PROGRESS OF SORTS
(SHIDZUOKA AND KANAGAWA)
I am not of those who look for perfection amongst the rural
population.--BORROW
The torrents that foam down the slopes of Fuji are a cheap source of
electricity, and, though the guide book may not stress the fact, it is
possible that the first glimpse of the unutterable splendours of the
sacred mountain may be gained in the neighbourhood of a cotton, paper
or silk factory. The farmers welcomed the factories when they found
that factory contributions to local rates eased the burden of the
agricultural population. The farmers also realised that to the
factories were due electric light, the telephone, better roads and
more railway stations. The farmers are undoubtedly better off. They
are so well off indeed that the district can afford an agricultural
expert of its own, children may be seen wearing shoes instead of
_geta_, and the agriculturists themselves occasionally sport coats cut
after a supposedly Western fashion. But the people, it was insisted,
have become a little "sly," and girls return from the factories less
desirable members of the community.
Mention of these matters led an agricultural authority whom I met
during my trip in Shidzuoka to deliver himself on the general question
of the condition of the farmer in Japan. He expressed the opinion that
10 per cent. of the farmers were in a "wretched condition." Big
holdings--if any holdings in Japan can be called big--were getting
bigger; it was an urgent question how to secure the position of the
owners of the small and the medium-sized classes of holding. The fact
that many rural families were in debt, not for seed or manure but for
food spoke for itself. The amounts might seem trivial in Western eyes,
but when the average income was only 350 yen a year a debt of 80 yen
was a serious matter; and 80 yen was the average debt of farming
families in the prefecture of Shidzuoka. No one could say that the
farmers were lazy: they were working hard according to their lights.
They were working too hard, perhaps, on the limited food they got.
There could be no doubt that the physical condition of the countryman
was being lowered.
Again, there was the fact of the rural exodus--the phrase sounded
strangely in the middle of a Japanese sentence. As to the causes, the
first unquestionably was that the farmer had not enough land on which
to make a living. If the farmer could have 5 acres or thereabouts he
would be well off. But the average area per farmer in the prefecture
in which we were travelling was a little less than 2-1/2 acres. High
taxes were another cause of the farmer's present condition. Then a
year's living would be mortgaged for the expenses of a marriage
ceremony. At a funeral, too, the neighbours came to eat and drink.
They took charge of the kitchen and even ordered in food. (After a
Japanese feast the guests are given at their departure the food that
is left over.) Further, some farmers wasted their substance on the
ambitions of local politics. Again, conscripts who had gone off to the
army hatless and wearing straw shoes came home hatted and sometimes
booted. Military service deprived farmers of labour, and their boys
while away asked their parents for money. Conscription pressed more
heavily on the poor because the sons of well-to-do people continued
their education to the middle school, and attendance at a middle
school entitled a young man to reduction of military service to one
year only.[198]
The countryside was suffering from the way in which importance was
increasingly attached to industry and commerce. Many M.P.s were of the
agricultural class, but they were chiefly landlords, and they were
often shareholders and directors of industrial companies. There was
very little real Parliamentary representation of the farming class and
it had not yet found literary expression. There were signs, however,
that some landlords were realising that industry and agriculture were
not of equal importance. But the farmers were slow to move. The
traditions of the Tokugawa epoch survived, making action difficult.
Finally, there was the drawback to rural development which exists in
the family system. But that, as Mr. Pickwick said, comprises by itself
a difficult study of no inconsiderable magnitude, and we must return
to it on another occasion.
In one of my excursions I went over a large agricultural school, the
boast of which was that of all the youths who had passed through it,
twenty only had deserted the land. I met the present scholars marching
with military tread, mattocks on shoulders, to the school paddies.
I noticed schoolgirls wearing a wooden tablet. It was a good-conduct
badge. If a girl was not wearing it on reaching home her parents knew
that her teacher had retained it because of some fault; if she was not
wearing it at school her teacher knew that her parents had kept it
back for a similar reason. The girls when they come to school have
often baby brothers or sisters tied on their backs. Otherwise the
girls would have to stay at home in order to look after them. I asked
a schoolmaster what happened when children were kept at home. He said
that when a child had been absent a week he called twice on the
parents in order to remonstrate. If there was no result he reported
the matter to the village authorities, who administered two warnings.
Failing the return of the truant a report was made by the village
authorities to the county authorities. They summoned the father to
appear before them. This meant loss of time and the cost of the
journey. Should the parent choose to continue defiant he was fined 5
to 10 yen for disobedience to authority and up to 30 yen for not
sending his child to school.
I found that a local philanthropic association had provided the
speaker's school with a supply of large oil-paper-covered umbrellas so
that children who had come unprovided could go home on a rainy day
without a parent, elder brother or sister having to leave work to
bring an umbrella to school.
In the playground of this school there was a low platform before which
the children assembled every morning. The headmaster, standing on the
platform, gravely saluted the children and the children as gravely
responded. The scholars also bowed in the direction of Tokyo, in the
centre of which is the Emperor's palace. An inscription hanging in the
school was, "Exert yourself to kill harmful insects." In another
school there was a portrait of a former teacher who had covered the
walls of the school with water-colours of local scenery. I noticed in
the playground of a third school a flower-covered cairn and an
inscribed slab to the memory of a deceased master. Every school
possesses equipment taken from the enemy during the Russo-Japanese
war, usually a shell, a rifle and bayonet and an entrenching spade.
In this prefecture I heard of young men's associations' efforts to
discourage "cheek binding," which is the wearing of the head towel in
such a way as to disguise the face and so enable the cheek binder to
do, if he be so minded, things he might not do if he were
recognisable.
One day I made my headquarters in a town that had just been rebuilt
after a fire. Within four hours the blaze aided by a strong wind had
consumed 1,700 houses and caused the deaths of nine persons. The
destruction of so many dwellings is wrought by bits of paper or
thatch, or the light pieces of wood from the _shoji_, which are
carried aflame by the wind, setting fire to several houses
simultaneously.
Beside street gutters I came across little stone _jizō_, the
cheerful-looking guardian deities of the children playing near; but
they looked as incongruous in the position they occupied as did a
small shrine which was standing in the shadow of a gasometer.
I heard of contracts under which girls served as nurse girls in
private families. A poor farmer may enter into a contract when his
girl is five for her to go into service at eight. He receives cash in
anticipation of the fulfilment of the contract.
I was assured by a man competent to speak on the matter that a
certain small town was notorious for receiving boys who had been
stolen as small children from their homes in the hills. Up to 30 yen
might be given for a boy. There might be a dozen of such unfortunates
in the place. Happily many of the children obtained by this "slave
system," as my informant called it, ran away as soon as they were old
enough to realise how they had been treated.
I visited a well-known rural reformer in the village which he and his
father had improved under the precepts of Ninomiya. The hillside had
been covered with tea, orange trees and mulberry; the community had
not only got out of debt but had come to own land beyond its
boundaries; gambling, drunkenness and immorality, it was averred, had
"disappeared"; there were larger and better crops; and "the habit of
enjoying nature" had increased. The amusements of the village were
wrestling, fencing, _jūjitstu_, and the festivals.
I heard here a story of how a bridge which was often injured by stores
was as often mysteriously repaired. On a watch being kept it was found
that the good work was done by a villager who had been scrupulous to
keep secret his labours for the public welfare. Another tale was of a
poor man who bought an elaborate shrine and brought it to his humble
dwelling. On his neighbours suggesting that a finer house were a
fitter resting-place for such a shrine, the man replied: "I do not
think so. My shrine is the place of my parents and ancestors, and may
be fine. But the place in which the shrine stands is my place; it need
not be fine."
In travelling the roads notices are often seen on official-looking
boards with pent roofs. But all of these notices are not official; one
I copied was the advertisement of a shrine which declared itself to be
unrivalled for toothache. The horses on the roads are sometimes
protected from the sun by a kind of oblong sail, which works on a
swivel attached to the harness. Black velvety butterflies as big as
wrens flit about. (There are twice as many butterflies and moths in
Japan as at home.) Snakes, ordinarily of harmless varieties, are
frequently seen, dead or alive.
Many of the people one passes are smoking, usually the little brass
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, "Penmanship 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 Japanese friend told me that all the airs I mentioned
"seem tender and touching to us," and I remember a Japanese
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 Japanese 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 Japanese 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 Shidzuoka! 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 quantity 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 Japanese pears are rooted, the
branches would be too sappy. Foreign pears are not more generally
cultivated because they come to the market in competition with
oranges, and the Japanese 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 refreshing 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 masses 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 Japanese 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 Japan. 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 Japanese 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 sex 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 Japan 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 Japanese
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.