MEN, DOGS AND SWEET POTATOES
(SHIMANE)
Nothing but omniscience could suffice to answer all the questions
implicitly raised.--J.G. FRAZER
When we descended from the hills we were in Shimane, a long, narrow,
coastwise prefecture through which one travels over a succession of
heights to the capital, Matsue, situated at the far end. Two-thirds of
the journey must be made on foot and by _kuruma_.[186] Some talk by
the way was about the farmers going five or six miles daily to the
hills to cut grass for their "cattle," the average number of cattle
per farmer being 1.3 hereabouts. It seemed strange to see buckwheat at
the flowering stage reached by the crops seen in Fukushima several
months before. The explanation was that buckwheat is sown both in
spring and autumn.
In the old days notable samurai, fugitives from Tokyo, had kept
themselves secluded in the rooms we occupied at Yamaguchi. In Shimane
we had small plain low-ceiled rooms in which daimyos had been
accommodated. Not here alone had I evidences of the simplicity of the
life of Old Japan.
I was wakened in the morning by the voice of a woman earnestly
praying. She stood in the yard of the house opposite and faced first
in one direction and then in another. A friend of mine once stayed
overnight at an inn on the river at Kyoto. In the morning he saw
several men and a considerable number of women praying by the
waterside. They were the keepers and inmates of houses of ill-fame.
The old Shinto idea was that prayers might be made anywhere at other
times than festivals, for the god was at the shrine at festivals only.
Nowadays some old men go to the shrine every morning, just as many old
women are seen at the Buddhist temples daily. Half the visitors to a
Shinto shrine, an educated man assured me, may pray, but in the case
of the other half the "worship" is "no more than a motion of respect."
My friend told me that when he prayed at a shrine his prayer was for
his children's or his parents' health.
At a county town I found a library of 4,000 volumes, largely an
inheritance from the feudal regime. Wherever I went I could not but
note the cluster of readers at the open fronts of bookshops.[187]
On our second day's journey in Shimane I had a _kuruma_ with wooden
wheels, and in the hills the day after we passed a man kneeling in a
_kago_, the old-fashioned litter. When we took to a _basha_ we
discovered that, owing to the roughness of the road, we had a driver
for each of our two horses. We had also an agile lad who hung on first
to one part and then another of the vehicle and seemed to be essential
in some way to its successful management. The head of the hatless
chief driver was shaved absolutely smooth.
It was a rare thing for a foreigner to pass this way. My companion
frequently told me that he had difficulty in understanding what people
said.
We saw an extinct volcano called "Green Field Mountain." There was not
a tree on it and it was said never to have possessed any. The whole
surface was closely cut, the patches cut at different periods showing
up in rectangular strips of varying shades. Wherever the hills were
treeless and too steep for cultivation they were carefully cut for
fodder. In cultivable places houses were standing on the minimum of
ground. More than once we had a view of a characteristic piece of
scenery, a dashing stream seen through a clump of bamboo.
When our basha stopped for the feeding of the horses, they had a tub
of mixture composed of boiled naked barley, rice chaff, chopped straw
and chopped green stuff. I noticed near the inn a doll in a tree. It
had been put there by children who believe that they can secure by so
doing a fine day for an outing. When we started again we met with a
company of strolling players: a man, his wife and two girls, all with
clever faces. We also saw several peasant anglers fishing or going
home with their catch. A licence available from July to December cost
50 sen.
At a shop I made a note of its signs, the usual strips of white wood
about 8 ins. by 3, nailed up perpendicularly, with the inscriptions
written in black. One sign was the announcement of the name and
address of the householder, which must be shown on every Japanese
house. A second stated that the place was licensed as a shop, a third
that the householder's wife was licensed to keep an inn, a fourth that
the householder was a cocoon merchant, a fifth that he was a member of
the co-operative credit society, a sixth that he belonged to the Red
Cross Society, a seventh that his wife was a member of the Patriotic
Women's Society,[188] the eighth, ninth and tenth that the shopkeeper
was an adherent of a certain Shinto shrine, a member of a Shinto
organisation and had visited three shrines and made donations to them.
An eleventh board proclaimed that he was of the Zen sect of Buddhism.
Finally, there was a box in which was stored the charms from various
shrines.
We passed a company of villagers working on the road for the local
authority. The labourers were chiefly old people and they were taking
their task very easily. Farther along the road men and women were
working singly. It seemed that the labourers belonged to families
which, instead of paying rates, did a bit of roadmending. The work was
done when they had time to spare.
For some time we had been in a part of the country in which the ridges
of the houses were of tiles. At an earlier stage of our journey they
had been either of straw or of earth with flowers or shrubs growing in
it. The shiny, red-brown tiles give place elsewhere to a
slate-coloured variety. The surface of all of these tiles is so
smooth that they are unlikely to change their hard tint for years.
Meanwhile they give the villages a look of newness. Their use is
spreading rapidly. Shiny though the tiles may be, one cannot but
admire the neat way in which they interlock. One day when I wondered
about the cost involved in recovering roofs with these tiles, a woman
worker who overheard me promptly said that, reckoning tiles and
labour, the cost was 60 or 70 sen per 22 tiles. In the old days tiled
porticoes were forbidden to the commonalty. They were allowed only to
daimyos who also used exclusively the arm rests which every visitor to
an inn may now command. Besides arm rests I have frequently had
kneeling cushions of the white brocade formerly used only for the
_zabuton_ of Buddhist priests.
In the county through which we were passing the fine water grass,
called _i_, used for mat making, is grown on an area of about 78
_chō_. It is sown in seed beds like rice and is transplanted into
inferior paddies in September. (The grass is better grown in Hiroshima
and Okayama.)
I saw a beautiful tree in red blossom. The name given to it is "monkey
slip," because of the smoothness of its skin, which recalled the name
of that very different ornament of suburban gardens, "monkey puzzle."
During this journey we recovered something of the conditions of
old-time travel. There were chats by the way and conferences at the
inn in the evening and in the morning concerning distances, the kind
of vehicles available, the character of their drivers, the charges,
the condition of the road, the probable weather and the places at
which satisfactory accommodation might be had. What was different from
the old days was that at every stopping-place but one we had electric
light. Part of our journey was done in a small motor bus lighted by
electricity. Like the automobile we had hired a day or two before, it
was driven--by two young men in blue cotton tights--at too high a
speed considering the narrowness and curliness of the roads by which
we crossed the passes. The roads are kept in reasonably good
condition, but they were made for hand cart and _kuruma_ traffic.
We passed an island on which I was told there were a dozen houses.
When a death occurs a beacon fire is made and a priest on the mainland
conducts a funeral ceremony. By the custom of the island it is
forbidden to increase the number of the houses, so presumably several
families live together. In the mountain communities of the mainland,
where the number of houses is also restricted, it is usual for only
the eldest brother to be allowed to marry. The children of younger
brothers are brought up in the families of their mothers.
We passed at one of the fishing hamlets the wreck of a Russian cruiser
which came ashore after the battle of Tsushima. Two boat derricks from
the cruiser served as gate posts at the entrance of the school
playground.
A familiar sight on a country road is the itinerant medicine vendor.
He or his employer believes in pushing business by means of an
impressive outfit. One typical cure-all seller, who had his medicines
in a shiny bag slung over his shoulders, wore yellow shoes, cotton
drawers, a frock coat, a peaked cap with three gold stripes, and a
mysterious badge. On his hands he had white cotton gloves and as he
walked he played a concertina. A common practice is to leave with
housewives a bag of medicines without charge. Next year another call
is made, when the pills and what not which have been used are paid for
and a new bag is exchanged for the old one.
The use of dogs to help to draw _kuruma_ is forbidden in some
prefectures, but in three stages of our journey in Shimane we had the
aid of robust dogs. During this period, however, I saw, attached to
_kuruma_ we passed, three dogs which did not seem up to their work.
Dogs suffer when used for draught purposes because their chests are
not adapted for pulling and because the pads of their feet get tender.
The animals we had were treated well. Each _kuruma_ had a cord, with a
hook at the end, attached to it; and this hook was slipped into a ring
on the dog's harness. The dogs were released when we went downhill and
usually on the level. Several times during each run, when we came to a
stream or a pond or even a ditch, the dogs were released for a bathe.
They invariably leapt into the water, drank moderately, and then, if
the water was too shallow for swimming, sat down in it and then lay
down. Sometimes a dog temporarily at liberty would find on his own
account a small water hole, and it was comical to see him taking a
sitz bath in it. When the sun was hot a dog would sometimes be
retained on his cord when not pulling in order that he might trot
along in the shade below the _kuruma_. The dog of the _kuruma_
following mine usually managed when pulling to take advantage of the
shade thrown by my vehicle. A _kurumaya_ told me that he had given 8
yen for his dog. Dogs were sometimes sold for from 10 to 15 yen. The
difficulty was to get a dog that had good feet and would pull. The
dogs I saw were all mongrels with sometimes a retriever, bloodhound or
Great Dane strain.
I made enquiries about another county town library. There were 18,000
volumes of which 300 consisted of European books and 600 of bound
magazines. The annual expenditure on books, and I presume magazines,
was 600 yen.
We passed a "special tribe" hamlet. Here the Eta were devoting
themselves to tanning and bamboo work. I was told of other "peculiar
people" called Hachia, also of a hawker-beggar class which sells small
things of brass or bamboo or travels with performing monkeys.
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 passing 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 Japan 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 Japanese bulls so friendly?
In the mountainous regions we passed 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 association. 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 clusters of eggs one
may see on the backs of leaves 4 rin was paid, while for 10 moths the
reward was 2 rin. The association 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 assistance 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 Japanese 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 assembled, 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 cocoons 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 clustering 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
Shinto architecture. In the month in which we arrived at Izumo the
deities are believed to gather there. Before the shrine the Japanese
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 Japan--now
reported that they had gained only half that sum in twelve months,
"the price of cocoons 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 Japan, 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.
[189] _Satsuma-imo_ is sweet potato. Our potato is called _jaga-imo_
or _bareisho_. _Imo_ is the general name.
[190] See Appendix LII.
[191] The Salt Monopoly profits are estimated at 314,204 yen for
1920-21.