Part 32 (1/2)
Many of the people one pa.s.ses are smoking, usually the little bra.s.s pipe used both by men and women, which, like some of the earliest English pipes, does not hold more tobacco than will provide a few draws. The pipe is usually charged twice or thrice in succession. One notices an immense amount of cigarette smoking, which cannot be without ill effect. There is a law forbidding smoking below the age of twenty. It is not always enforced, but when enforced there is a confiscation of smoking materials and a fining of the parents. The voices of many middle-aged women and some young ones are raucous owing to excessive smoking of pipes or cigarettes.
I looked into a school and saw the wall inscription, ”Penmans.h.i.+p is like pulling a cart uphill. There must be no haste and no stopping.”
Here, as in so many places, I saw the well-worn cover and much-thumbed pages of _Self Help_. I may add a fact which would be in its place in a new edition of Smiles's _Character_. As a simple opening to conversation I often asked if a man had been in Europe or America. His answer, if he had not travelled, was never ”No.” It was always ”Not yet.”
In these country schools most of the songs are set to Western tunes.
Such airs as ”Ye Banks and Braes,” ”Auld Lang Syne,” ”Annie Laurie,”
”Home, Sweet Home” and ”The Last Rose of Summer” are utilised for the songs not only of school children but of university students. Few of the singers have any notion that the music was not written in their own land. A j.a.panese friend told me that all the airs I mentioned ”seem tender and touching to us,” and I remember a j.a.panese agricultural expert saying, ”Reading those poems of Burns, I believe firmly that our hearts can vibrate with yours.”
As I have denied myself the pleasure of dwelling on j.a.panese scenic beauties, I may not pause to bear witness to the faery delights of cherry blossom which I enjoyed everywhere during this journey. But I may record two cherry-blossom poems I gathered by the way. The first is, ”Why do you wear such a long sword, you who have come only to see the cherry blossoms?” The second is, ”Why fasten your horse to the cherry tree which is in full bloom, when the petals would fall off if the horse reared?” A j.a.panese once told me that a foreigner had greatly surprised him by asking if the cherry trees bore much fruit.
Orange as well as tea culture is a feature of the agricultural life of the prefecture. As in California and South Africa, ladybirds have been reared in large numbers in order to destroy scale. I saw at the experiment station miserable orange trees encaged for producing scale for the breeding ladybirds. The insects are distributed from the station chiefly as larvae. They are sent through the post about a hundred at a time in boxes. The ladybird, which has, I believe, eight generations a year, and as an adult lives some twenty days, lays from 200 to 250 eggs, 150 of the larvae from which may survive. Alas for the released ladybirds of s.h.i.+dzuoka! Scale is said to be disappearing so quickly that they are having but a hard life of it.
In the neighbouring prefecture of Kanagawa I paid a visit to a gentleman who, with his brother, had devoted himself extensively to fruit and flower growing. Their produce was sent the twenty-six hours'
journey by road to Tokyo, where four shops were maintained. A considerable quant.i.ty of foreign pears had been produced on the palmette verrier system. The branches of the extensively grown native pear are everywhere tied to an overhead framework which completely covers in the land on which the trees stand. This method was adopted in order to cope with high winds and at the same time to arrest growth, for in the damp soil in which j.a.panese pears are rooted, the branches would be too sappy. Foreign pears are not more generally cultivated because they come to the market in compet.i.tion with oranges, and the j.a.panese have not yet learnt to buy ripe pears. The native pear looks rather like an enormous russet apple but it is as hard as a turnip, and, though it is refres.h.i.+ng because of its wateriness, has little flavour. Progress is being made with peaches and apricots. Figs are common but inferior. A fine native fruit, when well grown, is the _biwa_ or loquat. And homage must be paid to the best persimmons, which yield place only to oranges and tangerines.[199] In the north the apples are good, but most orchards are badly in need of spraying. Experiments have been made with dates.
Flowers have a weaker scent than in Europe. A rose called the ”thousand _ri_”--a _ri_ is two and a half miles--has only a slight perfume two and a half inches away, and then only when pulled. I met with no heather--it is to be seen in Saghalien, which has several things in common with Scotland--but found ma.s.ses of sweet-scented thyme.
One of the horticulturists to whom I have referred was something of an Alpinist and was married to a Swiss lady. They had several children. I also met an American lady who had had great experience of fruit growing in California, had married a j.a.panese farmer there, and had come to live with him in a remote part of his native country. From such alliances as these there may come some day a woman's impressions of the life and work of women and girls on the farms and in the factories of rural j.a.pan. Many a visitor to the country districts must have marked the dumbness of the women folk. Women were often present at the conversations I had in country places, but they seldom put in a word. I was received one day at the house of a man who is well known as a rural philanthropist--he has indeed written two or three brochures on the problems of the country districts--but when he, my friend and I sat at table his wife was on her knees facing us two rooms off. Every instructed person knows that there is a beautiful side to the self-suppression of the j.a.panese woman--many moving stories might be told--and that the ”subservience” is more apparent than real. But there is certainly unmerited suffering. The men and women of the Far East seem to be gentler and simpler, however, than the vehement and demonstrative folk of the West, and conditions which appear to the foreign observer to be unjust and unbearable cannot be easily and accurately interpreted in Western terms. At present many women who are conscious of the situation of their s.e.x see no means of improvement by their own efforts. But the development of the women's movement is proceeding in some directions at a surprising pace. Many young men are sincerely desirous to do their part in bringing about greater freedom. They realise what is undoubtedly true that not a few things which urgently need changing in j.a.pan must be changed by men and women working together.
Money has always been forthcoming, officially, semi-officially and privately, for sending to America and Europe numbers of intelligent young men and women. So disciplined and studious are most of these young people that their country has had back with interest every yen of the funds so wisely provided. We have much to learn from j.a.panese methods in this matter of well-considered post-graduate foreign travel.[200]
FOOTNOTES:
[198] See Appendix LXIII.
[199] See Appendix LV.
[200] See Appendix LVI.
CHAPTER x.x.xIII
GREEN TEA AND BLACK
(s.h.i.+DZUOKA)
Things I would know but am forbid By time and briefness.
LAURENCE BINYON
More than half of the tea grown in j.a.pan comes from the hilly coast-wise prefecture of s.h.i.+dzuoka through which every traveller pa.s.ses on his journey from Kobe or Kyoto to Tokyo. He sees a terraced cultivation of tea and fruit carried up to the skyline. But there is more tea on the hills than the pa.s.senger in the train imagines. When viewed from below much of the tea looks like scrub. In various parts of southern j.a.pan patches of tea may be noticed growing on little islands in the paddies, but tea is a hill plant and it is on the sides of hills and on the plateaus at the top of them that the plantations are to be found.
Tea looks not unlike privet and grows or is made to grow like box to a height which can be conveniently picked over. The rows of neat-looking plants are half a dozen feet apart. The first picking may take place when the bush is three or four years old. Bushes may last forty, fifty or even a hundred years, but the ordinary life of tea is between twenty and thirty. A bush is usually cut back every ten years or so. A good deal depends on the pruning. After each picking the bushes are cut over with the shears just as we trim box. These tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs may be used to make an inferior tea for farmhouse consumption, or they may be utilised in the manufacture of caffeine or theine--the two products are indistinguishable. Usually the bushes are cut round-topped, but occasionally they are roof-shaped and sometimes they are like giant green toadstools.
The characteristic feature of a tea district beyond the rows of tea bushes is the chimney piping of the farmhouses which manufacture their own tea. (The word manufacture is used in the original sense, for farmhouse tea is hand-made.) In a country where the houses are chimneyless these galvanised iron chimneys are conspicuous.
The picking of the tea seems to be done almost entirely by women and children. The pickers are supposed to take only the three leaves at the tips. But the pickers mostly take bigger pieces, for the somewhat higher price given for good picking is not enough to secure three-leaf stuff only. It is not absolutely necessary, however, that the leaves gathered should be all of such a choice sort.
Women and girls come from a distance to pick tea. Picking is regarded as ”polite labour by the daughters of the higher middle cla.s.s of farmers.” It has also the attraction that farmers' sons have a way of visiting tea gardens in order to ”pick up wives.” The girls certainly give would-be husbands every chance of seeing what they can do, for they are at work for a long day, often of from twelve to fourteen hours. In such a day it is possible, I was told, to pick 50, 80 or even 100 lbs. of leaves. One man put the rate as from 50 to 120 pieces a minute. Four pounds of leaves make a pound of tea.