{xvii}
ILLUSTRATIONS
{xix}
WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP
{3}
IJAPAN: THE LAND OF UPSIDE DOWN
"I cannot help thinking," said one of my friends to me when I left home, "that when you get over on the other side of the world, in Japan and China, you will have to walk upside down like the flies on the ceiling!"
While I find that this is not true in a physical sense, it is true, as Mr. Percival Lowell has pointed out, that, with regard to the manners and customs of the people, everything is reversed, and the surest way to go right is to take pains to go dead wrong! "To speak backward, write backward, read backward, is but the A B C of Oriental contrariety."
Alice need not have gone to Wonderland; she should have come to Japan.
I cannot get used, for example, to seeing men start at what with us would be the back of a book or paper and read toward the front; and it is said that no European or American ever gets used to the construction of a Japanese sentence, considered merely from the standpoint of thought-arrangement. I had noticed that the Japanese usually ended their sentences with an emphatic upward spurt before I learned that with them the subject of a sentence usually comes last (if at all), as for example, "By a rough road yesterday came John," instead of, "John came by a rough road yesterday."
And this, of course, is but one illustration of thousands that might be given to justify my title, "The Land of Upside Down," the land of contradictions to all our Occidental ideas. That {4} Japan is a land "where the flowers have no odor and the birds no song" has passed into a proverb that is almost literally true; and similarly, the far-famed cherry blossoms bear no fruit. The typesetters I saw in theKokumin Shimbumoffice were singing like birds, but the field-hands I saw at Komaba were as silent as church-worshippers. The women carry children on their backs and not in their arms. The girls dance with their hands, not with their feet, and alone, not with partners. An ox is worth more than a horse. The people bathe frequently, but in dirty water. The people are exceptionally artistic, yet the stone "lions" at Nikko Temple look as much like bulldogs as lions. A man's birthday is not celebrated, but the anniversary of his death is. The people are immeasurably polite, and yet often unendurably cocky and conceited. Kissing or waltzing, even for man and wife, would be improper in public, but the exposure of the human body excites no surprise. The national government is supposed to be modern, and yet only 2 per cent, of the people--the wealthiest--can vote. Famed for kindness though the people are, war correspondents declared the brutality of Japanese soldiers to the Chinese at Port Arthur such as "would damn the fairest nation on earth." Though the nation is equally noted for simplicity of living, it is a Japanese banker, coming to New York, who breaks even America's record for extravagance, by giving a banquet costing $40 a plate. The people are supposed to be singularly contented, and yet Socialism has had a rapid growth. The Emperor is regarded as sacred and almost infallible, and yet the Crown Prince is not a legitimate son. Although the government is one of the most autocratic on earth, it has nevertheless adopted many highly "paternalistic" schemes--government ownership of railways and telegraphs, for example. The people work all the time, but they refuse to work as strenuously as Americans. The temples attract thousands of people, but usually only in a spirit of frolic: in the first Shinto temple I visited the priests offered me sake (the national liquor) {5} to drink. Labor per day is amazingly cheap, but, in actual results, little cheaper than American labor.
It is amid such a maze of contradictions and surprises that one moves in Japan. When I go into a Japanese home, for example, it is a hundred times more important to take off my shoes than it is to take off my hat--even though, as happened this week when I called on a celebrated Japanese singer, there be holes in my left sock. (But I was comforted later when I learned that on President Taft's visit to a famous Tokyo teahouse his footwear was found to be in like plight.)
Speaking of music, we run squarely against another oddity, in that native Japanese (as well as Chinese) music usually consists merely of monotonous twanging on one or two strings--so that I can now understand the old story of Li Hung Chang's musical experiences in America. His friends took him to hear grand opera singers, to listen to famous violinists, but these moved him not; the most gifted pianists failed equally to interest him. But one night the great Chinaman went early to a theatre, and all at once his face beamed with delight, and he turned to his friends in enthusiastic gratitude: "We have found it at last!" he exclaimed. "That is genuine music!" . . . And it was only the orchestra "tuning up" their instruments!
I might as well say just here that this story, while good, always struck me as a humorous exaggeration till I came to Japan, but the music which I heard the other night in one of the most fashionable and expensive Japanese restaurants in Tokyo was of exactly the same character--like nothing else in all the world so much as an orchestra tuning up! And yet by way of modification (as usual) it must be said that appreciation of Western music is growing, and one seldom hears in classical selections a sweeter combination of voice and piano than Mrs. Tamaki Shibata's, while my Japanese student-friend has also surprised me by singing "Suwanee River" and other old-time American favorites like a genuine Southerner.
Take the social relations of the Japanese people as another {6} example of contrariety. Here the honorable sex is not the feminine but the masculine. There is even a proverb, I believe, "Honor men, despise women." Perhaps the translation "despise" is too strong, but certainly it would be regarded as nothing but contemptible weakness for young men to show any such regard for young women, or husbands for their wives, as is common in America. The wives exist solely for their husbands, nor must the wife object if the husband maintains other favorites, or even brings these favorites into the home with her. And although a man is with his wife a much greater part of his time than is the case in America, he may have little or no voice in selecting her; in fact, he may see her only once before marrying.
After having seen probably half a million or more Japanese, Sundays and week-days, I have not noticed a single young Japanese couple walking together, and in the one case where I saw a husband and a wife walking thus side by side I discovered on investigation that the man was blind!
"For a young couple to select each other as in America," said a young Japanese gentleman to me, "would be considered immoral, and as for a young man calling on a young woman, that never happens except clandestinely." And when I asked if it was true that when husband and wife go together the woman must follow the man instead of walking beside him as his equal, he answered: "But it is very, very seldom that the two go out together."
My Japanese friend also told me that the young man often has considerable influence in selecting his life-partner (in case it is for life: there is one divorce to every three to five marriages), but the young woman has no more voice in the matter than the commodity in any other bargain-and-sale. When a young man or young woman gets of marriageable age, which is rather early, the parents decide on some satisfactory prospective partner, and a "middleman" interviews the parents of the prospective partner aforesaid, and if they are willing, and {7} financial and other considerations are satisfactory, it doesn't matter what the girl thinks, nor does it matter much whether young Barkis himself is "willin'." The Sir Anthony Absolutes in Japan indeed brook no opposition. All of which, while not wholly commendable (my young Japanese friend himself dislikes the plan, at least in his own prospective case), has at least the advantage of leaving but remarkably few bachelors and old maids in Japan. Here every man's house may not be his castle, but it is certainly his nursery. Usually, too, in the towns at least, his home is his shop; the front part full of wares, with no hard and fast dividing line between merchandise rooms and the living rooms, children being equally conspicuous and numerous in both compartments.
Japan is still governed largely on patriarchal lines. The Emperors themselves depend largely on the patriarchal spirit for their power, claiming direct descent in unbroken line from the Sun-Goddess, while the people are supposed to be themselves descendants of Emperors or of minor gods. In family life the patriarchal idea is still more prominent, the father being the virtual ruler until he abdicates in favor of the eldest son.
Ancestor-worship is general, of course, and a typical case is that of my young Nikko friend, who tells me that in his home are memorial tablets to six of his most recently deceased ancestors, and that hot rice is placed before these tablets each morning. Now the teaching is that the spirits of the dead need the odor of the rice for nourishment, and also require worship of other kinds. Consequently the worst misfortune that can befall a man is to die without heirs to honor his memory (the mere dying itself is not so bad); and if an oldest son die unmarried such action amounts almost to treason to the family.
Moreover, if a man be without sons (daughters don't count), he may adopt a son; and the cases of adoption are surprisingly frequent. Count Okuma, ex-prime minister of the empire, whom I visited last Sunday, adopted his son-in-law as his {8} legal son. A distinguished banker I visited is also an adopted son; and in a comparatively brief list of eminent Japanese, a sort of abbreviated national "Who's Who," I find perhaps twenty cases in which these eminent officials and leaders have been adopted and bear other family names than those with which they were born.
The willingness to give up one's name in adoption, viewed in the light of the excessive devotion to one's own ancestors and family name, is only another illustration of Japanese contrariety. It is a land of surprises.
Miyanoshita, Japan.
{9}
IISNAPSHOTS OF JAPANESE LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY
"What is a Japanese city like?" Well, let us "suppose," as the children say. You know the American city nearest you, or the one you live in. Suppose then you should wake up in this city to-morrow morning and find in the first place that forty-nine people out of every fifty have put on such unheard-of clothing as to make you rub your eyes in wonder as to whether you are asleep or awake; next, that everybody has become six inches shorter, and that all these hundred-thousand five-foot men and four-foot women have unanimously developed most violent sunburn--have become bronzed almost beyond recognition.
Moreover, the high buildings you once knew have all disappeared, and a wilderness chiefly of tiny one and two story houses has taken their places, wherein the first story, even in two-story buildings, is so low that all your new brown friends warn you by a gesture to duck your head as you go through the doors, while the second story is usually little more than a garret.
Next, a wild jargon of unmeaning voices strikes your ear and you discover that ninety-nine people out of a hundred have forgotten how to speak English. More than this, the English signs are no more, and on the billboards and before the business offices are marks that look as if a thousand ostriches fresh from a thousand ink barrels had been set to scratching new signs to take the places of the old. You pick up a book {10} or the morning paper, and the same thing has happened--pig tracks, chicken tracks, and double bowknots fantastically tied instead of English type--and everybody begins at the back of the book and reads toward him instead of reading the way you have grown used to!
And the buggies, carriages, and automobiles: what on earth has become of them? There's hardly a horse in sight, but dozens or scores of men with bare legs and odd clothes, each flying around pulling a light two-wheeled jinrikisha, a man or a woman seated in each man-drawn "buggy"; and there are dozens of other bare-legged men laboriously pulling heavy loads of vegetables, freight, and even lumber and giant telegraph poles! You jump into one of the rickshaws and forget your strange little Puck-like steed in the marvel of your surroundings till a voice from the shafts makes you feel like Balaam when the ass spoke to him!
By this time you begin to get a hazy idea as to how the people are dressed, and as nearly as you can make out, it is something like this:
Evidently all the inhabitants of an ancient Roman city, a modern American town, a half-dozen Hindoo villages, and several thousand seashore bathers have all thrown their clothes--(or the lack of them!)--into one tremendous pile, and everybody has rushed in pell-mell and put on the first thing, or the first two or three things, that came to hand. There is every conceivable type of clothing, but perhaps the larger number have wound up with something like a light bathing suit and a sort of gingham dressing-gown belted over it; and if one has less than this, why, then, as the Japanese say, "Shikata na gai" (All right; it can't be helped). In the shops and stores one passes a few men clad only in their own integrity and a loin-cloth, and both children and grown people dress with a hundred times more disregard of convention than the negroes in America.
Of shoes, there is an equally great variety as of clothing, {11} but the majority of men, women, and children (in muddy weather at least) have compromised on the "getas," a sort of wooden sole strapped on the foot, with wooden pieces put fore and aft the instep, these pieces throwing the foot and sole about three inches above ground. It looks almost as difficult to walk in them as to walk on stilts, but away the people go, young and old, and the muddy places marked by the strange footwear look as if the corrugated wheels of a hundred mowing-machines had passed along! In most cases the clatter of the "get as" is the loudest noise on the streets, for the Japanese are remarkably quiet: in Tokyo to-day I saw a thousand of them waiting to see the Empress, and an American crowd would literally have made more noise in a minute than they made in an hour.
On entering their houses, as we have already noticed, the people take off their getas, sandals, shoes or whatever outer footwear is used--for the very good reason that the people sit on the floor (on mats or on the floor itself), eat on the floor (very daintily, however), and sleep on the floor, so that to walk over the floor here with muddy feet would be the same as if an American should walk roughshod over his chairs, table and bed. Even in the Japanese department store I visited this morning cloth covers were put on my shoes, and this afternoon at the Ni-no Go Reiya Shinto temple I had to go in my stocking feet.
Then the babies--who ever saw as many babies to the square inch? About 10 per cent of the male population seems to be hauling other men, but 50 per cent, of the female population seems hardly enough to carry the wise and happy-looking little Jap babies--not in go-carts (a go-cart or a hired nurse is almost never seen), but on the back. And these little women who when standing are only about as tall as you are when sitting--they seem hardly more than children themselves, so that you recall Kipling's saying of Japan: "A four-foot child walks with a three-foot child, who is holding the hand {12} of a two-foot child, who carries on her back a one-foot child."
Boys in their teens are also seen with babies strapped on their backs in the same loose-fitting, sack-like baby-holders, and after work-time the father takes a turn at the same business. You are reminded of the negro who said to another: "'Fo Gawd, Bill, you's got the mos' chillun any nigger I ever seed. Why, I passed yo' house yistiddy mornin' at nine erclock and throwed a brick on top and hollered 'Fiah!' an' at five erclock in the evenin' nigger chillun was still runnin' out!" It seems sometimes as if such an incident, with Jap children substituted for negroes (I doubt if there is a negro here), might actually happen in Japan.
And those two men bowing to each other as they meet--are they rehearsing as Alphonse and Gaston for the comedy show to-night, or are they serious? No, they are serious, for yonder is another pair meeting in the same way, and yonder another couple separating with even more violent "convulsions of politeness"--and nobody laughing but yourself. No wonder the Japanese are strong: they only need to meet a few friends a day to get exercise enough to keep them in trim! Look again: those women meeting at the depot, for example (for there are familiar-looking street cars and less familiar-looking passenger cars amid all these strange surroundings). There is the woman with her hair combed straight back, which, I am told, means that she is a widow; one with an odd Japanese topknot, which means that she is married, and a younger one whose hair is arranged in the style of unmarried girls; and though they are evidently bosom friends, they do not embrace and kiss at meeting--to kiss in public would be shocking to the Japanese--and you can only guess the depth of their affection by the greater warmth and emphasis of their bows to one another.
{13}
THE GIANT AVENUE OF CRYPTOMERIAS AT NIKKO.
This magnificent avenue, twenty-five miles in length, consists of trees planted by daimyos, or small lords, as a memorial to the great Japanese warrior and statesman, Iyeyasu. A spirit of simplicity and love of nature has produced a nobler monument than extravagance could possibly have done.
{14}
TYPICAL JAPANESE COSTUMES.
TYPICAL TEMPLE ARCHITECTURE.
In the temple picture notice also how the limbs of the trees have been trained. Many fantastic effects are often produced in this way.
{12 continued}
They are trained in politeness from their youth up, are these Japanese; and it is perhaps the greatest charm of both young and old. I must have seen a full hundred thousand Japanese {15} by this time, and I do not recall one in the attitude of scolding or abuse, while authorities tell me that the Japanese language simply has no words to enable one to swear or curse. I was also interested to have the American Ambassador here tell me that in all his three years' stay in Japan, and with all the freedom with which a million children run about the streets and stores, he has never seen a man impatient with a child. At the Imperial University yesterday morning I noticed two college boys part with the same deep courtesy used by the older men, and the little five-year-old girl near Chuzenji the other day thanked me for my gift with the most graceful of Eastern salaams.
I shall not say that the excessive ceremoniousness of the men does not at times seem ludicrous, but when you come to your hotel dining-room, and the inexpressibly dainty little Japanese girls, moving almost noiselessly on their sandaled feet (no getas indoors) welcome each guest with smiling bows, happy, refined and graceful, a very different impression of Japanese courtesy comes over you. In America, unfortunately, the like courteous attention under such circumstances might be misinterpreted, but here you are only reminded of how a thousand years of courtesy and gentle manners have given the women of Japan--pretty though they are not, judged by our Western standards--an unsurpassed grace of manner and happiness of disposition together with Shakespeare's well-praised "voice, soft and low, an excellent thing in woman."
And here and everywhere, as in the old fable of the man with the overcoat, must not such sun-like gentleness be more powerful in compelling deference than all the stormy strength of the "new woman"?
Which reminds me that however much the social, political, and economic revolution of the last forty years may have changed the national character (and upon this point I shall not speak till later), it is certain that Old Japan and the Old South were distinguished for not a few characteristics {16} in common. For example, we are reminded of the South's ante-bellum civilization when we learn that in old Japan "the business of money-making was held in contempt by the superior classes," and of all forms of business, agriculture was held in highest esteem. Next to the nobility stood the Samurai, or soldier class, the social rank of all other persons then being as follows: (1) farmers, (2) artisans, (3) merchants. And farming was thus not only regarded as the most honorable of all occupations, but farmers in the early ages were privileged to wear swords, the emblem of rank next to the nobility. Below the farmers ranked the mechanic element, while as Lafcadio Hearn tells us:
"The commercial class (A kindo), including bankers, merchants, shopkeepers, and traders of all kinds, was the lowest officially recognized. The business of money-making was held in contempt by the superior classes; and all methods of profiting by the purchase and resale of the produce of labor were regarded as dishonorable. . . . There is a generally, in militant society, small respect for the common forms of labor. But in old Japan the occupation of the farmer and artisan were not despised; trade alone appears to have been considered degrading, and the distinction may have been partly a moral one."
I wonder if there is not really a great deal more than we have realized in what Hearn here suggests as to the soundness and essential "morality" of the Japanese plan of ranking farming and manufacturing above trade as occupations? Morally and economically considered, it is the men who actually produce wealth rather than those men who trade or barter in the products of other men's labor who deserve most honor. They serve the world best: The barterers are, in limited numbers, necessary and useful servants of those who do produce, but the strength of a state manifestly lies in the classes who are really creators of values.
Tokyo, Japan.
{17}
IIIJAPANESE FARMING AND FARMER FOLK
I went yesterday to the Agricultural College of the Imperial University of Japan, situated at Komaba, near Tokyo, where I had an appointment with Director Matsui. My purpose was to get further information concerning the general condition of Japanese farmers and Japanese farming, but the biggest fact my researches brought out was not in regard to rice or barley or potatoes or taro, or any other field product of the Mikado's empire.
Rather it was a fact with regard to what is in every land the most important of all crops--the crop of boys and girls. And the big fact I discovered was simply this:
These brown Mongolian farm children, whose land we opened to civilization but fifty years ago, and whom we thought of but yesterday as backward "heathen"--they are getting, as a general proposition, just twice as much schooling as is furnished pupils in many of our American rural districts: their parents are providing, in their zeal for their children's welfare, just twice as good educational facilities as we are giving many of our white farm boys and girls--boys and girls who have in their veins the blood of a race which has carried the flag of human progress for a thousand years, and whom we are expecting to continue leaders in civilization and enlightenment.
In other words, so Doctor Matsui told me (and I went to-day to the Japanese National Department of Education to verify the fact), the Japanese farm boys and girls are getting ten months' schooling a year, while the farm boy or girl {18} in my own state is getting only five or six months--and when I was in a country school fifteen years ago, not nearly so much as that! Do you wonder that I avoided telling the Japanese educational officer just how our provision for farm boys and girls compared with Japan's? Also that I neglected to tell him how we compare in the matter of utilizing school advantages, when he showed me that of all the children between six and fourteen in all the empire of Japan the school attendance is 98 per cent.--98 out of every 100 children of "school age" attending school, and in several provinces 99 out of every 100! Thirty-five years ago the average school attendance in Japan was only 28, and in 1893 only 59, but by the time of the war with Russia it had passed 90, and since then has been climbing straight and steadily toward the amazing maximum itself, the official figures showing a gain of 1 per cent, a year--94 per cent., then 95, then 96, then 97, and now 98, and the leaders are now ambitious for 99 or 100, as they told me to-day.
When this officer of an "inferior race" showed me, furthermore, that Japan is so intent upon educating every boy and girl in her borders that she compels attendance on the public schools for eight years, I didn't tell him that in civilized America, in the great enlightened nation so long held up to him as a model, demagogues and others in many states on one pretext or another have defeated every effort for effective compulsory education laws, so that if a boy's parents are indifferent to his future, the state does not compel them to give him a fighting chance in life--for the state's own sake and for the boy's.
{19}
JAPANESE FARMING SCENES.
The upper picture shows a rice field in the foreground, tea alongside the buildings, and the graceful feathery bamboo in the background; also, an unusual sight on a Japanese farm, a group of cattle. The lower picture shows the work of transplanting rice.
{20}
JAPANESE SCHOOL CHILDREN.
Boys predominate in the upper picture, girls in the lower. A system of compulsory education is enforced in Japan, and 98 per cent, of the children of school age attend. Even the country schools run ten months in the year--longer than in a majority of our states.
{18 continued}
With these facts before me, as I have said, I did not make any vainglorious boasts of the great educational progress of our own states these last twenty years: However much progress we have made, these brown Japanese "heathen" have beaten us. While there is no official census on the question of illiteracy here, every Japanese man in his twenties must serve {21} two years in the army (unless he is in a normal school studying to be a teacher), and a record is made as to the literacy or illiteracy of each recruit. That is to say, there is a place where the fact of any recruit's inability to read would be recorded, but the Department of Education informed me to-day that the illiterate column is now absolutely blank.
There are no illiterates among Japan's rising generation.
More than this, we have to reflect that it is in their poverty that the Japanese are thus doing more than we are doing in our plenty. We waste more in a year than they make. Even with a hundred acres of land the American farmer is likely to consider himself poor, but when I asked my Japanese guide the other day if twocho(five acres) would be an average sized farm here he said: "No, not an average; such a man would be regarded as a middle-class farmer--a rather large farmer." And the figures which I have just obtained in a call on the national Department of Agriculture and Commerce more than justify the reply.
Forty-six farmers out of every 100 in Japan own less than one and one quarter acres of land; 26 more out of every 100 own less than two and one half acres, and only one man in a hundred owns as much as twenty-five acres. (In the matter of cultivation also I find that 70 per cent, cultivate less than two and one half acres, and nearly half are tenants.)
This year the situation is even worse than usual, for disastrous floods have reduced the rice crop, which represents one half Japan's crop values, 20 per cent, below last year's figures, and many people will suffer.
Ordinarily, however, these little handkerchief-sized farms yield amazingly. It has been shown by Prof. F. H. King that the fields of Japan are cultivated so intensively, fertilized so painstakingly, and kept so continuously producing some crop, that they feed 2277 people to the square mile--21,321 square miles of cultivated fields in the main islands supporting a population of 48,542,376. If the tilled fields of Iowa, for {22} example, supported an equal number of people per square mile, the population so supported would be over 100,000,000. That state alone could feed the entire population of the United States and then have an excess product left for export to other countries! If North Carolina did as well with her cultivated land she would support 30,000,000 people, and if Mississippi's 11,875 square miles of land under cultivation supported each 2277 persons, then 27,041,375 people, or thirteen times the present population of the state, could live off their produce!
And yet these Japanese lands have been in cultivation for unnumbered centuries. Some of them may have been cleared when King Herod trembled from his dream of a new-born rival in Judea, and certainly "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome" had not faded from the earth when some of these fields began their age-long ministry to human need. And they have been kept fertile simply by each farmer putting back on the ground every ounce of fertility taken from it, for commercial fertilizers were absolutely unknown until our own generation.
Of course, with a population so dense and with each man cultivating an area no larger than a garden-patch in America, the people are poor, and the wonder is that they are able to produce food enough to keep the country from actual want. Practically no animal meat is eaten; if we except fish, the average American eats nearly twice as much meat in a week as the average Japanese does in a year: to be exact, 150 pounds of meat per capita is required per year for the average American against 1.7 pounds for the average Japanese! Many of the farmers here are too poor even to eat a good quality of rice. Consequently Japan presents the odd phenomenon of being at once an exporter and a large importer of rice. Poor farmers sell their good rice and buy a poorer quality brought in from the mainland of Asia and mix it with barley for grinding.
Only about one farmer in three has a horse or an ox; in most cases all the work must be done by hand and with crude tools. {23} It is pitiful--or rather I should say, it would be pitiful if they did not appear so contented--to see men breaking the ground not by plowing but by digging with kuwas: long-handled tools with blades perhaps six inches wide and two feet long. At the Agricultural College farm in Komaba I saw about thirty Japanese weeding rice with the kama--a tool much like an old-fashioned sickle except that the blade is straight: the right hand quickly cut the roots of the weed or grass plant and the left hand as quickly pulled it up. With the same sickle-like kamas about thirty other Japanese were cutting and shocking corn: they are at least too advanced to pull fodder, I was interested to notice!
With land so scarce, it is of course necessary to keep something on the ground every growing day from year's end to year's end. Truckers and gardeners raise three crops a year. Rice, as a rule, is not sown as with us, but the plants are transplanted as we transplant cabbage or tomato plants (but so close together, of course, that the ripening fields look as if they had been sown), in order that the farmer may save the time the rice plants are getting to the transplanting stage. That is to say, some other crop is maturing on the land while the rice plants are growing large enough to transplant. Riding through the country almost anywhere you will notice the tender young plants of some new crop showing between the rows of some earlier-planted crop now maturing or newly harvested.
The crops in Japan are not very varied. Rice represents half the agricultural values. Next to rice is the silkworm industry, and then barley, wheat, vegetables, soy beans, sweet potatoes, and fruits. There is especial interest in fruit growing just now. Sweet potatoes grow more luxuriantly than in any other country I have ever seen, and are much used for food. I have seen one or two little patches of cotton, but evidently only for home spinning, although I hear it said that in Korea, which has just been formally annexed as Japanese territory, cotton can be profitably grown. A much {24} cultivated plant, with leaves like those of the lotus or water-lily, is the taro, which I also saw growing in Hawaii; its roots are used for food as potatoes are.
Every particle of fertility of every kind, as I have said, is religiously saved, and in recent years a considerable demand for commercial fertilizers has sprung up, $8 to $10 worth per acre being a normal application.
So much for the farming country as it has impressed me around Tokyo. A few days ago I saw a somewhat different agricultural area--280 miles of great rice-farming land between Miyanoshita and Kyoto. This country is different from that around Yokahoma and north of Tokyo in that it is so much more rolling and mountainous (majestic Mount Fuji, supreme among peaks, was in sight several hours) and greater efforts are therefore necessary to take care of the soil.
But when such effort is necessary in Japan, it is sure to be made. The population is so dense that every one realizes the essential criminality of soil-waste, of the destruction of the one resource which must support human life as long as the race shall last.
Much of the land is in terraces, or, perhaps I should say, tiers. That is to say, here will be a half-acre or an acre from eighteen inches to six feet higher (all as level as a threshing-floor) than a similar level piece adjoining. While the levelling is helpful in any case for the preservation of fertility and the prevention of washing, the tier system is necessary in many cases on account of the irrigation methods used in rice growing. While the lower plot is flooded for rice, upland crops may be growing on the adjacent elevated acre or half-acre.
The hillside or mountain slopes are also cultivated to the last available foot, and in dry seasons you may even see the men and women carrying buckets uphill to water any suffering crop. In nearly all cases the rows are on a level. Where there was once a slanting hillside the Japanese here dig it down or grade it, and the mountainsides are often enormous steps or {25} stairs; one level terrace after another, each held in place by turf or rock wall.
Rice growing, as it is conducted in Japan, certainly calls for much bitter toil. The land must be broken by hand; into the muddy, miry, water-covered rice fields the farmer-folk must wade, to plant the rice laboriously, plant by plant; then the cultivation and harvesting is also done by hand, and even the threshing, I understand. When we recall that the net result of all this bitter toil is only a bare existence made increasingly hard by the steady rise in land-taxes, and that the Japanese people know practically none of the diversions which give joy and color to American and English country life, it is no wonder that thousands of farmers are leaving their two and three acre plots, too small to produce a decent living for a family, to try their fortunes in the factories and the towns. Specifically, it may be mentioned that the boys from the farms who go into the army for the compulsory two years' service are reported as seldom returning to the country.
True, the government is trying to help matters to some extent (though this is indeed but little) by lending money to banks at low rates of interest with the understanding that the farmers may then borrow from these banks at rates but little higher; and there are also in most communities, I learn, "cooperative credit societies" (corresponding somewhat to the mutual building and loan societies in American towns), by means of which the farmers escape the clutches of the Shylock money-lenders who have heretofore charged as high as 20 to 30 per cent, for advances. The Japanese farmers invest their surplus funds in these "cooperative credit societies," just as they would in savings banks, except that in their case their savings are used solely for helping their immediate neighbors and neighborhoods. A judicious committee passes upon each small loan, and while the interest rates might seem high to us, we have to remember that money everywhere here commands higher interest than in America.