PROBLEMS BEHIND THE PICTURESQUE
(SAITAMA, GUMMA, NAGANO AND YAMANASHI)
A foreigner who comes among us without prejudice may speak his
mind freely.--GOLDSMITH
I went back to Nagano to visit the silk industrial regions. My route
lay through the prefectures of Saitama and Gumma. I left Tokyo on the
last day of June. Many farmers were threshing their barley. On the
dry-land patches, where the grain crop had been harvested, soya bean,
sown between the rows of grain long before harvest, was becoming
bushier now that it was no longer overshadowed. Maize in most places
was about a foot high, but where it had been sown early was already
twice that height. The sweet potato had been planted out from its
nursery bed for weeks. Here and there were small crops of tea which
had been severely picked for its second crop. I noticed melons,
cucumbers and squashes, and patches of the serviceable burdock. Many
paddy farmers had water areas devoted to lotus, but the big floating
leaves were not yet illumined by the mysterious beauty of the
honey-scented flowers.
In order to imagine the scene on the rice flats, the reader must not
think of the glistering paddy fields[136] as stretching in an unbroken
monotonous series over the plain. Occasionally a rocky patch,
outcropping from the paddy tract, made a little island of wood.
Sometimes it was a sacred grove in which one caught a glimpse of a
Shinto shrine or the head stones of the dead. Sometimes there was a
little clump of cropped tree greenery which kept a farmhouse cool in
summer and, at another time of the year, sheltered from the wind. Few
householders were too poor or too busy to be without their little
patch of flowers.
Before the train climbed out of the Kwanto plain temperature of not
far below 100° F. the planting of rice seemed to be almost an enviable
occupation. The peasant had his great umbrella-shaped straw hat,
sometimes an armful of green stuff tied on his back, and a delicious
feeling of being up to the knees in water or mud on a hot day-one
recalled the mud baths of the West-when the alternative was walking on
a dusty road, digging on the sun-baked upland or perspiring in a house
or the train.
With the rise in the level a few mulberries began to appear and
gradually they occupied a large part of the holdings. Sometimes the
mulberries were cultivated as shoots from a stump a little above
ground level, and sometimes as a kind of small standard. As mulberry
culture increased, the silk factories' whitewashed cocoon stores and
the tall red and black iron chimneys of the factories themselves
became more numerous. It is a pity that the silk factory is not always
so innocent-looking inside as the pure white exterior of its stores
might suggest. It is certain that the overworked girl operatives,
sitting at their steaming basins, drawing the silk from the soaked
cocoons, were glad to find the weather conditions such that they could
have the sides of their reeling sheds removed.
At many of the railway stations there were stacks of large, round,
flat bean cakes, for the farmer feeds his "cake" to his fields direct,
not through the medium of cattle. Although a paddy receives less
agreeable nutritive materials than bean cake, the extensive use of
this cake must be comforting to a little school of rural reformers in
the West. These ardent vegetarians have refused to listen to the
allegation that vegetarianism was impossible because without
meat-eating there would be no cattle and therefore no nitrogen for the
fields.
It was not only the bean cakes at the stations which caught my
attention but the extensive use of lime. Square miles of paddy field
were white with powdered lime, scattered before the planting of the
rice, an operation which in the higher altitudes would not be finished
until well on in July.
A contented and prosperous countryside was no doubt the impression
reflected to many passengers in the train that sunny day. But I knew
how closely pressed the farmers had been by the rise in prices of many
things that they had got into the way of needing. I had learnt, too,
the part that superstition[137] as well as simple faith played in the
lives of the country folk. When, however, I pondered the way in which
the rural districts had been increasingly invaded by factories run
under the commercial sanctions of our eighteen-forties, I asked myself
whether there might not be superstitions of the economic world as well
as of religious and social life.
I heard a Japanese speak of being well treated at inns in the old days
for 20 sen a night. It should be remembered, however, that there is a
system not only of tipping inn servants but of tipping the inn. The
gift to the inn is called _chadai_ and guests are expected to offer a
sum which has some relation to their position and means and the food
and treatment they expect. I have stayed at inns where I have paid as
much _chadai_ as bill. To pay 50 per cent. of the bill as _chadai_ is
common. The idea behind _chadai_ is that the inn-keeper charges only
his out-of-pocket expenses and that therefore the guest naturally
desires to requite him. In acknowledgment of _chadai_ the inn-keeper
brings a gift to the guest at his departure--fans, pottery, towels,
picture postcards, fruit or slabs of stiff acidulated fruit jelly (in
one inn of grapes and in another of plums) laid between strips of
maize leaf. The right time to give _chadai_ is on entering the hotel,
after the "welcome tea." In handing money to any person in Japan,
except a porter or a _kurumaya_, the cash or notes are wrapped in
paper.
On the journey from the city of Nagano to Matsumoto, wonderful views
were unfolded of terraced rice fields, and, above these, of terraced
fields of mulberry. How many hundred feet high the terraces rose as
the train climbed the hills I do not know, but I have had no more
vivid impression of the triumphs of agricultural hydraulic
engineering. We were seven minutes in passing through one tunnel at a
high elevation.
I spoke in the train with a man who had a dozen _chō_ under grapes, 20
per cent. being European varieties and 80 per cent. American. He said
that some of the people in his district were "very poor." Some farmers
had made money in sericulture too quickly for it to do them good. He
volunteered the opinion, in contrast with the statement made to me
during our journey to Niigata, that the people of the plains were
morally superior to the people of the mountains. The reason he gave
was that "there are many recreations in the plains whereas in the
mountains there is only one." In most of the mountain villages he knew
three-quarters of the young men had relations with women, mostly with
the girls of the village or the adjoining village. He would not make
the same charge against more than ten per cent. of the young men of
the plains, and "it is after all with teahouse girls." He thought that
there were "too many temples and too many sects, so the priests are
starved."
An itinerant agricultural instructor in sericulture who joined in our
conversation was not much concerned by the plight of the priests. "The
causes of goodness in our people," he said, "are family tradition and
home training. Candidly, we believe our morals are not so bad on the
whole. We are now putting most stress on economic development. How to
maintain their families is the question that troubles people most.
With that question unsolved it is preaching to a horse to preach
morality. We can always find high ideals and good leaders when
economic conditions improve. The development of morality is our final
aim, but it is encouraged for six years at the primary school. The
child learns that if it does bad things it will be laughed at and
despised by the neighbours and scolded by its parents. We are busy
with the betterment of economic conditions and questions about
morality and religion puzzle us."
When I reached Matsumoto I met a rural dignitary who deplored the
increasing tendency of city men to invest in rural property.
"Sometimes when a peasant sells his land he sets up as a
money-lender." I was told that nearly every village had a sericultural
co-operative association, which bought manures, mulberry trees and
silk-worm eggs, dried cocoons and hatched eggs for its members and
spent money on the destruction of rats. Of recent years the county
agricultural association had given 5 yen per _tan_ to farmers who
planted improved sorts of mulberry. About half the farmers in the
county had manure houses. Some 800 farmers in the county kept a
labourer.
I went to see a _gunchō_ and read on his wall: "Do not get angry.
Work! Do not be in a hurry, yet do not be lazy." "These being my
faults," he explained, "I specially wrote them out." There was also on
his wall a _kakemono_ reading: "At twenty I found that even a plain
householder may influence the future of his province; at thirty that
he may influence the future of his nation; at forty that he may
influence the future of the whole world." Below this stirring
sentiment was a portrait of the writer, a samurai scholar, from a
photograph taken with a camera which he had made himself. He lived in
the last period of the Shogunate and studied Dutch books. He was
killed by an assassin at the instance, it was believed, of the Shogun.
One of the noteworthy things of Matsumoto was the agricultural
association's market. Another piece of organisation in that part of
the world was fourteen institutes where girls were instructed in the
work of silk factory hands. The teachers' salaries were paid by the
factories. So were also the expenses of the silk experts of the local
authorities. On the day I left the city the daily paper contained an
announcement of lectures on hygiene to women on three successive days,
"the chief of police to be present." This paper was demanding the
exemption of students from the bicycle tax, the rate of which varies
in different prefectures.
A young man was brought to see me who was specialising in musk melons.
He said that the Japanese are gradually getting out of their
partiality for unripe fruit.
On our way to the Suwas we saw many wretched dwellings. The feature
of the landscape was the silk factories' tall iron chimneys,
ordinarily black though sometimes red, white or blue.
It is not commonly understood that Japanese lads by the time they
"graduate" from the middle school into the higher school have had some
elementary military training. A higher-school youth knows how to
handle a rifle and has fired twice at a target. At Kami Suwa the
problem of how middle-class boys should procure economical lodging
while attending their classes had been solved by self-help. An
ex-scholar of twenty had managed to borrow 4,000 yen and had proceeded
to build on a hillside a dormitory accommodating thirty-six boarders.
Lads did the work of levelling the ground and digging the well. The
frugal lines on which the lodging-house was conducted by the lads
themselves may be judged from the fact that 5 yen a month covered
everything. Breakfast consisted of rice, _miso_ soup and pickles.
Cooking and the emptying of the _benjo_[138] were done by the lads in
turn. A kitchen garden was run by common effort. Among the many
notices on the walls was one giving the names of the residents who
showed up at 5 o'clock in the morning for a cold bath and fencing. I
also saw the following instruction written by the founder of the
house, which is read aloud every morning by each resident in turn:
Be independent and pure and strive to make your characters more
beautiful. Expand your thought. Help each other to accomplish your
ambitions. Be active and steady and do not lose your self-control. Be
faithful to friends and righteous and polite. Be silent and keep
order. Do not be luxurious (_sic_). Keep everything clean. Pay
attention to sanitation. Do not neglect physical exercises. Be
diligent and develop your intelligence.
The borrower of the 4,000 yen with which the institution was built
managed to pay it back within seven years with interest, out of the
subscriptions of residents and ex-residents.
An agricultural authority whom I met spoke of "farming families
living from hand to mouth and their land slipping into the possession
of landlords"; also of a fifth of the peasants in the prefecture being
tenants. A young novelist who had been wandering about the Suwa
district had been impressed by the grim realities of life in poor
farmers' homes and cited facts on which he based a low view of rural
morality.
Suwa Lake lies more than 3,500 ft. above sea level and in winter is
covered with skaters. The country round about is remarkable
agriculturally for the fact that many farmers are able to lead into
their paddies not only warm water from the hot springs but water from
ammonia springs, so economising considerably in their expenditure on
manure. A simple windmill for lifting the fertilising water is sold
for only 4 yen.
We went to Kōfu, the capital of Yamanashi prefecture, through many
mountain tunnels and ravines. Entrancing is the just word for this
region in the vicinity of the Alps. But joy in the beauty through
which we passed is tinged for the student of rural life by thoughts of
the highlander's difficulties in getting a living in spots where quiet
streams may become in a few hours ungovernable torrents. I remember
glimpses of grapes and persimmons, of parties of middle-school boys
tramping out their holiday--every inn reduces its terms for them--and
of half a dozen peasant girls bathing in a shaded stream. But there
were less pleasing scenes: hills deforested and paddies wrecked by a
waste of stones and gravel flung over them in time of flood. Here and
there the indomitable farmers, counting on the good behaviour of the
river for a season or two, were endeavouring, with enormous labour, to
resume possession of what had been their own. The spectacle
illustrated at once their spirit and their industry and their need of
land. At night we slept at Kōfu at "the inn of greeting peaks." In the
morning a Governor with imagination told me of the prefecture's
gallant enterprises in afforestation and river embanking at
expenditures which were almost crippling.
FOOTNOTES:
[135] The three leading silk prefectures are in order: Nagano,
Fukushima and Gumma.
[136] At this time of the year, when the rice plants are small, the
water in the paddies is still conspicuous.
[137] An old Japan hand once counselled me that "the thing to find out
in sociological enquiries is not people's religions but their
superstitions."
[138] See Appendix IV.