Part 2 (1/2)
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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese! Many of the farmers here are too poor even to eat a good quality of rice. Consequently j.a.pan 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 j.a.panese weeding rice with the kama--a tool much like an old-fas.h.i.+oned sickle except that the blade is straight: the right hand quickly cut the roots of the weed or gra.s.s plant and the left hand as quickly pulled it up. With the same sickle-like kamas about thirty other j.a.panese 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 j.a.pan 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 j.a.panese 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 Miyanos.h.i.+ta 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 j.a.pan, 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 thres.h.i.+ng-floor) than a similar level piece adjoining. While the levelling is helpful in any case for the preservation of fertility and the prevention of was.h.i.+ng, 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.pan, 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 thres.h.i.+ng, 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 pa.s.ses 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.
{26}
I am the more interested in these ”cooperative credit societies,”
because they seem to me to embrace features which our American farmers would do well to adopt.
It is said that the farmers live on better food than they had twenty years ago, but I should think that there has been little improvement in the little thatch-roofed houses in which they live. These houses are grouped into small villages, as are the farm houses in Europe, the farmer going out from the settlement to his fields each working day, much after the fas.h.i.+on of the workers on the largest American plantations. Buildings corresponding to our American two-story houses are almost never seen in towns here and absolutely never in farming sections, the farm home, like the town home, usually consisting of a story and a half, with sliding walls of paper-covered sash between the rooms, a sort of box for the fire on which the meals are cooked, and no chimney--little better, though much cleaner, than the negro cabins in the South. In winter the people nearly freeze, or would but for the fact that the men put on heavy woolens, and the women pile on cotton padding until they look almost like walking feather beds.
True as are the things that I have said in this article, I fear that my average reader would get a very gloomy and false conception of j.a.panese farm life if I should stop here. The truth is that, so far as my observation goes, I have seen nothing to indicate that the rural population of j.a.pan is not now as happy as the rural population in America. If their possessions are few, so are their wants. In fact.
Dr. Juichi Soyeda, one of the country's leading men, in talking to me, expressed a doubt as to whether the new civilization of j.a.pan will really produce greater average happiness than the old rural seclusion and isolation (a doubt, however, which I do not share). ”Our farm people,” he said, ”are hard-working, frugal, honest, cheerful, and while their possessions are small, there is little actual want among them. A greater {27} number than in most other countries are home-owners, and, altogether, they form the backbone of an empire.”
Doctor Soyeda went on to give a noteworthy ill.u.s.tration of the affection of the people for their home farms. ”The j.a.panese,” he said, ”have a term of contempt for the man who sells an old homestead.”
There is no English word equivalent to it, but it means ”a seller of the ancestral land,” and to say it of a man is almost equivalent to reflecting upon his character or honor! I wish that we might develop in America such a spirit of affection for our farm homes.
I wish, too, that we might develop the j.a.panese love of the beautiful in nature. No matter how small and cramped the yard about the tiny home here, you are almost sure to find the beauty of shrub and tree and neatly trimmed hedge, and in Tokyo the whole population looks forward with connoisseur-like enthusiasm to the season for wistaria blooms in earliest spring, to the cherry blossom season in April, to lotus-time in mid-summer, and to the chrysanthemum shows in the fall.
The fame of Tokyo's cherry blossoms has already gone around the world, and thus they not only add to the pleasure of its citizens, but give the city a distinction of no small financial advantage as well.
Why may not our civic improvement a.s.sociations, women's clubs, etc., get an idea here for our American towns? A long avenue of beautiful trees along a road or street, even if trees without blossoms, would give distinction to any small village or to any farm. Every one who has been to Europe will recall the long lines of Lombardy poplars that make the fair vision of many French roads linger long in the memory, and I can never forget the magnificent avenue of cryptomerias--gigantic in size, straight as s.h.i.+p masts, fair as the cedars of Lebanon--that line the road leading to the great Shogun Iyeyasu's tomb in Nikko.