G. "As to uncomeliness there are several Japanese types. The refined type is surely attractive. If many Japanese noses seem to be too short, foreigners' noses seem to us to be too long. The results of intermarriage between Western people and Japanese who are of equal social and educational status and of good physique should be closely watched."

H. "In our schools an hour or two a week is reserved for culture, but the true spirit of culture is lacking. The Imperial Rescript on education is very good moral doctrine, but the real life's aim of many of us is to be well off, to have an automobile, to become a Baron or to extend the Empire. We do not ask ourselves, 'For what reason?'"

I. "I conduct certain classes which the clerks of my bank must attend. The teaching I give is based on Confucian, Christian and Buddhist principles. I try to make the young men more manful. I constantly urge upon them that 'you must be a man before you can be a clerk.'"

J. (a septuagenarian ex-daimyo): "Confucianism is the basis of my life, but twice a month I serve at my Shinto shrine and I conduct a Buddhist service in my house morning and evening. It is necessary to make the profession that Buddha saves us. I do not believe in paradise. It is paradise if when I die I have a peaceful mind due to a feeling that I have done my duty in life and that my sons are not bad men. Unless I am peaceful on my deathbed I cannot perish but must struggle on. Therefore my sons must be good. I myself strove to be filial and I have always said to my sons, 'Fathers may not be fathers but sons must be sons.'"

K. (the preceding speaker's son expressing his opinion on another occasion): "My father as a Confucian is kind to people negatively. We want to be kind positively because it is right to be kind. As to filial obedience, even fathers may err; we are righteous if we are right. My father is a Shintoist because it is our national custom. He wants to respect his ancestors in a wide sense and he desires that Japan, his family and his crops may be protected."

L. "I wish foreigners had a juster idea about 'idols'. There is a difference between frequenters of the temples believing the figures to be holy and believing them to be gods. Every morning my mother serves before her shrine of Buddha but she does not believe our Buddha to be God. She would not soil or irreverently handle our Buddha, but it is only holy as a symbol, as an image of a holy being. My mother has said to me, 'Buddha is our father. He looks after us always; I cannot but thank him. If there be after life Buddha will lead me to Paradise. There is no reason to beg a favour.' My mother is composed and peaceful. All through her life she has met calamities and troubles serenely. I admire her very much. She is a good example of how Buddha's influence makes one peaceful and spiritual. But such religious experience may not be grasped from the outside by foreigners."

M. "When I am in a temple or at a shrine I realise its value in concentrating attention. The daily domestic service before the shrine in the house also ensures some religious life daily. Many of my countrymen no doubt regard religion as superstition; they know little of spiritual life. For some of them patriotism or humanitarian sentiments or eagerness to seek after scientific truth takes the place of religion. Most men think that they can never comprehend the cosmos and say, 'We may believe only what we can prove. Let us follow not after preachers but after truth.' I believe with your Western philosophers who say that the cosmos is not perfect but that it is moving towards perfection. Many think that this War shows that the cosmos is not perfect. Spiritual life is living according to one's purest consciousness. But what is of first importance is our actions. It is not enough merely to strive after moral development. One must strive after economic and social development. Some religious people think only of the spiritual life and have no sympathy with economics. The labours of such religious people must be of small value."

In later Chapters the views of other thoughtful Japanese are noted down as they were communicated to me.

FOOTNOTES:

[169] "The strength that is given at such times arises not from ignoring loss or persuading oneself that the thing is not that is, but from the resolute setting of the face to the East and the taking of one step forwards. Anything that detaches one, that makes one turn from the past and look simply at what one has to do, brings with it new strength and new intensity of interest."—HALDANE.

[170] Teacher, instructor, master, or a polite way of saying "You"—the usual title by which I was addressed.

[171] Constance Naden.

[172] "The Phaedo was bought for us by the death of Socrates."—QUILLER COUCH.



THE ISLAND OF SHIKOKU

CHAPTER XXIV

LANDLORDS, PRIESTS AND "BASHA" (TOKUSHIMA, KOCHI AND KAGAWA)

The most capital article, the character of the inhabitants.—TYTLER

In travelling southwards I noticed between Kyoto and Osaka that farms were being irrigated from wells in the primitive way by means of the weighted swinging pole and bucket. Along the coast to the south, indeed as far as Hiroshima, there have been great gains from the sea, and in the neighbourhood of Kobe there are three parallel roads which mark successive recoveries of land. Before crossing the Inland Sea at Okayama to Shikoku (area about 1,000 square miles) I visited one of the new settlements on recovered land. The labour available from a family was reckoned as equal to that of two men, and as much as 4 to 5 cho was allotted to each house. It will be seen how much larger is this area—5 cho is 12-1/2 acres—than the average Japanese farming family must be content with, a little less than 3 acres. The company supplied houses, seeds, manures, etc., and after all expenses were met the workers were allowed 25 per cent, of the net income of their summer crop and 35 per cent, of the net income of their second crop. The cultivation was directed by the company. There had been 300 applications for the last twenty houses built. An experiment station was maintained, and a campaign against a rice borer had been of benefit to the amount of about 10,000 yen. I found the company's winnowing machine discharging its chaff into the furnace of the rice-drying apparatus.

One of the experts of the company came with me for some distance in the train in order to discuss some of his problems. He thought agricultural work could be done in less back-breaking ways. He wanted a small threshing machine which would be suitable not only for threshing small quantities of rice or corn but for easy conveyance along the narrow and easily damaged paths between the rice fields. If he had such a machine he would like to improve it so that it would lay out the threshed straw evenly, so making the straw more valuable for the many uses to which it is put. He wished to see a machine invented for planting out rice seedlings and another contrivance devised for drying wheat. The company's rice-drying machine handled 200 koku of rice a day, but there were difficulties in drying wheat. (In many places I noticed the farmers drying their corn by the primitive method of singeing it and thus spoiling it.)[173]

On the Inland Sea, aboard the smart little steamer of the Government Railways, my companion spoke of the extent to which sea-faring men, a conservative class, had abandoned the use of the single square sail which one sees in Japanese prints; the little vessels had been re-rigged in Western fashion. But many superstitions had survived the abolished square sails. The mother of my fellow-traveller once told him that, when she crossed the Inland Sea in an old-style ship and a storm arose, the shipmaster earnestly addressed the passengers in these words, "Somebody here must be unclean; if so, please tell me openly." The title of the book my companion was reading was The History of the Southern Savage. Who was the "Southern Savage"? The word is namban, the name given to the early Portuguese and Spanish voyagers to Japan. (The Dutch were called komojin, red-haired men.) In looking through the official railway guide on the boat I saw that there was a list of specially favourable places for viewing the moon. An M.P. passenger told me that the average cost of getting returned to the Diet was 10,000 yen[174].

The difficulties of communication in Shikoku are so considerable that I was compelled to leave the two prefectures of Tokushima and Kochi unvisited. Kochi is without a yard of railway line. In the prefecture of Ehime most of my journey had to be made by kuruma. Communication between the four prefectures of Shikoku—the one in which I landed was Kagawa—is largely conducted by coasting steamers and sailing craft. An interesting thing in Kochi is the area by the sea in which two crops of rice are grown in the year. Tokushima holds a leading place in the production of indigo. At one place in the hills the adventurous have the satisfaction of crossing a river by means of suspension bridges made of vine branches.

The streets of Takamatsu, the capital of Kagawa, are many of them so narrow that the shopkeepers on either side have joint sun screens which they draw right across the thoroughfares. Here I found the carts hauled by a smallish breed of cow. The placid animals are handier in a narrow place and less expensive than horses. They are shod, like their drivers, in waraji. In Shikoku the cow or ox is generally used in the paddies instead of the horse. "It is slower but strong and can plough deep," one agricultural expert said. "It eats cheaper food than the horse, which moves too fast in a small paddy. Cows and oxen are probably not working for more than seventy-five or eighty days in the year."

At Takamatsu I had the opportunity of visiting a daimyo's castle. I was impressed by its strength not only because of the wide moats but because of the series of earthen fortifications faced with cyclopean stonework through which an invading force must wind its way. There was within the walls a surprisingly large drilling ground for troops and also an extensive drug garden. The present owner of the castle proposed to build here a library and a museum for the town. I was glad of the opportunity to ascend one of the high pagoda-like towers so familiar in Japanese paintings. I was disillusioned. Instead of finding myself in beautiful rooms for the enjoyment of marvellous views and sea breezes I had to clamber over the roughest cob-webbed timbers. One storey was connected with another by a stair of rude planking. Such pagodas were built only for their military value as lookouts and for their delightful appearance from the outside.

The town now enjoyed as a park of more than ten acres the grounds of a subsidiary residence of the daimyo. The magnificent trees, with lakes, rivulets and hills fashioned with infinite art,[175] and the background of natural hill and woodland, made in all a possession which exhibited the delectable possibilities of Japanese gardening. An occasional electric light amid the trees gave an effect in the evening in which Japanese delight. Some of the old carp which dashed up to the bridges when they heard our footsteps seemed to be not far short of 3 ft. long.

Except for a small patch of sugar cane in Shidzuoka—it is grown practically on the sea beach where it is visible from the express—the visitor to Japan may never see sugar cane until Shikoku is reached. The value of the crop in the whole island is about 800,000 yen. The tall cane is conspicuous alongside the more diminutive rice. In this prefecture an experiment is being made in growing olives.

Kagawa is remarkable in having had until lately 30,000 pond reservoirs for the irrigation of rice fields. Under the new system of rice-field adjustment many of the ponds are joined together. Because in Shikoku flat tracts of land or tracts that can be made flat are limited in number the farmers have to be content with small pieces of land. The average area of farm in Kagawa outside the mountainous region is less than two acres. When the farms are near the sea, as they commonly are, the agriculturists may also be fishermen.

The number of place names ending in ji (temple) proclaims the former flourishing condition of Buddhism. Shikoku is a great resort of white-clothed pilgrims. Sometimes it is a solitary man whom one sees on the road, sometimes a company of men, occasionally a family. Not seldom the pilgrim or his companion is manifestly suffering from some affection which the pilgrimage is to cure. In the old days it was not unusual to send the victim of "the shameful disease" or of an incurable ailment on a pilgrimage from shrine to shrine or temple to temple. He was not expected to return. In Shikoku there are eighty-eight temples to Buddha and the founder of the Shingon sect, and it is estimated that it would mean a 760 miles' journey to visit them all.

We went off our route at one point where my companion wished to visit a gorgeous shrine. A guidebook said that people flocked there "by the million," but what I was told was that last year's attendance was 80,000. The street leading to the approach to the shrine was in a series of steps. On either side were the usual shops with piled-up mementoes in great variety and of no little ingenuity, and also, on spikes, little stacks of rin—the old copper coin with a square hole through the middle—into which the economical devotee takes care to exchange a few sen. We climbed to the shrine when twilight was coming on. At the point where the series of street steps ended there began a new series of about a thousand steps belonging to the shrine. A thousand granite steps may be tiring after a hot day's travel in a kuruma. All the way up to the shrine there were granite pillars almost brand new, first short ones, then taller, then taller still, and after these a few which topped the tallest. They were conspicuously inscribed with the names of donors to the shrine. A small pillar was priced at 10 yen. What the big, bigger and biggest cost I do not know. I turned from the pillars to the stone lanterns. "They burn cedar wood, I believe," said my companion. But soon afterwards I saw a man working at them with a length of electric-light wire.

The great shrine was impressive in the twilight. There was a platform near, and from it we looked down from the tree-covered heights through the growing darkness. Where the lights of the town twinkled there was a subsidiary shrine. A bare-headed, kimono-clad sailor stepped forward near us and bowed his head to some semblance of deity down there. Various fishermen had brought the anchors of their ships and the oars of their boats to show forth their thankfulness for safety at sea. In the murkiness I was just able to pick out the outlines of a bronze horse which stands at the shrine, "as a sort of scape-goat," my companion explained. "It is probably Buddhist," he said; "but you can never be sure; these priests embellish the history of their temples so."

It was at the inn in the evening that someone told me that in the town which is dependent on the shrine there were "a hundred prostitutes, thirty geisha and some waitresses." Late at night I had a visit from a man in a position of great responsibility in the prefecture. He was at a loss to know what could be done for morality. "Religion is not powerful," he said, "the schools do not reach grown-up people, the young men's societies are weak, many sects and new moralities are attacking our people, and there are many cheap books of a low class."

Next day I laid this view before a group of landlords. They did not reply for a little and my skilful interpreter said, "they are thinking deeply." At length one of them delivered himself to this effect: "Landowners hereabouts are mostly of a base sort. They always consider things from a material and personal point of view. But if they are attacked and made to act more for the public good it may have an effect on rural conditions which are now low."

I enquired about the new sects of Buddhism and Shintoism, for there had been pointed out to me in some villages "houses of new religions." "New religions in many varieties are coming into the villages," I was told, "and extravagant though they may be are influencing people. The adherents seem to be moral and modest, and they pay their taxes promptly. There is a so-called Shinto sect which was started twenty years ago by an ignorant woman. It has believers in every part of Japan. It is rather communistic."[176] None of the landlords who talked with me believed in the possibility of a "revival of Buddhism." One of them noted that "people educated in the early part of Meiji are most materialistic. It is a sorrowful circumstance that the officials ask only materialistic questions of the villagers."

I asked one of the landlords about his tenants. He said that his "largest tenant" had no more than 1.3 tan of paddy. It was explained that "tenants are obedient to the landowner in this prefecture." Under the system of official rewards which exists in Japan, 1,086 persons in the prefecture had been "rewarded" by a kind of certificate of merit and nine with money—to the total value of 26 yen.

When I drew attention to the fact that the manufacture of sake and soy seemed to be frequently in the hands of landowners it was explained to me that formerly this was their industry exclusively. Even now "whereas an ordinary shop-keeper is required by etiquette to say 'Thank you' to his customer, a purchaser of sake or soy says 'Thank you' to the shop-keeper."

The flower arrangement in my room in the inn consisted of an effective combination of hagi (Lespedeza bicolor, a leguminous plant which is grown for cattle and has been a favourite subject of Japanese poetry), a cabbage, a rose, a begonia and leaf and a fir branch.

A landowner I chatted with in the train showed me that it was a serious matter to receive the distinction of growing the millet for use at the Coronation. One of his friends who was growing 5 sh=o, the actual value of which might be 50 or 60 sen, was spending on it first and last about 3,000 yen.

I enquired about the diversions of landowners. It is easy, of course, to have an inaccurate impression of the extent of their leisure. Only about 1 per cent, have more than 25 acres.[177] Therefore most of these men are either farmers themselves or must spend a great deal of time looking after their tenants. Still, some landowners are able to take things rather easily. The landowners I interrogated marvelled at the open-air habits of English landed proprietors. They were greatly surprised when I told them of a countess who is a grandmother but thinks nothing of a canter before breakfast. The mark of being well off was often to stay indoors or at any rate within garden walls, which necessarily enclose a very small area. (Hence the fact that one object of Japanese gardening is to suggest a much larger space than exists.) A good deal of time is spent "in appreciating fine arts." Ceremonial tea drinking still claims no small amount of attention. (In many gardens and in the grounds of hotels of any pretensions one comes on the ostentatiously humble chamber for Cha-no-yu.) No doubt there is among many landowners a considerable amount of drinking of something stronger than tea, and not a few men sacrifice freely to Venus. Perhaps the greatest claimant of all on the time of those who have time to spare is the game of go, which is said to be more difficult than chess. One cannot but remark the comparatively pale faces of many landowners.

As we went along by the coast it was pointed out to me that it was from this neighbourhood that some of the most indomitable of the old-time pirates set sail on their expeditions to ravage the Chinese coast. They visited that coast all the way from Vladivostock, now Russian (and like to be Japanese), to Saigon, now French. There are many Chinese books discussing effectual methods of repelling the pirates. In an official Japanese work I once noticed, in the enumeration of Japanese rights in Taiwan (Formosa), the naive claim that long ago it was visited by Japanese pirates! The Japanese fisherman is still an intrepid person, and in villages which have an admixture of fishing folk the seafarers, from their habit of following old customs and taking their own way generally, are the constant subject of rural reformers' laments.

I spent some time in a typical inland village. The very last available yard of land was utilised. The cottages stood on plots buttressed by stone, and only the well-to-do had a yard or garden; paddy came right up to the foundations. Now that the rice was high no division showed between the different paddy holdings. I noticed here that the round, carefully concreted manure tank which each farmer possessed had a reinforced concrete hood. I asked a landowner who was in a comfortable position what societies there were in his village. He mentioned a society "to console old people and reward virtue." Then there was the society of householders, such as is mentioned in Confucius, which met in the spring and autumn, and ate and drank and discussed local topics "with open heart." There were sometimes quarrels due to sake. Indeed, some villagers seemed to save up their differences until the householders' meeting at its sake stage. At householders' meetings where there was no sake peace appeared to prevail. The householders' meeting was a kind of informal village assembly. That assembly itself ordinarily met twice a year. There were in the village, in addition to the householders' organisation, the usual reservists' association, the young men's society and agricultural association. As to ko, from philanthropic motives my informant was a member of no fewer than ten.

My host told me that he spent a good deal of time in playing go, but in the shooting season (October 15 to April 15) he made trips to the hills and shot pheasants, hares, pigeons and deer. In the garden of his house two gardeners were stretched along the branches of a pine tree, nimbly and industriously picking out the shoots in order to get that bare appearance which has no doubt puzzled many a Western student of Japanese tree pictures. Each man's ladder—two lengths of bamboo with rungs tied on with string—was carefully leant against a pole laid from the ground through the branches. Many of the well-cared-for trees in the gardens and public places of Japan pass the winter in neat wrappings of straw.

I visited a farm-house and found the farmer making baskets. When I was examining the winnowing machine my companion reminded me smilingly that when he was a boy he was warned never to turn the wheel of the winnowing machine when the contrivance had no grain in it or a demon might come out. There was a properly protected tank of liquid manure and a well-roofed manure house. The family bath in an open shed was of a sort I had not seen before, a kind of copper with a step up to it. Straw rope about three-quarters of an inch in diameter was being made by the farmer's son, a day's work being 40 yds. At another farm a woman showed me the working of a rough loom with which she could in a day make a score of mats worth in all 60 sen. From the farmer's house I went to the room of the young men's association and looked over its library. I was impressed by the high level of civilisation which this village seemed to exhibit in essentials.

When we continued our journey we saw two portable water wheels by means of which water was being lifted into a paddy. Each wheel was worked by a man who continually ascended the floats. The two men were able to leave their wheels in turn for a rest, for a third man was stretched on the ground in readiness for his spell. It seems that a man can keep on the water tread-mill for an hour. The two wheels together were lifting an amazing amount of water at a great rate. When the pumping is finished one of these light water wheels is easily carried home on a man's shoulders.

Farther on I saw in a dry river bed a man sieving gravel in an ingenious way. The trouble in sieving gravel is that if the sieve be filled to its capacity the shaking soon becomes tiring. This man had a square sieve which when lying on the ground was attached at one side by two ropes to a firmly fixed tripod of poles. When the sieve was filled the labourer lifted it far enough away from the tripod for it to be swinging on one side. Therefore when he shook the sieve he sustained a portion only of its weight.

As we rode along I was told that the largest taxpayer in the county "does not live in idleness but does many good works." The next largest taxpayer "labours every day in the field." When I enquired as to the recreations of moneyed men I was told "travelling, go and poem writing."

As we rode by the sea a trustworthy informant pointed out to me an islet where he said the young men have the young women in common and "give permission for them to marry." There is a house in which the girls live together at a particular time and are then free from the attentions of the youths. Children born are brought up in the families of the mothers but there is some infanticide. In another little island off the coast there are only two classes of people, the seniors and the juniors. Any person senior to any other "may give him orders and call him by his second name." (The surname comes first in Japanese names.)

Our route led us along the track of the new railway line which was penetrating from Kagawa into Ehime. Not for the first time on my journeys was I told of the corrupting influence exerted on the countryside by the imported "navvies," if our Western name may be applied to men who in figure and dress look so little like the big fellows who do the same kind of work in England. Although these navvies were a rough lot and our ancient basha (a kind of four-wheeled covered carriage) was a thing for mirth, we met with no incivility as we picked our way among them for a mile or two. I was a witness indeed of a creditable incident. A handcart full of earth was being taken along the edge of the roadway, with one man in the shafts and another pushing behind. Suddenly a wheel slipped over the side of the roadway, the cart was canted on its axle, the man in the shafts received a jolt and the cargo was shot out. Had our sort of navvies been concerned there would have been words of heat and colour. The Japanese laughed.

The reference to our venerable basha reminds me of a well-known story which was once told me by a Japanese as a specimen of Japanese humour. A basha, I may explain, has rather the appearance of a vehicle which was evolved by a Japanese of an economical turn after hearing a description of an omnibus from a foreigner who spoke very little Japanese and had not been home for forty years. The body of the vehicle is just high enough and the seats just wide enough for Japanese. So the foreigner continually bumps the roof, and when he is not bumping the roof he has much too narrow a seat to sit on. Sometimes the basha has springs of a sort and sometimes it has none. But springs would avail little on the rural roads by which many basha travel. The only tolerable place for Mr. Foreigner in a basha is one of the top corner seats behind the driver, for the traveller may there throw an arm round one of the uprights which support the roof. If at an unusually hard bump he should lose his hold he is saved from being cast on the floor by the responsive bodies of his polite and sympathetic fellow-travellers who are embedded between him and the door. The tale goes that a tourist who was serving his term in a basha was perplexed to find that the passengers were charged, some first-, some second-and some third-class fare. While he clung to his upright and shook with every lurch of the conveyance this problem of unequal fares obsessed him. It was like the persistent "punch-in-the-presence-of-the-passengare." What possible advantage, he pondered, could he as first class be getting over the second and the second class over the third? At length at a steep part of the road the vehicle stopped. The driver came round, opened the door, and bowing politely said: "Honourable first-class passengers will graciously condescend to keep their seats. Second-class passengers will be good enough to favour us by walking. Third-class passengers will kindly come out and push." And push they did, no doubt, kimonos rolled up thighwards, with good humour, sprightliness and cheerful grunts, as is the way with willing workers in Japan.

FOOTNOTES:

[173] At Anjo agricultural experiment station I saw eighteen kinds of small threshing machines at from 13 to 18 yen. There were husking machines of three sorts. A rice thresher was equal to dealing with the crop of one tan, estimated at 2 koku 4 to, in three hours.

[174] See Appendix XLVI.

[175] It is quite possible that the trees had also come into their positions artificially. There are no more skilful tree movers than the Japanese.

[176] It has recently come into collision with the authorities. Another sect with Shinto ideas was also started by a woman.

[177] See Appendix XLVII.



CHAPTER XXV

"SPECIAL TRIBES"

(EHIME)

A frank basis of reality.—Meredith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weep not, Do not lament, This world is as the wheel of a car. If we live long, We may meet again on the road.

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

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

FOOTNOTES:

[178] For an account of a vegetable wax factory, see Appendix XLVIII.

[179] For further particulars of Eta in Japan and America, see Appendix XLIX.

[180] See Appendix L.

[181] In 1918 net profits of 33 million yen were made by cotton factories. The factories are anticipating sharp competition from China.



CHAPTER XXVI

THE STORY OF THE BLIND HEADMAN

(EHIME)

The thing to do is to rise humorously above one's body which is the veritable rebel, not one's mind.—MEREDITH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOOTNOTES:

[182] See Appendix XXXVIII.

[183] That is, not only his household but his relatives.

[184] Adding to the 17 days' labour for the rice crop, 13 days' labour for the succeeding barley crop, the total was 30 days' labour per tan against the general Japan average of 39 days per tan.



THE SOUTH-WEST OF JAPAN

CHAPTER XXVII

UP-COUNTRY ORATORY

(YAMAGUCHI)

I have confidence, which began with hope and strengthens with experience, that humanity is gaining in the stores of mind.—MEREDITH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ordinary music, 12 sen to 5 yen, Special music and dance, 10 yen and upwards, Lighting all lanterns, 9 yen,

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

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

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

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

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

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



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



At the third meeting the Governor and the speaker of the day did enter the hall together, but before the Governor had finished his introductory harangue my companion took himself off to the anteroom to refresh himself with a cigar and a chat. When the Governor concluded and returned to the anteroom there was conversation for a few minutes, and then my friend and his Excellency went into the meeting together. This time the Governor stayed to the end.

In his three speeches my friend said many moving things and his audiences were appreciative. But no one presumed to interrupt with applause. At the end, however, there was a hearty round of hand-clapping, now a general custom at public gatherings. On the conclusion of each of his addresses the orator stepped down from the platform and made off to the hall, for no one dreamt of asking questions. When he was gone an official expressed the thanks of the audience and there was another round of applause. Then everybody connected with the arrangement of the meeting gathered in the anteroom and one after the other made appreciative speeches and bows. I marvelled at the orator's toughness. Before he went on the platform he had been pestered with unending introductions and beset by conversation. But I do not know that my friend felt any strain. Nor did the fashion in which the speakers wandered on and off the platform, and thus, according to our notions, did their utmost to damp the enthusiasm of the meetings, seem to have any such effect. Once in an oculist's consulting clinic in Tokyo I was struck by the fact that when water was squirted into the eyes of a succession of patients of both sexes and various ages, they did not wince as Western people would have done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When we had gone on some distance I stopped to watch a farmer's wife and daughter threshing in a barn by pulling the rice through a row of steel teeth, the simple form of threshing implement which is seen in slightly different patterns all over Japan. (It is the successor of a contrivance of bamboo stakes.) The women told me that one person could thresh fourteen bushels a day. The implement cost 2-1/2 yen from travelling vendors but only 1-1/2 yen from the co-operative society. While we talked the farmer appeared. I apologised to him for unwittingly stepping on the threshold of the barn—that is, the grooved timber in which the sliding doors run. It is considered to be an insult to the head of the house to tread on the threshold as in some way "standing on the householder's head."

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

FOOTNOTES:

[185] See Appendix XII.



CHAPTER XXVIII

MEN, DOGS AND SWEET POTATOES

(SHIMANE)

Nothing but omniscience could suffice to answer all the questions implicitly raised.—J.G. FRAZER

When we descended from the hills we were in Shimane, a long, narrow, coastwise prefecture through which one travels over a succession of heights to the capital, Matsue, situated at the far end. Two-thirds of the journey must be made on foot and by kuruma.[186] Some talk by the way was about the farmers going five or six miles daily to the hills to cut grass for their "cattle," the average number of cattle per farmer being 1.3 hereabouts. It seemed strange to see buckwheat at the flowering stage reached by the crops seen in Fukushima several months before. The explanation was that buckwheat is sown both in spring and autumn.

In the old days notable samurai, fugitives from Tokyo, had kept themselves secluded in the rooms we occupied at Yamaguchi. In Shimane we had small plain low-ceiled rooms in which daimyos had been accommodated. Not here alone had I evidences of the simplicity of the life of Old Japan.

I was wakened in the morning by the voice of a woman earnestly praying. She stood in the yard of the house opposite and faced first in one direction and then in another. A friend of mine once stayed overnight at an inn on the river at Kyoto. In the morning he saw several men and a considerable number of women praying by the waterside. They were the keepers and inmates of houses of ill-fame. The old Shinto idea was that prayers might be made anywhere at other times than festivals, for the god was at the shrine at festivals only. Nowadays some old men go to the shrine every morning, just as many old women are seen at the Buddhist temples daily. Half the visitors to a Shinto shrine, an educated man assured me, may pray, but in the case of the other half the "worship" is "no more than a motion of respect." My friend told me that when he prayed at a shrine his prayer was for his children's or his parents' health.

At a county town I found a library of 4,000 volumes, largely an inheritance from the feudal regime. Wherever I went I could not but note the cluster of readers at the open fronts of bookshops.[187]

On our second day's journey in Shimane I had a kuruma with wooden wheels, and in the hills the day after we passed a man kneeling in a kago, the old-fashioned litter. When we took to a basha we discovered that, owing to the roughness of the road, we had a driver for each of our two horses. We had also an agile lad who hung on first to one part and then another of the vehicle and seemed to be essential in some way to its successful management. The head of the hatless chief driver was shaved absolutely smooth.

It was a rare thing for a foreigner to pass this way. My companion frequently told me that he had difficulty in understanding what people said.

We saw an extinct volcano called "Green Field Mountain." There was not a tree on it and it was said never to have possessed any. The whole surface was closely cut, the patches cut at different periods showing up in rectangular strips of varying shades. Wherever the hills were treeless and too steep for cultivation they were carefully cut for fodder. In cultivable places houses were standing on the minimum of ground. More than once we had a view of a characteristic piece of scenery, a dashing stream seen through a clump of bamboo.

When our basha stopped for the feeding of the horses, they had a tub of mixture composed of boiled naked barley, rice chaff, chopped straw and chopped green stuff. I noticed near the inn a doll in a tree. It had been put there by children who believe that they can secure by so doing a fine day for an outing. When we started again we met with a company of strolling players: a man, his wife and two girls, all with clever faces. We also saw several peasant anglers fishing or going home with their catch. A licence available from July to December cost 50 sen.

At a shop I made a note of its signs, the usual strips of white wood about 8 ins. by 3, nailed up perpendicularly, with the inscriptions written in black. One sign was the announcement of the name and address of the householder, which must be shown on every Japanese house. A second stated that the place was licensed as a shop, a third that the householder's wife was licensed to keep an inn, a fourth that the householder was a cocoon merchant, a fifth that he was a member of the co-operative credit society, a sixth that he belonged to the Red Cross Society, a seventh that his wife was a member of the Patriotic Women's Society,[188] the eighth, ninth and tenth that the shopkeeper was an adherent of a certain Shinto shrine, a member of a Shinto organisation and had visited three shrines and made donations to them. An eleventh board proclaimed that he was of the Zen sect of Buddhism. Finally, there was a box in which was stored the charms from various shrines.

We passed a company of villagers working on the road for the local authority. The labourers were chiefly old people and they were taking their task very easily. Farther along the road men and women were working singly. It seemed that the labourers belonged to families which, instead of paying rates, did a bit of roadmending. The work was done when they had time to spare.

For some time we had been in a part of the country in which the ridges of the houses were of tiles. At an earlier stage of our journey they had been either of straw or of earth with flowers or shrubs growing in it. The shiny, red-brown tiles give place elsewhere to a slate-coloured variety. The surface of all of these tiles is so smooth that they are unlikely to change their hard tint for years. Meanwhile they give the villages a look of newness. Their use is spreading rapidly. Shiny though the tiles may be, one cannot but admire the neat way in which they interlock. One day when I wondered about the cost involved in recovering roofs with these tiles, a woman worker who overheard me promptly said that, reckoning tiles and labour, the cost was 60 or 70 sen per 22 tiles. In the old days tiled porticoes were forbidden to the commonalty. They were allowed only to daimyos who also used exclusively the arm rests which every visitor to an inn may now command. Besides arm rests I have frequently had kneeling cushions of the white brocade formerly used only for the zabuton of Buddhist priests.

In the county through which we were passing the fine water grass, called i, used for mat making, is grown on an area of about 78 cho. It is sown in seed beds like rice and is transplanted into inferior paddies in September. (The grass is better grown in Hiroshima and Okayama.)

I saw a beautiful tree in red blossom. The name given to it is "monkey slip," because of the smoothness of its skin, which recalled the name of that very different ornament of suburban gardens, "monkey puzzle."

During this journey we recovered something of the conditions of old-time travel. There were chats by the way and conferences at the inn in the evening and in the morning concerning distances, the kind of vehicles available, the character of their drivers, the charges, the condition of the road, the probable weather and the places at which satisfactory accommodation might be had. What was different from the old days was that at every stopping-place but one we had electric light. Part of our journey was done in a small motor bus lighted by electricity. Like the automobile we had hired a day or two before, it was driven—by two young men in blue cotton tights—at too high a speed considering the narrowness and curliness of the roads by which we crossed the passes. The roads are kept in reasonably good condition, but they were made for hand cart and kuruma traffic.

We passed an island on which I was told there were a dozen houses. When a death occurs a beacon fire is made and a priest on the mainland conducts a funeral ceremony. By the custom of the island it is forbidden to increase the number of the houses, so presumably several families live together. In the mountain communities of the mainland, where the number of houses is also restricted, it is usual for only the eldest brother to be allowed to marry. The children of younger brothers are brought up in the families of their mothers.

We passed at one of the fishing hamlets the wreck of a Russian cruiser which came ashore after the battle of Tsushima. Two boat derricks from the cruiser served as gate posts at the entrance of the school playground.

A familiar sight on a country road is the itinerant medicine vendor. He or his employer believes in pushing business by means of an impressive outfit. One typical cure-all seller, who had his medicines in a shiny bag slung over his shoulders, wore yellow shoes, cotton drawers, a frock coat, a peaked cap with three gold stripes, and a mysterious badge. On his hands he had white cotton gloves and as he walked he played a concertina. A common practice is to leave with housewives a bag of medicines without charge. Next year another call is made, when the pills and what not which have been used are paid for and a new bag is exchanged for the old one.

The use of dogs to help to draw kuruma is forbidden in some prefectures, but in three stages of our journey in Shimane we had the aid of robust dogs. During this period, however, I saw, attached to kuruma we passed, three dogs which did not seem up to their work. Dogs suffer when used for draught purposes because their chests are not adapted for pulling and because the pads of their feet get tender. The animals we had were treated well. Each kuruma had a cord, with a hook at the end, attached to it; and this hook was slipped into a ring on the dog's harness. The dogs were released when we went downhill and usually on the level. Several times during each run, when we came to a stream or a pond or even a ditch, the dogs were released for a bathe. They invariably leapt into the water, drank moderately, and then, if the water was too shallow for swimming, sat down in it and then lay down. Sometimes a dog temporarily at liberty would find on his own account a small water hole, and it was comical to see him taking a sitz bath in it. When the sun was hot a dog would sometimes be retained on his cord when not pulling in order that he might trot along in the shade below the kuruma. The dog of the kuruma following mine usually managed when pulling to take advantage of the shade thrown by my vehicle. A kurumaya told me that he had given 8 yen for his dog. Dogs were sometimes sold for from 10 to 15 yen. The difficulty was to get a dog that had good feet and would pull. The dogs I saw were all mongrels with sometimes a retriever, bloodhound or Great Dane strain.

I made enquiries about another county town library. There were 18,000 volumes of which 300 consisted of European books and 600 of bound magazines. The annual expenditure on books, and I presume magazines, was 600 yen.

We passed a "special tribe" hamlet. Here the Eta were devoting themselves to tanning and bamboo work. I was told of other "peculiar people" called Hachia, also of a hawker-beggar class which sells small things of brass or bamboo or travels with performing monkeys.

Water from hot springs is piped long distances in water pipes made of bamboo trunks, the ends of which are pushed into one another. A turn is secured by running two pipes at the angle required into a block of wood which has been bored to fit.

When we got down to the sand dunes there were windbreaks, 10 or 15 ft. high, made of closely planted pines cut flat at the top. Elsewhere I saw such windbreaks 30 ft. high. On the telegraph wires there were big spiders' webs about 4 ft. in diameter.

As we sped through a village my attention was attracted by a funeral feast. The pushed-back shoji showed about a dozen men sitting in a circle eating and drinking. Women were waiting on them. At the back of the room, making part of the circle, was the square coffin covered by a white canopy.

While passing a Buddhist temple I heard the sound of preaching. It might have been a voice from a church or chapel at home.

Shortly afterwards I came on a memorial to the man who introduced the sweet potato into the locality 150 years before. This was the first of many sweet-potato memorials which I encountered in the prefecture and elsewhere. Sometimes there were offerings before the monuments. Occasionally the memorial took the form of a stone cut in the shape of a potato. There is a great exportation of sweet potatoes—sliced and dried until they are brittle—to the north of Japan where the tuber cannot be cultivated.[189]

While we rested at the house of a friend of my companion we spoke of emigration. There are four or five emigration companies, and it is an interesting question just how much emigration is due to the initiative of the emigrants themselves and how much to the activity of the companies. The chief reason which induces emigrants to go to South America is that, under the contract system, they get twice as much money as they would obtain, say, in Formosa.[190]

Our host did not remember any foreigner visiting his village since his boyhood, though it is on the main road. It took nearly four days for a Tokyo newspaper to arrive. This region is so little known that when a resident mentioned it in Tokyo he was sometimes asked if it was in Hokkaido.

I was interested to see how many villages had erected monuments to young men who had won distinction away from home as wrestlers.

I had often noticed bulls drawing carts and behaving as sedately as donkeys, but it was new to see a bull tethered at the roadside with children playing round it. Why are the Japanese bulls so friendly?

In the mountainous regions we passed through I saw several paddies no bigger than a hearthrug. At one spot a land crab scurried across the road. It was red in colour and about 2-1/2 ins. long.

At a village office the headman's gossip was that priests had been forbidden by the prefecture to interfere in elections. We looked through the expenses of the village agricultural association. For a lecture series 5 yen a month was being paid. Then there had been an expenditure by way of subsidising a children's campaign against insects preying on rice. For ten of the little clusters of eggs one may see on the backs of leaves 4 rin was paid, while for 10 moths the reward was 2 rin. The association spent a further 10 yen on helping young people to attend lectures at a distance. The commune in which those things had been done numbered 3,100 people. There had been two police offences during the year, but both offenders were strangers to the locality.

In a cutting which was being made for the new railway, girl labourers were steering their trucks of soil down a half-mile descent and singing as they made the exhilarating run. The building of a railway through a closely cultivated and closely populated country involves the destruction of a large amount of fertile land and the rebuilding of many houses. The area of agricultural land taken during the preceding and present reigns, not only for railways and railway stations but for roads, barracks, schools and other public buildings, has been enormous. "The owner of land removed from cultivation may seem to do well by turning his property into cash," a man said to me. "He may also profit to some extent while the railway is building by the jobs he is able to do for the contractor, with the assistance of his family and his horse or bull; but afterwards he has often to seek another way of earning his living than farming."

We neared railhead on a market day and many folk in their best were walking along the roads. Of fourteen umbrellas used as parasols to keep off the sun that I counted one only was of the Japanese paper sort; all the others were black silk on steel ribs in "foreign style" except for a crude embroidery on the silk.

When we got into the town it was as much as our kurumaya could do to move through the dense crowd of rustics in front of booths and shops. Once more I was impressed by the imperturbability and natural courtesy of the people. At the station quite a number of farmers and their families had assembled, not to travel by the train but to see it start.

During the short journey by train I noticed lagoons in which fish were artificially fed. At an agricultural experiment station in the place at which we alighted there were two specimen windmills set up to show farmers who were fortunate enough to have ammonia water on their land the cheapest means of raising it for their paddies. The tendency here as elsewhere was to apply too much of the ammonia water. All rubbish on this extensive experiment station was carefully burnt under cover in order to demonstrate the importance not only of getting all the potash possible but of preserving it when obtained.

Farmers who are without secondary industries are short of cash except at the times when barley, rice and cocoons are sold, and in certain places they seem to have taken to saving money on salt. An old man told us with tears in his eyes how he had protested to his neighbours against the tendency to do without salt. An excuse for attempting to save on salt, besides the economical one, was the size of the salt cubes. Neighbours clubbed together to buy a cube, and thus a family, when it had finished its share, had to wait until the neighbours had disposed of theirs and market day came round.[191]

I saw a monument erected to the memory of "a good farmer" who had planted a wood and developed irrigation.

We made a stay at the spot where, on a forest-clad hill overlooking the sea, there stands in utter simplicity the great shrine of Izumo. The customary collection of shops and hotels clustering at the town end of the avenue of torii cannot impair the impression which is made on the alien beholder by this shrine in the purest style of Shinto architecture. In the month in which we arrived at Izumo the deities are believed to gather there. Before the shrine the Japanese visitor makes his obeisance and his offering at the precise spot—four places are marked—to which his rank permits him to advance. (This inscription may be read: "Common people at the doorway.") The estimate which an official gave me of the number of visitors last year, 40,000, bore no relation to the "quarter of a million" of the guide book. But it had been a bad year for farmers. Forty-seven geisha, who had reported the previous year that they had received 35,000 yen—there is no limit to what is tabulated in Japan—now reported that they had gained only half that sum in twelve months, "the price of cocoons being so low that even well-to-do farmers could not come." I noticed that there was a clock let into one of the granite votive pillars of the avenue along which one walks from the town to the shrine. As I glanced at the clock it happened that the sound of children's voices reached me from a primary school. I wondered what time and modern education, which have brought such changes in Japan, might make of it all.

FOOTNOTES:

[186] The railway has now been extended in the direction of Yamaguchi.

[187] See Appendix LI.

[188] Protests have been made against the way in which the country people are dunned for subscriptions to these semi-official organisations. A high agricultural authority has stated that in Nagano the farmers' taxes and subscriptions to the Red Cross and Patriotic Women Societies are from 65 to 70 per cent. of their expenditure as against 30 to 35 per cent. spent on outlay other than food and clothing.

[189] Satsuma-imo is sweet potato. Our potato is called jaga-imo or bareisho. Imo is the general name.

[190] See Appendix LII.

[191] The Salt Monopoly profits are estimated at 314,204 yen for 1920-21.



CHAPTER XXIX

FRIENDS OF LAFCADIO HEARN

(SHIMANE, TOTTORI AND HYOGO)

Those who suffer learn, those who love know.—MRS. HAVELOCK ELLIS

At Matsue, with which the name of Lafcadio Hearn will always be associated, I chanced to arrive on the anniversary of his death. His local admirers were holding a memorial meeting. As a foreigner I was honoured with a request to attend. First, however, I had the chance of visiting Hearn's house. Matsue was the first place at which Hearn lived. He always remembered it and at last came back there to marry. Except that a pond has been filled up—no doubt to reduce the number of mosquitoes—the garden of his house is little changed.