THE STORY OF THE BLIND HEADMAN
(EHIME)
The thing to do is to rise humorously above one's body which is the
veritable rebel, not one's mind.--MEREDITH
It is delightful to find so many things made of copper. Copper, not
iron, is in Japan the most valuable mineral product after coal.[182]
But there are drawbacks to a successful copper industry. Several times
as I came along by the coast I heard how the farmers' crops had been
damaged by the fumes of a copper refinery. "There are four copper
refineries in Japan, who fighted very much with the farmers," it was
explained. The Department of Agriculture is also the Department of
Commerce and "it was embarrassed by those battles." The upshot was
that one refinery moved to an island, another rebuilt its chimney and
the two others agreed to pay compensation because it was cheaper than
to install a new system. The refinery which had removed to an island
seven miles off the coast I had been traversing had had to pay
compensation as well as remove. I saw an apparatus that it had put up
among rice fields to aid it in determining how often the wind was
carrying its fumes there. The compensation which this refinery was
paying yearly amounted to as much as 75,000 yen. It had also been
compelled to buy up 500 _chō_ of the complaining farmers' land. When
we ascended by _basha_ into the mountains we looked down on a copper
mine in a ravine through which the river tumbled. The man who had
opened the original road over the pass had had the beautiful idea of
planting cherry trees along it so that the traveller might enjoy the
beauty of their blossoms in spring and their foliage and outlines the
rest of the year. The trees had attained noble proportions when the
refinery started work and very soon killed most of them. They looked
as if they had been struck by lightning.
Some miles farther on, wherever on the mountain-side a little tract
could be held up by walling, the chance of getting land for
cultivation had been eagerly seized. It would be difficult to give an
impression of the patient endeavour and skilful culture represented by
the farming on these isolated terraces held up by Galloway dykes.
Elsewhere the heights were tree-clad. In places, where the trees had
been destroyed by forest fires or had been cleared, amazingly large
areas had been closely cut over for forage. One great eminence was a
wonderful sight with its whole side smoothed by the sickles of
indomitable forage collectors. In some spots "fire farming" had been
or was still being practised. Here and there the cultivation of the
shrubs grown for the production of paper-making bark had displaced
"fire farming." I saw patches of millet and sweet potato which from
the road seemed almost inaccessible.
On the admirable main road we passed many pack ponies carrying immense
pieces of timber. Speaking of timber, the economical method of
preserving wood by charring is widely practised in Japan. The
palisades around houses and gardens and even the boards of which the
walls or the lower part of the walls of dwellings are constructed are
often charred. The effect is not cheerful. What does have a cheerful
and trim effect is a thing constantly under one's notice, the habit of
keeping carefully swept the unpaved earth enclosed by a house and
buildings as well as the path or roadway to them. This careful
sweeping is usually regarded as the special work of old people. Even
old ladies in families of rank in Tokyo take pleasure in their daily
task of sweeping.
When we had crossed the pass and descended on the other side and taken
_kuruma_ we soon came to a wide but absolutely dry river bed. The high
embankments on either side and the width of the river bed, which,
walking behind our _kuruma_, it took us exactly four minutes to
cross, afforded yet another object lesson in the severity of the
floods that afflict the country. The rock-and rubble-choked condition
of the rivers inclines the traveller to severe judgments on the State
and the prefectures for not getting on faster with the work of
afforestation; but it is only fair to note that in many places
hillsides were pointed out to me which, bare a generation ago, are now
covered with trees. Within a distance of twenty-five miles hill
plantations were producing fruit to a yearly value of half a million
yen. As for the cultivation on either side of the roadway, along which
our _kurumaya_ were trotting us, I could not see a weed anywhere.
A favourite rural recreation in Ehime, as in Shimane on the mainland,
is bull fighting. It is not, however, fighting with bulls but between
bulls: the sport has the redeeming feature that the animals are not
turned loose on one another but are held all the time by their owners
by means of the rope attached to the nose ring. The rope is gripped
quite close to the bull's head. The result of this measure of control
is, it was averred, that a contest resolves itself into a struggle to
decide not which bull can fight better but which animal can push
harder with his head. That the bulls are occasionally injured there
can be no doubt. The contests are said to last from fifteen to twenty
minutes and are decided by one of the combatants turning tail. There
is a good deal of gambling on the issue. In another prefecture of
Shikoku the rustics enjoy struggles between muzzled dogs. A taste for
this sport is also cultivated in Akita. A certain amount of dog and
cock fighting goes on in Tokyo.
At an inn there was an evident desire to do us honour by providing a
special dinner. One bowl contained transparent fish soup. Lying at the
bottom was a glassy eye staring up balefully at me. (The head,
especially the eye, of a fish is reckoned the daintiest morsel.) There
was a relish consisting of grapes in mustard. A third dish presented
an entire squid. I passed honourable dishes numbers two and three and
drank the fish soup through clenched teeth and with averted gaze.
I interrogated several chief constables on the absence of assaults on
women from the lists of crimes in the rural statistics I had
collected. Various explanations were offered to me: if there were
cases of assault they were kept secret for the credit of the woman's
family; no prosecution could be instituted except at the instance of
the woman, or, if married, the woman's husband; women did not go out
much alone; the number of cases was not in fact as large as might be
imagined, because the people were well behaved. An official who had
had police experience in the north of Japan declared that the south
was more "moral and more civilised and had higher tastes." In Ehime,
for example, there was very little illegitimacy and fewer children
still-born than in any other prefecture. Nevertheless four offences
against women had occurred in villages in Ehime within the preceding
twelve months.
One of the most interesting stories of rural regeneration I heard was
told me by a blind man who had become headman of his village at the
time of the war with Russia. His life had been indecorous and he had
gradually lost his sight, and he took the headmanship with the wish to
make some atonement for his careless years. This is his story:
"Although I thought it important to advance the economic condition of
the village it was still more important to promote friendship. As the
interests of landowners and tenants was the same it was necessary to
bring about an understanding. I began by asking landowners to
contribute a proportion of the crops to make a fund. I was blamed by
only fourteen out of two hundred. But the landowners who did blame me
blamed me severely, so much so that my family[183] were uneasy. I went
from door to door with a bag collecting rice as the priests do. My
eccentric behaviour was reported in the papers. The anxiety of my
household and relatives grew. My children were told at the school that
their father was a beggar. During the first harvest in which I
collected I gathered about 40 _koku_ (about 200 bushels). In the
fourth year a hundred tenants came in a deputation to me. They said:
'This gathering of rice is for our benefit. But you gather from the
landowners only. So please let us contribute every year. Some of us
will collect among ourselves and bring the rice to you, so giving you
no trouble.' I was very pleased with that. But I did not express my
pleasure. I scolded them. I said: 'Your plan is good but you think
only of yourselves. You do not give the landowners their due. When you
bring your rent to them you choose inferior rice. It is a bad custom.'
I advised them to treat their landowners with justice and achieve
independence in the relation of tenant and landowner. They were moved
by my earnestness.
"In the next year the tenants exerted themselves and the landowners
were pleased with them. Thus the relation of landlord and tenant
became better. The landowners in their turn became desirous of showing
a friendly feeling toward the tenants. Some landlords came to me and
said, 'If you wish for any money in order to be of service to the
tenants we will lend it to you without interest.' I received some
money. I lent money to tenants to buy manure and cattle, to attack
insect pests, to provide protection against wind and flood and to help
to build new dwellings nearer their work. By these means the tenants
were encouraged and their welfare was promoted. The landlords were
also happier, for the rice was better and the land improved. The
landlords found that their happiness came from the tenants. There was
good feeling between them. The landlords began to help the tenants
directly and indirectly. Roads and bridges and many aids to
cultivation were furnished by the landlords. A body of landlords was
constituted for these purposes and it collected money. My idea was
realised that the way of teaching the villages is to let landlords and
tenants realise that their interests agree and they will become more
friendly."
The co-operative credit society which the blind headman established
not only buys and sells for its members in the ordinary way but hires
land for division among the humbler cultivators. One of the
departments of the society's work is the collection of villagers'
savings. They are gathered every Sunday by school-children. One lad, I
found from his book, had collected on a particular Sunday 5 sen
each--5 sen is a penny--from two houses and 10 sen each from another
two dwellings. The next Sunday he had received 5 sen from one house,
10 sen from two houses, 30 sen and 50 sen from others and a whole yen
from the last house on his list. The subscriber gets no receipt but
sees the lad enter in his book the amount handed over to him, and the
next Sunday he sees the stamp of the bank against the sum. Some 390
householders out of the 497 in the village hand over savings to the
boy and girl collectors, whose energy is stimulated with 1 per cent.
on the sums they gather. In five years the Sunday collections have
amassed 60,000 yen. The previous year had been marked by a bad harvest
and large sums had been drawn out of the bank, but there was still a
sum of 14,000 yen in hand.
In this village there had been issued one of the economic and moral
diaries mentioned in an earlier chapter. The diary of this village has
two spaces for every day--that is, the economic space and the moral
space. The owner of this book had to do two good deeds daily, one
economic and the other moral, and he had to enter them up. Further, he
had to hand in the book at the end of the year to the earnest village
agricultural and moral expert who devised the diary and carefully
tabulates the results of twelve months' economic and moral endeavour.
One might think that the scheme would break down at the handing in of
the diary stage, but I was assured that there were good reasons for
believing that a considerable proportion of the 440 persons who had
taken out diaries would return them.
There is an old custom by which Buddhist believers, in companies of a
dozen or so, meet to eat and drink together. As a good deal is eaten
and drunk the gatherings are costly. Our blind headman met the
difficulty of expense in his village by getting the companies of
believers to cultivate together in their spare time about three acres
of land. His object was to associate religion and agriculture and so
to dignify farming in the eyes of young men. He also wished to provide
an object lesson in the results of good cultivation. The profits
proved to be, as he anticipated, so considerable as to leave a balance
after defraying the cost of the social gathering. The headman
prevailed on the cultivators to keep accurate accounts and they made
plain some unexpected truths: as for example, that a _tan_ of paddy
did not need the labour of a man for more than twenty-three days of
ten hours, and that the net income from such an area was a little more
than 16 yen, and that thus the return for a day's labour was 73 sen.
It was demonstrated, therefore, that labour was recompensed very well,
and that instead of farming being "the most unprofitable of
industries"--for in Japan as in the West there are sinners against the
light who say this--it was reasonably profitable.
But if rice called for only twenty-three days' labour per
_tan_--nearly all the farmers' land was paddy--and the whole holding
numbered only a few _tan_, it was also plain that there were many days
in the year when the farmer was not fully employed. From this it was
easy to proceed to the conviction that the available time should be
utilised either in secondary employments, or in, say, draining, which
would reduce the quantity of manure needed on the land. So the farmers
began to think about drainage and the means of economising labour.
They began to realise how time was wasted owing to most farmers
working not only scattered, but irregularly shaped pieces of land. So
the rice lands were adjusted, and everybody was found to have a trifle
more land than he held before, and the fields were better watered and
more easily cultivated. Only from sixteen to seventeen days' labour
instead of twenty-three were now needed per _tan_[184] and the crops
were increased. There is now no exodus from this progressive village.
Concerning his blindness the headman said that it was more profitable
for him to hear than to see, for by sight "energy might be diverted."
He had recited in every prefecture his personal experience of rural
reform. He asserted that while conditions varied in every prefecture,
there was, generally speaking, labour on the land for no more than 200
days in the year. He deplored the disappearance of some home
employments. He did not approve of the condition of things in the
north where women worked as much in the fields as their husbands and
brothers. Women were "so backward and conservative." The biggest
obstacles to agricultural progress were old women. To introduce a
secondary industry was to take women from the fields.
I spoke with an agricultural expert, one of whose dicta was that
"students at normal schools who come from town families are not so
clever as students from farmers' families." He told me that 10,000
young men in his county had sworn "to act in the way most fitting to
youths of a military state [sic], to buy and use national products as
far as possible and so to promote national industry."
What was wrong with some farming, according to an official of a county
agricultural association whom I met later, was that the farmers
cultivated too intensively. They used too much "artificial." A
prefectural official, speaking of the possibility of extending the
cultivated area in Japan, said that in Ehime there were 6,000 _chō_
which might be made into paddies if money were available. As to
afforestation, 100,000 yen a year, exclusive of salaries, was spent in
the prefecture. As a final piece of statistics he mentioned that
whereas ten years before pears were grown only in a certain island of
the prefecture, the production of a single county was now valued at
half a million yen yearly.
I spent a night at a hot spring. It is said that the volume of water
is decreasing. What a situation for a town which lives on a hot spring
if the hot-water supply should suddenly stop! I heard of another
hot-spring resort at which the water is gradually cooling: it is
warmed up by secret piping.
I have not troubled my readers with many stories of the jostling of
past and present, but I noticed in an electric street car at Matsuyama
a peasant trying to light his pipe with flint and tinder. As he did
not succeed a fellow-passenger offered him a match. He was so inexpert
with it that he still failed to get a light and he had to be handed a
cigarette stump.
In riding down to the port in the street car I borrowed for a few
moments a schoolboy's English reader. It seemed rather mawkish. A book
of Japanese history which I was also allowed to look at was full of
reproductions of autographs of distinguished men. "They make the
impression very strong," I was told.
FOOTNOTES:
[182] See Appendix XXXVIII.
[183] That is, not only his household but his relatives.
[184] Adding to the 17 days' labour for the rice crop, 13 days' labour
for the succeeding barley crop, the total was 30 days' labour per
_tan_ against the general Japan average of 39 days per _tan_.
THE SOUTH-WEST OF JAPAN