Part 3 (1/2)

The indomitable experimenter swallowed another cupful of tea and declared that ”in order to be prosperous, all the members of the family must work.” All the members of his family did work. His wife was strong and there were five healthy children. He used the ordinary farm implements and his livestock consisted of only a horse and a few hens. The home farm was five miles from the station. The outlying farms were scattered in five villages--”there are always spendthrift lazy fellows willing to sell their land.” ”I have a firm belief,” the speaker added complacently, ”that agriculture is the most honest, the most sincere, the most interesting, the most secure and the most profitable calling.”

”Very often,” he went on, ”good people are not sufficiently precautious”--I give the excellent word coined by my interpreter.

”They spend for the public good, and in the end they are left poor.

Renowned, rich families have come to a miserable condition by such action. What they have done may have been good. But they are reduced to pauperism and they are laughed at by many persons. People jeer that they pretended to do good, yet they could not do good to themselves.

If all people who work for the public benefit are laughed at at last--and many are--it will come to be thought that to work for the public benefit is not good. Therefore I think that the man who would work for the public good must be careful in his own affairs. He must not be a poor man if he is to help public business. However philanthropic he may be, if his financial position is not strong he cannot go on long. He will be stopped on his good way. He cannot help other people. Therefore I am now gathering wealth for strengthening my financial position as a means to attain the higher end.”

As the speaker awaited my judgment on his career, I ventured to suggest that gifts, qualities and inspiration which made a man a public man did not necessarily equip him for being a great success in business life. The question was, perhaps, whether the type of man who was pre-eminently successful in promoting his own pecuniary interests was necessarily the best type of public man. Was the average character equal to the strain of many years of concentration on money-making to the exclusion of public interests? When men emerged from the sphere of concentrated money-making, were they worth so very much as public men?

Might not the values of things have altered a little for them? Might it not have a shrivelling effect on the heart to resist applications which must be refused when the strengthening of one's financial position was regarded as the chief object in life?

At this point our host, Mr. Yamasaki, the respected princ.i.p.al of the big agricultural school of the prefecture and a well-known rural author and speaker, broke in with the e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, ”He has got a needle in your head”--the j.a.panese equivalent for ”touching the spot”--and continued: ”Surely he is right who through his life offers freely what he may have as to members of his own family. I give away many pamphlets and I have guests. I could save in these directions.

But I am not doing it. I am content if I can support my family. I gave a savings book to each of my five children. When the boy becomes twenty-one he will have enough to finish at the university or start as a small merchant so as not to be a parasite. My girls will be provided with enough to furnish the costs of modest marriage. If I did more I might perhaps become greedy.”

I cannot say that the farmer who had so kindly outlined his life's programme was impressed either by our host's views or by mine, but he told us that he now spent 5 per cent. of his income on public purposes, and that 150 yen received for giving lectures was spent on books and recreation ”for enlarging mind and heart.” He happened to mention that, though his family was of the Zen sect of Buddhism, he was a s.h.i.+ntoist. It is difficult to believe that a genuine Buddhist could have evolved such a life scheme. There is certainly a s.h.i.+nto symbolism in his plan of tree planting before his house. He has set there, in the order shown, eleven pines which he named as marked:

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLAN OF THE ELEVEN SYMBOLIC TREES WHICH THE FARMER PLANTED OUTSIDE HIS HOUSE AND THE EVILS (REPRESENTED BY ARROWS) FROM WHICH THEY ARE s.h.i.+ELDING HIM]

The virtues inscribed on this plan are the guardians of the farmer and his family, which is represented in the middle of it. The words behind the arrows represent the character of the attacks to which the farmer conceives himself and his family to be exposed. Courage is imagined as going before and Wisdom as protecting the rear.

The talk turned to some advice which had been given to farmers to lay out ”economic gardens.” They were to plant no trees but fruit trees.

To this an old farmer of our company replied: ”If you are too economical your children will become mercenary. Some families were too economical and cut down beautiful trees, planting instead economical ones. Those families I have seen come to an evil end. The man who exercises rigid economy may be a good man, but his children can know little of his real motives and must be wrongly influenced by his conduct.” We all agreed that there was nowadays too much talk about money-making in rural j.a.pan. ”Even I,” laughed the owner of the symbolic trees, ”planted not persimmons but pines.”

FOOTNOTES:

[14] That is, before the Revolution of half a century ago, when the Tokugawa Shogun resigned his powers to the Emperor.

[15] The j.a.panese bed, _futon_, consists of a soft mattress of cotton wool, two or three inches thick. It is spread on the floor, which itself consists of mats of almost the same thickness, 6 ft. long by 3 ft. wide.

[16] Most of the really big men of Australia have left political life in comparatively impoverished circ.u.mstances. Not only did Sir Henry Parkes die poor. Sir George Reid took the High Commissioners.h.i.+p in London; Sir Graham Berry was provided with a small annuity; Sir George Dibbs was made the manager of a State savings bank; Sir Edmund Barton was lifted to the High Court Bench.--_Times_, January 11, 1921.

To the last day of his life, executions were levied in his house.--Rosebery on Pitt.

[17] For his figures see Appendix I.

CHAPTER III

EARLY-RISING SOCIETIES AND OTHER INGENUOUS ACTIVITIES

I should be heartily sorry if there were no signs of partiality. On the other hand, there is, I trust, no importunate advocacy or tedious a.s.sentation.--MORLEY

”The alarum clocks for waking us at four o'clock in the summer and five in the winter”--it was the chairman of a village Early-Rising Society who was speaking to me--are placed at the houses of the secretaries, and each member is in turn a secretary. The duty of a secretary, when the alarum clock strikes, is to get up and visit the houses of all the members allotted to him and to shout for the young men until they answer. Each member on rising walks to the house of the secretary of his division and writes his name on the record of attendances. Then the member goes to the shrine, where we fence and wrestle for a time. At first we thought that if we fenced and wrestled early in the morning we should be tired for our work, but we found that it was not so.

”Sometimes a clock gets damaged and does not ring, so a few of us may be getting up later that morning. Or a man becomes afraid of sleeping too late, fears his clock is wrong, and gets up at 3 o'clock and then goes off to waken members. Hence complaints. Some cunning fellows ask their friends or brothers to write down for them their names on the list of attendances. But we find out their deceit by their handwriting. It is very difficult to form the habit of early rising, because members are not expected to report at the secretaries' houses on a rainy day. As there is no control over them that day, they are easy in their minds and sleep on. Thus they break the habit of early rising that they are forming. Getting up early is necessary not only because it is good to begin work early but because early rising overcomes the habit of gadding about at night which is customary in many villages.

”You may say that all this is a great deal to ask of young men,” the chairman continued. ”But if you ask from them comfortable practices only, how can you expect from them a remarkable result? Young men should ponder this and be willing to exert themselves.” Later on it was explained to me that it had been found that it took a great deal of time for the secretaries to call up all the members in the morning by shouting to them, ”so the secretary obtained bugles; but even the bugles were not heard everywhere, so they were changed to drums, and now five drums go round our village every morning.”

In every village of j.a.pan there is a young men's a.s.sociation, which is by no means to be confounded with the world-encircling Y.M.C.A.[18]