It is possible for us Japanese to worship some god somewhere without knowing why. The poet says, 'I do not know the reason of it, but tears fall down from my eyes in reverence and gratitude.' I suppose this is natural theology. The proverb says, 'Even the head of a sardine is something if believed in.' I attach more importance to a man's attitude to something higher than himself than to the thing which is revered by him. Whether a man goes to Nara and Kyoto or to a Roman Catholic or a Methodist church he can come home very purified in heart."

"Some foreigners have thought well to call us 'half civilised,'" the speaker went on. "Can it be that uncivilised is something distasteful to or not understood by Europeans and Americans? We have the ambition to erect some system of Eastern civilisation. It is possible that we may have it in our minds to call some things in Europe 'half civilised.' Surely the barbarians are usually the people other than ourselves. When the townsman goes to the country he says the people are savages. But the countryman finds his fellow-savages quite decent people."

"Some time ago," broke in a professor, "I read a novel by Rene Bazin and I could not but think how much alike were our peasants and the peasants of the West."

The previous speaker resumed: "The other day a foreigner laughed in my presence at our old art of incense burning and actually said that we were deficient in the sense of smell. I told him that fifty years ago our samurai class, in excusing their anti-foreign manifestations, said they could not endure the smell of foreigners, and that to this day our peasants may be heard to say of Western people, 'They smell; they smell of butter and fat.'"

In the city of Nagano early in the morning I went to a large Buddhist temple where the authorities had kindly given me special facilities to see the treasures—alas! all in a wooden structure. A strange thing was the preservation untouched of the room in which the Emperor Meiji rested thirty years ago. May oblivion be one day granted to that awful chenille table cover and those appalling chairs which outrage the beautiful woodwork and the golden tatami of a great building! At the entrance of the temple priests in a kind of open office were reading the newspaper, playing go or smoking. More pleasing was the sight of matting spread right round the temple below its eaves, in order that weary pilgrims might sleep there, and the spectacle of travel-stained women tranquilly sleeping or suckling their infants before the shrine itself. There is a pitch dark underground passage below the floor round the foundations of the great Buddha, and if the circuit be made and the lock communicating with the entrance door to the sacred figure be fortunately touched on the way, paradise, peasants believe, is assured. I made the circuit a few moments after an old woman and found the lock, and on returning to the temple with the rustic dame knelt with her before the shrine as the curtain which veils the big Buddha was withdrawn. The face of one wooden figure in the temple had been worn, like that of many another in Japan, with the stroking that it had received from the ailing faithful.



I had the privilege of visiting the adjoining nunnery. As I was specially favoured by a general admission, I asked to be permitted to see some nuns' cells. They showed a Buddhist advance on Western ideas. The word "cells" was a misnomer for beautiful little flower-adorned rooms of a cheerful Japanese house. The fragile, wistful nun who was so kind as to speak with me had a consecrated expression. Her dress was white, and over it was brocade in a perfect combination of green and cream. Her head was shaven; her hands, which continually told her beads, were hidden. Religious services are conducted and sermons are delivered here and in other nunneries by the nuns themselves. I could not but be sorry for some girl children who had become nuns on their relatives' or guardians' decision. Adult newcomers are given a month in which, if they wish, they may repent them of their vows; but what of the children? The head of this nunnery was a member of the Imperial family. The institution, like the temple from which I had just come, stores thousands of wooden tablets to the memory of the dead. There are many little receptacles in which the hair, the teeth or the photographs of believers are preserved. I found that both at the nunnery and the temple a practical interest was being shown in the reformation of ex-criminals.



While in the highlands of Nagano I spent a night at Karuizawa, a hill resort at which tired missionaries and their families, not only from all parts of Japan but from China, gather in the summer months beyond the reach of the mosquito.[133] I stayed in the summer cottage of my travelling companion's brother-in-law. The family consisted of a reserved, cultivated man with a pretty wife of what I have heard a foreigner call "the maternal, domestic type." In their owlishness newcomers to the country are inclined to commiserate all Japanese housewives as the "slaves of their husbands." They would have been sadly wrong in such thoughts about this happy wife and mother. The eldest boy, a wholesome-looking lad, had just passed through the middle school on his way to the university, and spoke to me in simple English with that air of responsibility which the eldest son so soon acquires in Japan. His brothers and sisters enjoyed a happy relation with him and with each other. The whole family was merry, unselfish and, in the best sense of the word, educated. As we knelt on our zabuton we refreshed ourselves with tea and the fine view of the active volcano, Asama, and chatted on schools, holidays, books, the country and religion. After a while, a little to my surprise, the mother in her sweet voice gravely said that if I would not mind at all she would like very much to ask me two questions. The first was, "Are the people who go to the Christian church here all Christians?" and the second, "Are Christians as affectionate as Japanese?"

Karuizawa, which is full of ill-nourished, scabby-headed, "bubbly-nosed"[134] Japanese children, is an impoverished place on one of the ancient highways. We took ourselves along the road until we reached at a slightly higher altitude the decayed village of Oiwake. When the railway came near it finished the work of desolation which the cessation of the daimyos' progresses to Yedo (now Tokyo) had begun half a century ago. In the days of the Shogun three-quarters of the 300 houses were inns. Now two-thirds of the houses have become uninhabitable, or have been sold, taken down and rebuilt elsewhere. The Shinto shrines are neglected and some are unroofed, the Zen temple is impoverished, the school is comfortless and a thousand tombstones in the ancient burying ground among the trees are half hidden in moss and undergrowth.

The farm rents now charged in Oiwake had not been changed for thirty, forty or fifty years. In the old inn there was a Shinto shrine, about 12 ft. long by nearly 2 ft. deep, with latticed sliding doors. It contained a dusty collection of charms and memorials dating back for generations. Outside in the garden at the spring I found an irregular row of half a dozen rather dejected-looking little stone hokora about a foot high. Some had faded gohei thrust into them, but from the others the clipped paper strips had blown away. At the foot of the garden I discovered a somewhat elaborate wooden shrine in a dilapidated state. "Few country people," someone said to me, "know who is enshrined at such a place." It is generally thought that these shrines are dedicated to the fox. But the foxes are merely the messengers of the shrine, as is shown by the figures of crouching or squatting foxes at either side. A well-known professor lately arrived at the conviction that the god worshipped at such shrines is the god of agriculture. He went so far as to recommend the faculty of agriculture at Tokyo university to have a shrine erected within its walls to this divinity, but the suggestion was not adopted.

In the course of another chat with the old host of the inn he referred to the time, close on half a century ago, when 3,000 hungry peasants marched through the district demanding rice. They did no harm. "They were satisfied when they were given food; the peasants at that time were heavily oppressed." To-day the people round about look as if they were oppressed by the ghosts of old-time tyrants. But there is "something that doth linger" of self-respect. When we left on our way to Tokyo I gave the man who brought our bags a mile in a barrow to the station 40 sen. He returned 10 sen, saying that 30 sen was enough.

FOOTNOTES:

[133] Although, as has been seen, the rural problems under investigation in this book are inextricably bound up with religion, limits of space make it necessary to reserve for another volume the consideration of the large and complex question of missionary work.

[134] As to the "bubbly-nosed callant," to quote the description given of young Smollett, nasal unpleasantness seems to be popularly regarded as a sign of health. The constant sight of it is one of the minor discomforts of travel.



IN AND OUT OF THE SILK PREFECTURE[135]

CHAPTER XVI

PROBLEMS BEHIND THE PICTURESQUE

(SAITAMA, GUMMA, NAGANO AND YAMANASHI)

A foreigner who comes among us without prejudice may speak his mind freely.—GOLDSMITH

I went back to Nagano to visit the silk industrial regions. My route lay through the prefectures of Saitama and Gumma. I left Tokyo on the last day of June. Many farmers were threshing their barley. On the dry-land patches, where the grain crop had been harvested, soya bean, sown between the rows of grain long before harvest, was becoming bushier now that it was no longer overshadowed. Maize in most places was about a foot high, but where it had been sown early was already twice that height. The sweet potato had been planted out from its nursery bed for weeks. Here and there were small crops of tea which had been severely picked for its second crop. I noticed melons, cucumbers and squashes, and patches of the serviceable burdock. Many paddy farmers had water areas devoted to lotus, but the big floating leaves were not yet illumined by the mysterious beauty of the honey-scented flowers.

In order to imagine the scene on the rice flats, the reader must not think of the glistering paddy fields[136] as stretching in an unbroken monotonous series over the plain. Occasionally a rocky patch, outcropping from the paddy tract, made a little island of wood. Sometimes it was a sacred grove in which one caught a glimpse of a Shinto shrine or the head stones of the dead. Sometimes there was a little clump of cropped tree greenery which kept a farmhouse cool in summer and, at another time of the year, sheltered from the wind. Few householders were too poor or too busy to be without their little patch of flowers.

Before the train climbed out of the Kwanto plain temperature of not far below 100 deg. F. the planting of rice seemed to be almost an enviable occupation. The peasant had his great umbrella-shaped straw hat, sometimes an armful of green stuff tied on his back, and a delicious feeling of being up to the knees in water or mud on a hot day-one recalled the mud baths of the West-when the alternative was walking on a dusty road, digging on the sun-baked upland or perspiring in a house or the train.

With the rise in the level a few mulberries began to appear and gradually they occupied a large part of the holdings. Sometimes the mulberries were cultivated as shoots from a stump a little above ground level, and sometimes as a kind of small standard. As mulberry culture increased, the silk factories' whitewashed cocoon stores and the tall red and black iron chimneys of the factories themselves became more numerous. It is a pity that the silk factory is not always so innocent-looking inside as the pure white exterior of its stores might suggest. It is certain that the overworked girl operatives, sitting at their steaming basins, drawing the silk from the soaked cocoons, were glad to find the weather conditions such that they could have the sides of their reeling sheds removed.

At many of the railway stations there were stacks of large, round, flat bean cakes, for the farmer feeds his "cake" to his fields direct, not through the medium of cattle. Although a paddy receives less agreeable nutritive materials than bean cake, the extensive use of this cake must be comforting to a little school of rural reformers in the West. These ardent vegetarians have refused to listen to the allegation that vegetarianism was impossible because without meat-eating there would be no cattle and therefore no nitrogen for the fields.

It was not only the bean cakes at the stations which caught my attention but the extensive use of lime. Square miles of paddy field were white with powdered lime, scattered before the planting of the rice, an operation which in the higher altitudes would not be finished until well on in July.

A contented and prosperous countryside was no doubt the impression reflected to many passengers in the train that sunny day. But I knew how closely pressed the farmers had been by the rise in prices of many things that they had got into the way of needing. I had learnt, too, the part that superstition[137] as well as simple faith played in the lives of the country folk. When, however, I pondered the way in which the rural districts had been increasingly invaded by factories run under the commercial sanctions of our eighteen-forties, I asked myself whether there might not be superstitions of the economic world as well as of religious and social life.

I heard a Japanese speak of being well treated at inns in the old days for 20 sen a night. It should be remembered, however, that there is a system not only of tipping inn servants but of tipping the inn. The gift to the inn is called chadai and guests are expected to offer a sum which has some relation to their position and means and the food and treatment they expect. I have stayed at inns where I have paid as much chadai as bill. To pay 50 per cent. of the bill as chadai is common. The idea behind chadai is that the inn-keeper charges only his out-of-pocket expenses and that therefore the guest naturally desires to requite him. In acknowledgment of chadai the inn-keeper brings a gift to the guest at his departure—fans, pottery, towels, picture postcards, fruit or slabs of stiff acidulated fruit jelly (in one inn of grapes and in another of plums) laid between strips of maize leaf. The right time to give chadai is on entering the hotel, after the "welcome tea." In handing money to any person in Japan, except a porter or a kurumaya, the cash or notes are wrapped in paper.

On the journey from the city of Nagano to Matsumoto, wonderful views were unfolded of terraced rice fields, and, above these, of terraced fields of mulberry. How many hundred feet high the terraces rose as the train climbed the hills I do not know, but I have had no more vivid impression of the triumphs of agricultural hydraulic engineering. We were seven minutes in passing through one tunnel at a high elevation.

I spoke in the train with a man who had a dozen cho under grapes, 20 per cent. being European varieties and 80 per cent. American. He said that some of the people in his district were "very poor." Some farmers had made money in sericulture too quickly for it to do them good. He volunteered the opinion, in contrast with the statement made to me during our journey to Niigata, that the people of the plains were morally superior to the people of the mountains. The reason he gave was that "there are many recreations in the plains whereas in the mountains there is only one." In most of the mountain villages he knew three-quarters of the young men had relations with women, mostly with the girls of the village or the adjoining village. He would not make the same charge against more than ten per cent. of the young men of the plains, and "it is after all with teahouse girls." He thought that there were "too many temples and too many sects, so the priests are starved."

An itinerant agricultural instructor in sericulture who joined in our conversation was not much concerned by the plight of the priests. "The causes of goodness in our people," he said, "are family tradition and home training. Candidly, we believe our morals are not so bad on the whole. We are now putting most stress on economic development. How to maintain their families is the question that troubles people most. With that question unsolved it is preaching to a horse to preach morality. We can always find high ideals and good leaders when economic conditions improve. The development of morality is our final aim, but it is encouraged for six years at the primary school. The child learns that if it does bad things it will be laughed at and despised by the neighbours and scolded by its parents. We are busy with the betterment of economic conditions and questions about morality and religion puzzle us."

When I reached Matsumoto I met a rural dignitary who deplored the increasing tendency of city men to invest in rural property. "Sometimes when a peasant sells his land he sets up as a money-lender." I was told that nearly every village had a sericultural co-operative association, which bought manures, mulberry trees and silk-worm eggs, dried cocoons and hatched eggs for its members and spent money on the destruction of rats. Of recent years the county agricultural association had given 5 yen per tan to farmers who planted improved sorts of mulberry. About half the farmers in the county had manure houses. Some 800 farmers in the county kept a labourer.

I went to see a guncho and read on his wall: "Do not get angry. Work! Do not be in a hurry, yet do not be lazy." "These being my faults," he explained, "I specially wrote them out." There was also on his wall a kakemono reading: "At twenty I found that even a plain householder may influence the future of his province; at thirty that he may influence the future of his nation; at forty that he may influence the future of the whole world." Below this stirring sentiment was a portrait of the writer, a samurai scholar, from a photograph taken with a camera which he had made himself. He lived in the last period of the Shogunate and studied Dutch books. He was killed by an assassin at the instance, it was believed, of the Shogun.

One of the noteworthy things of Matsumoto was the agricultural association's market. Another piece of organisation in that part of the world was fourteen institutes where girls were instructed in the work of silk factory hands. The teachers' salaries were paid by the factories. So were also the expenses of the silk experts of the local authorities. On the day I left the city the daily paper contained an announcement of lectures on hygiene to women on three successive days, "the chief of police to be present." This paper was demanding the exemption of students from the bicycle tax, the rate of which varies in different prefectures.

A young man was brought to see me who was specialising in musk melons. He said that the Japanese are gradually getting out of their partiality for unripe fruit.

On our way to the Suwas we saw many wretched dwellings. The feature of the landscape was the silk factories' tall iron chimneys, ordinarily black though sometimes red, white or blue.

It is not commonly understood that Japanese lads by the time they "graduate" from the middle school into the higher school have had some elementary military training. A higher-school youth knows how to handle a rifle and has fired twice at a target. At Kami Suwa the problem of how middle-class boys should procure economical lodging while attending their classes had been solved by self-help. An ex-scholar of twenty had managed to borrow 4,000 yen and had proceeded to build on a hillside a dormitory accommodating thirty-six boarders. Lads did the work of levelling the ground and digging the well. The frugal lines on which the lodging-house was conducted by the lads themselves may be judged from the fact that 5 yen a month covered everything. Breakfast consisted of rice, miso soup and pickles. Cooking and the emptying of the benjo[138] were done by the lads in turn. A kitchen garden was run by common effort. Among the many notices on the walls was one giving the names of the residents who showed up at 5 o'clock in the morning for a cold bath and fencing. I also saw the following instruction written by the founder of the house, which is read aloud every morning by each resident in turn:

Be independent and pure and strive to make your characters more beautiful. Expand your thought. Help each other to accomplish your ambitions. Be active and steady and do not lose your self-control. Be faithful to friends and righteous and polite. Be silent and keep order. Do not be luxurious (sic). Keep everything clean. Pay attention to sanitation. Do not neglect physical exercises. Be diligent and develop your intelligence.

The borrower of the 4,000 yen with which the institution was built managed to pay it back within seven years with interest, out of the subscriptions of residents and ex-residents.

An agricultural authority whom I met spoke of "farming families living from hand to mouth and their land slipping into the possession of landlords"; also of a fifth of the peasants in the prefecture being tenants. A young novelist who had been wandering about the Suwa district had been impressed by the grim realities of life in poor farmers' homes and cited facts on which he based a low view of rural morality.

Suwa Lake lies more than 3,500 ft. above sea level and in winter is covered with skaters. The country round about is remarkable agriculturally for the fact that many farmers are able to lead into their paddies not only warm water from the hot springs but water from ammonia springs, so economising considerably in their expenditure on manure. A simple windmill for lifting the fertilising water is sold for only 4 yen.

We went to Kofu, the capital of Yamanashi prefecture, through many mountain tunnels and ravines. Entrancing is the just word for this region in the vicinity of the Alps. But joy in the beauty through which we passed is tinged for the student of rural life by thoughts of the highlander's difficulties in getting a living in spots where quiet streams may become in a few hours ungovernable torrents. I remember glimpses of grapes and persimmons, of parties of middle-school boys tramping out their holiday—every inn reduces its terms for them—and of half a dozen peasant girls bathing in a shaded stream. But there were less pleasing scenes: hills deforested and paddies wrecked by a waste of stones and gravel flung over them in time of flood. Here and there the indomitable farmers, counting on the good behaviour of the river for a season or two, were endeavouring, with enormous labour, to resume possession of what had been their own. The spectacle illustrated at once their spirit and their industry and their need of land. At night we slept at Kofu at "the inn of greeting peaks." In the morning a Governor with imagination told me of the prefecture's gallant enterprises in afforestation and river embanking at expenditures which were almost crippling.

FOOTNOTES:

[135] The three leading silk prefectures are in order: Nagano, Fukushima and Gumma.

[136] At this time of the year, when the rice plants are small, the water in the paddies is still conspicuous.

[137] An old Japan hand once counselled me that "the thing to find out in sociological enquiries is not people's religions but their superstitions."

[138] See Appendix IV.



CHAPTER XVII

THE BIRTH, BRIDAL AND DEATH OF THE SILK-WORM

(NAGANO)

The mulberry leaf knoweth not that it shall be silk.—Arab proverb

One acre in every dozen in Japan produces mulberry leaves for feeding the silk-worms which two million farming families—more than a third of the farming families of the country—painstakingly rear.

But the mulberry is not the only mark of a sericultural district. Its mark may be seen in the tall chimneys of the factories and in the structure of the farmers' houses. Breeders of silk-worms are often well enough off to have tiled instead of thatched roofs; they have frequently two storeys to their dwellings; and they have almost always a roof ventilator so that the vitiated air from the hibachi-heated silk-worm chambers may be carried off. Yet another sign of sericulture being a part of the agricultural activities of a district is its prosperity. Silk-worms produce the most valuable of all Japanese exports. Japan sends abroad more raw silk than any other country.[139]

It is in the middle of the country that sericulture chiefly nourishes. The smallest output of raw silk is from the most northerly prefecture and from the prefecture in the extreme south-west of the mainland. But human aptitude plays its part as well as climate. The Japanese hand is a wonderful piece of mechanism—look at the hands of the next Japanese you meet—and in sericulture its delicate touch is used to the utmost advantage.

The gains of sericulture are not made without corresponding sacrifices. Silk-worm raising is infinitely laborious. The constant picking of leaves, the bringing of them home and the chopping and supplying of these leaves to the smallest of all live stock and the maintenance of a proper temperature in the rearing-chamber day and night mean unending work. The silk-worms may not be fed less than four or five times in the day; in their early life they are fed seven or eight times. This is the feeding system for spring caterpillars. Summer and autumn breeds must have two or three more meals. The men and women who attend to them, particularly the women, are worn out by the end of the season. "The women have only three hours' rest in the twenty-four hours," I remember someone saying. "They never loose their obi."

When the caterpillars emerge from the tiny, pin-head-like eggs of the silk-worm moth they are minute creatures. Therefore the mulberry leaves are chopped very fine indeed. They are chopped less and less fine as the silk-worms grow, until finally whole leaves and leaves adhering to the shoots are given. Some rearers are skilful enough to supply from the very beginning leaves or leaves still on the shoots. The caterpillars live in bamboo trays or "beds" on racks. In the house of one farmer I found caterpillars about three-quarters of an inch long occupying fifteen trays. When the silk-worms grew larger they would occupy two hundred trays.

The eggs, when not produced on the farm, are bought adhering to cards about a foot square. There are usually marked on these cards twenty-eight circles about 2 ins. in diameter. Each circle is covered with eggs. The eggs come to be arranged in these convenient circles because, as will be explained later on, the moths have been induced to lay within bottomless round tins placed on the circles on the cards. The eggs are sticky when laid and therefore adhere. In a year 35,000,000 cards, containing about a billion eggs, are produced on some 10,000 egg-raising farms.

The eggs—they are called "seed"—are hatched in the spring (end of April—as soon as the first leaves of the mulberry are available—to the middle of May), summer (June and July) and autumn (August and October). It takes from three to seven days—according to temperature—for the "seed" to hatch, and from twenty to thirty-two days—according to temperature—for the silk-worms to reach maturity. Half the hatching is done in spring. In one farmer's house I visited in the spring season I found that he had hatched fifty cards of "seed." From the birth of the caterpillars to the formation of cocoons the casualties must be reckoned at ten per cent. daily. Not more than eighty-five per cent. of the cocoons which are produced are of good quality. The remainder are misshapen or contain dead chrysalises. As there are more than a thousand breeds of silk-worm, all cocoons are not of the same shape and colour. Some are oval; some are shaped like a monkey nut. Most are white but some are yellow and others yellow tinted.

In the whole world of stock raising there is nothing more remarkable than the birth of silk-worm moths. The cocoons on the racks in the farmer's loft are covered by sheets of newspaper in which a number of round holes about three-quarters of an inch in diameter have been cut. When the moths emerge from their cocoons they seek these openings towards the light and creep through to the upper side of the newspaper. For newly born things they come up through these openings with astonishing ardour. In body and wings the moths are flour white. White garments are suitable for the babe, the bride and the dead, and the moth perfected in the cocoon is arrayed not only for its birth but for bridal and death, which come upon it in swift succession. The male as well as the female is in white and is distinguishable by being somewhat smaller in size. On the newspaper the few males who have not found partners are executing wild dances, their wings whirring the while at a mad pace. When from time to time they cease dancing they haunt the holes in the paper through which the newly born moths emerge. When a female appears a male instantly rushes towards her, or rather the two creatures rush towards one another, and they are at once locked in a fast embrace. Immediately their wings cease to flutter, the only commotion on the newspaper being made by the unmated males. In a hatching-room these males on the stacks of trays are so numerous that the place is filled with the sound of the whirring of their wings. The down flies from their wings to such an extent that one continually sneezes. The spectacle of the stacks of trays covered by these ecstatic moths is remarkable, but still more remarkable is the thrilling sense of the power of the life-force in a supposedly low form of consciousness.

The wonder of the scene is missed, no doubt, by most of those who are habituated to it. From time to time weary, stolid-looking girls or old women lift down the trays and run their hands over them in order to pick up superfluous male moths. Sometimes the male moths are walking about the newspaper, sometimes they are torn callously from the embrace of their mates. The fate of the male moths is to be flung into a basket where they stay until the next day, when perhaps some of them may be mated again. The novice is impressed not only by the ruthlessness of this treatment but by the way in which the whole loft is littered by male moths which have fallen or have been flung on the floor and are being trampled on.

The female moths, when their partners have been removed, are taken downstairs in newspapers in order to be put into the little tin receptacles where the eggs are to be laid. On a tray there are spread out a number of egg cards with, as before mentioned, twenty-eight printed circles on each of them. On these circles are placed the twenty-eight half-inch-high bottomless enclosures of tin. Some one takes up a handful of moths and scatters them over the tins. Some of the moths fall neatly into a tin apiece. Others are helped into the little enclosures in which, to do them credit, they are only too willing to take up their quarters. The curious thing is the way in which each moth settles down within her ring. Indeed from the moment of her emergence from the cocoon until now she has never used her wings to fly. Nor did the male moth seem to wish to fly. The sexes concentrate their whole attention on mating. After that the female thinks of nothing but laying eggs. Almost immediately after she is placed within her little tin she begins to deposit eggs, and within a few hours the circle of the card is covered.

Food is given neither to the females nor to the males. Those which are not kept in reserve for possible use on the second day are flung out of doors. When the female moth has deposited her eggs she also is destroyed.[140] The shoji of the breeding and egg-laying rooms permit only of a diffused light. The discarded moths are cast out into the brilliant sunshine where they are eaten by poultry or are left to die and serve as manure.

Sericulture is always a risky business. There is first the risk of a fall in prices. Just before I reached Japan prices were so low that many people despaired of being able to continue the business, and shortly after I left there was a crisis in the silk trade in which numbers of silk factories failed. At the time I was last in a silk-worm farmer's house cocoons were worth from 5 to 6 yen per kwan of 8-1/4 lbs. From 8 to 10 kwan of cocoons could be expected from a single egg card. Eggs were considered to be at a high price when they were more than 2 yen per card. The risks of the farmer are increased when he launches out and buys mulberry leaves to supplement those produced on his own land. Sometimes the price of leaves is so high that farmers throw away some of their silk-worms. The risks run by the man who grows mulberries beyond his own leaf requirements on the chance of selling are also considerable.

Beyond the risk of falling prices or of a short mulberry crop there is in sericulture the risk of disease. One advantage of the system in which the eggs are laid in circles on the cards instead of all over them is that if any disease should be detected the affected areas can be easily cut out with a knife and destroyed. Disease is so serious a matter that silk-worm breeding, as contrasted with silk-worm raising, is restricted to those who have obtained licences. The silk-worm breeder is not only licensed. His silkworms, cocoons and mother moths are all in turn officially examined. Breeding "seeds" were laid one year by about 33,000,000 odd moths; common "seeds" by about 948,000,000.

Of recent years enormous progress has been made in combating disease. I have spoken of how a silk-worm district may be recognised by the structure of the farmhouses and the prosperity of the farmers, but another striking sign of sericulture is the trays and mats lying in the sun in front of farmers' dwellings or on the hot stones of the river banks in order to get thoroughly purified from germs. It is illustrative of the progress that has been made under scientific influence, that whereas twenty years ago a sericulturist would reckon on losing his silk-worm harvest completely once in five years, such a loss is now rare. Scientific instructors have their difficulties in Japan as in the rural districts of other countries, but the people respect authority, and they are accustomed to accept instruction given in the form of directions. Also the Japanese have an unending interest in the new thing. Further, there is a continual desire to excel for the national advantage and in emulation of the foreigner. The advance in scientific knowledge in the rural districts is remarkable, because it is in such contrast with the primitive lives of the country people. Picture the surprise of British or American farmers were they brought face to face with thermometers, electric light and a working knowledge of bacteriology in the houses of peasants in breech clouts.

It was while I was trying to learn something of the sericultural industry that I had the opportunity of visiting a noteworthy institution. It is noteworthy, among other reasons, because I seldom met a foreigner in Japan who knew of its existence. It is the great Ueda Sericultural College in the prefecture of Nagano. I was struck not only by its extent but by its systematised efficiency. On a level with the director's eyes was a motto in large lettering, "Be diligent. Develop your virtues."



The Institute devotes itself to mulberries, silk-worms and silk manufacture. There are 200 students, as many as it will hold. The young men become teachers of sericulture, advisers in mills and experts of co-operative sericultural societies. The institution, in addition to the fees it receives and its earnings from its own products, some 33,000 yen in all, has an annual Government subsidy of about 114,000 yen. There are other sericultural colleges doing similar work in Tokyo and Kyoto, and there is also in the capital the Imperial Sericultural Experiment Station (with a staff of 87), where I saw all sorts of research work in progress. This experiment station has half a dozen branches scattered up and down the silk districts.



At Ueda I went through corridors and rooms, sterilised thrice a year, to visit professors engaged in a variety of enquiries. One professor had turned into a kind of beef tea the pupae thrown away when the cocoons are unwound; another had made from the residual oil two or three kinds of soap. The usual thing at a silk factory is for the pupae, which are exposed to view when the silk is unrolled from the scalded cocoons, to lie about in horrid heaps until they are sold as manure or carp food. The professor declared that his product was equal to a third of the total weight of the pupae utilised, and was sure that it could be sold at a fifteenth of the price of Western beef essences. The Director of the College had tried the product with his breakfast for a fortnight and avowed that during the experiment he was never so perky.

It was a pleasure to look into the well-kept dormitories of the students, where there was evidence, in books, pictures and athletic material, of a strenuous life. The young men are made fit not only by judo, fencing, archery, tennis and general athletics, but by being sent up the mountains on Sundays. The men are kept so hard that at the open fencing contest twice a year the visitors are usually beaten. The director quoted to me Roosevelt's "Sweat and be saved."

From men we went to machines and mulberries. I inspected all sorts of hot chambers for killing cocoons. I saw, in rooms draped in black velvet like the pictured scenes at a beheading, silk testing for lustre and colour. I gazed with respect on many kinds of winding and weaving machinery. Then, going out into the experiment fields, I strode through more varieties of mulberry than I had imagined to exist. There are supposed to be 500 sorts in the country but many are no doubt duplicates. The varieties differ so much in shape and texture of leaf that the novice would not take some of them for mulberries.

It was held that it would not be difficult to increase the mulberry area in Japan by another quarter of a million acres. The yield of leaves might be raised by 3,300 lbs. per acre if the right sort of bushes were always grown and the right sort of treatment were given to them and to the soil. As to the additional labour needed for an extended sericulture, the annual increase in the population of Japan would provide it. I was told that "the technics of sericulture are sure to improve." It would be easy to raise the yield 2 kwan per egg card for the whole country. Within a seven-year period the production of cocoons per egg card had become 20 per cent. better. The talk was of doubling the present yield of cocoons. The "proper encouragement" needed for doubling the production of cocoons was more technical instruction and more co-operative societies. There had been a continual rise in the world's demand for silk and there was no need to fear "artificial silk." "People who buy it often come to appreciate natural silk." And I read in an official publication that "the climate of Japan is suitable for the cultivation of mulberry trees from south-west Formosa to Hokkaido in the north."

FOOTNOTES:

[139] For statistics of sericulture, see Appendix XXXIX.

[140] She is examined microscopically in order to make sure that she was not affected by infectious disease.



CHAPTER XVIII

"GIRL COLLECTORS" AND FACTORIES

(NAGANO AND YAMANASHI)

At your return show the truth.—FROISSART

I visited factories in more than one prefecture. At the first factory—it employed about 1,000 girls and 200 men—work began at 4.30 a.m., breakfast was at 5 and the next meal at 10.30. The stoppages for eating were for a few minutes only. A cake was handed to each girl at her machine at 3. Suppertime came after work was finished at 7.[141] No money was paid the first year. The second year the wages might be 3 or 4 yen a month. The statement was made that at the end of her five years' term a girl might have 300 yen, but that this sum was not within the reach of all.[142] The girls were driven at top speed by a flag system in which one bay competed with another and was paid according to its earnings. Owing to the heat the flushed girls probably looked better in health than they really were. They were fat in the face, but this could not be regarded as an indication of their general well-being. It was admitted that some girls left through illness. Employees returned to their homes for January and February, when the factory was closed down; there was also three days' holiday in June. In the dormitory I noticed that each girl had the space of one mat only (6 ft. by 3 ft.). Twenty-two girls slept in each dormitory. The men connected with this factory were low-looking and shifty-eyed.