Part 28 (2/2)

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 pa.s.sing 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 j.a.pan 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 j.a.panese bulls so friendly?

In the mountainous regions we pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sociation. 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 cl.u.s.ters of eggs one may see on the backs of leaves 4 rin was paid, while for 10 moths the reward was 2 rin. The a.s.sociation 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 a.s.sistance 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 j.a.panese 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 a.s.sembled, 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 coc.o.o.ns 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 cl.u.s.tering 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 s.h.i.+nto architecture. In the month in which we arrived at Izumo the deities are believed to gather there. Before the shrine the j.a.panese 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 j.a.pan--now reported that they had gained only half that sum in twelve months, ”the price of coc.o.o.ns 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 j.a.pan, 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.

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