A COUNTRY DOCTOR AND HIS NEIGHBOURS
(CHIBA)
What was yet wanting must be sought by fortuitous and unguided
excursions and gleaned as industry should find or chance should
offer.--JOHNSON
When I first went to Chiba, the peninsular prefecture lying across the
bay from Tokyo, many carriages in the trains were heated by iron
_hibachi_[203]with pieces of old carpet thrown over them. It is on the
Chiba trains that the recruits of that section of the army which has
to do with the operation of the railways learn their business. It is
in part of Chiba--and also in a district in Tokyo prefecture--that the
earliest rice is grown. Chiba also contains more poultry than any
other prefecture.[204] It has the further distinction of having tried
to issue truthful crop statistics.[205]
Wherever one goes in Japan one is impressed by the large consumption
of fish--fresh, dried, and salted. Thin slices of raw fish make one of
the tasty dishes at a Japanese meal. The foreigner, forgetting the
Western relish for oysters and clams, is repelled by this raw fish,
but a liking for it seems to be quickly acquired. In Tokyo the slices
of raw fish are cut from the meaty bonito (tunny), but _tai_ (bream)
is also used. Bonito also provides the long narrow steaks, dried to a
mahogany-like hardness, which are known as _katsubushi_. This
_katsubushi_ keeps indefinitely and is grated or shaved with a kind
of plane and used much as the Western cook employs Parmesan cheese.
I heard a man in Chiba combating very strongly the idea of there being
a connection between leprosy and fish eating. As to leprosy, it is
doubtful if the belief expressed by the Chinese name for the disease,
"heavenly punishment," has disappeared. There are at least 24,000
lepers in Japan, and as a well-known Japanese work of reference
casually remarks, "the hospitals can at present accommodate only 5 per
cent. of them."
I could not but compare the undulating countryside, on which so vast
an amount of labour had been expended, with what it would have been
under European treatment and the influence of an European
climate--possibly picturesque pasture with high hedges. The congeries
of rice fields was fringed, where the water supply had given out, with
upland cultivation. On the low mud walls which separated the paddies
beans grew except at a boundary corner, where a tea or mulberry bush
served as a landmark. In looking down or up the little valleys one saw
how completely the houses had been brushed aside to the foot of the
low hills so that no land cultivable as paddies should be wasted. This
intensely developed countryside was not however ideal land. It was
often much too sandy. Not a few paddies had to depend to some extent
on the water they could catch for themselves. A naturally draughty and
hungry land was yielding crops by a laborious manurial improvement of
its physical and chemical condition, by wonders being wrought in rural
hydraulics and by unending industry in cultivation and petty
engineering.
It might be supposed that beauty had gone from the countryside. Some
of what the land agents call the amenities of the district had
certainly disappeared. There seemed to be nowhere for the pedestrian
to sit down in order to refresh himself with those rural sights and
sounds which exhilarate the spirit. But this marvellously delved,
methodised and trimmed countryside had a character and a stimulus of
its own. It reflected the energy and persistence that had subdued it.
I saw nothing ugly. The tidied rice plots, shaped at every possible
curve and angle, and eloquent of centuries of unremitting toil; the
upland beyond them, worked to a skilled perfection of finish; the
nesting houses which nowhere offended the eye; the big still ponds
contrived by the rude forefathers of the hamlet for water storage or
the succour of the rice in the hottest weather; the low hilltops green
with pine because cultivation could not ascend so far, and hiding here
and there a Shinto sanctuary: such a countryside was satisfying in its
own way.
In Chiba, as in other prefectures, one is impressed by the way in
which the exertions of many generations have resulted in the levelling
of wide areas and even the complete removal of small hills. In many
places one can still see low hills in process of demolition. In Tokyo
itself several small hills have been carried off in recent years.
I was in Chiba several times and I remember to have noticed one winter
day with what considered roughness the paddies had been dug in order
to receive from frost and sun the benefits which are as good as a
manuring. Some notion of the strength of the weather forces at work
may be gathered from the fact that, though I was walking without an
overcoat and was glad to shade my eyes by pulling down the brim of my
hat, the frost of the two previous nights had produced ice on the
paddies an inch thick.
Sometimes at the irrigation reservoirs one may see notice boards
announcing that these water areas are stocked with _koi_ (carp). This
fish is also kept in the paddies. The carp are put in as yearlings or
two-year-olds, when the paddies are flooded, and a score out of every
hundred come out in the autumn--assuming the happiest conditions--ten
inches or so long. Carp culture flourishes in the sericulture
districts, where the pupæ which remain when the cocoons are unwound
are thrown to the fish; but pupæ fed carp have a flavour which
diminishes their value. Indeed paddy-field fish, which on the whole
must have a rather troubled existence, do not bring the price of river
carp. Other fish than carp, eels for instance, are also kept in
paddies.[206]
I visited a vigorous personality who was at once a landowner and
rural oculist, as his father and grandfather had been before him. He
had graduated at Tokyo and had kept himself abreast of German
specialist literature. There was accommodation for about a hundred
patients in the buildings attached to his house. He believed in the
efficacy in eye cases of "the air of the rice fields," not to speak of
the shrine which overlooks the patients' quarters. As the number of
blind people in Japan is appalling,[207] it was interesting to hear
the opinion that the chief causes were gonorrhœa, inadequate attention
at birth, insufficient nourishment in childhood and nervous
disease--all more or less preventible. Nearly a quarter of my host's
patients had had their eyes wounded by rice-stem points while stooping
in the paddies. As the people are hurt in the busy season they often
put off coming for help until it is too late.
The landowner-oculist's premises were lighted by natural gas from a
depth of 900 ft. According to a fellow-guest, who happened to be an
expert in this matter, natural gas is to be had all over Japan.[208]
The room in which I slept belonged to a part of the house which was of
great age, but by my _futon_ there was laid an electric torch.
A pleasant thing during my visit was the presence of a dozen
intelligent, kindly students who early in the evening came and knelt
in a semicircle round us, "in order to profit by our talk." One of
them, a son of the house, an athlete (and now, after travelling in
Europe, his father's successor), did all sorts of services for me
during my stay, in the simple-hearted fashion that shows such an
attractive side of the Japanese character. One question asked by the
students was, "For what reasons does _Sensei_ believe that the
influence of women in public life would be good?" Another enquiry was,
"Which are the best London and Paris papers?" These lads could hardly
hope to get through the university before they were twenty-five or
twenty-six. Yet, compared with our undergraduates, they had very
little time for general reading, discussions and outdoor sports. I
remember a man of some experience in the educational world saying to
me, "Our students do not read enough apart from their studies; it is
their misfortune." They have not only the burden of having to learn
nearly several thousand ideographs,[209] three scripts and Japanese
and Chinese pronunciation. They have to acquire Western languages,
which, owing to their absolute dissimilarity from Oriental
tongues--for example, the word for "I" is _watakushi_--must be learnt
entirely from memory. It is not that the Japanese student does not
begin early as well as leave off late. A professor once said to me,
"For some little time after I first went to school I was still fed
from the bosom of my mother." In some ways it is no doubt a source of
strength for Japan that her men can spend from their earliest years to
the age of twenty-six on the acquirement of knowledge and
self-discipline--the privileges of the student class and the
generosity of their families and friends and the public at large are
remarkable--but the disadvantages are plain. No sight seems stranger
to a new arrival in Japan than that of so many men in their middle or
late twenties still wearing the conspicuous kimono and German bandsman
cap of the student.
To return to our host, he told us that tenants were "getting clever."
They were paying their rent in "worse and worse qualities of rice."
The landlords "encouraged" their tenants with gifts of tools, clothes
or saké in order that they might bring them the best rice, but the
tenants evidently thought it paid better to forgo these benefits and
market their best rice. This raises the question whether rent ought
nowadays to be paid in kind. Rural opinion as a whole is in favour of
continuing in the old way, but there is a clear-headed if small
section of rural reformers which is for rent being paid in cash.
One thing I found in my notes of my talk with the landowner-oculist I
hesitated to transcribe without confirmation. Speaking of the physique
of the people, he had said that few farmers could carry the weights
their fathers and grandfathers could move about. But later on a high
agricultural authority mentioned to me that it had been found
necessary to reduce the weight of a bale of rice from 19 to 18
_kwamme_ and then to 15--1 _kwamme_ is 8.26 lbs.
In the _oaza_ in which I was staying there were eighty families.
Seventy were tenants. Under a savings arrangement initiated by my
host, the hamlet, including its five peasant proprietors, was saving
120 yen a month. On the other hand, more than half the tenants were in
debt "in connection with family excesses," such as weddings, births
and burials. But there might be unknown savings. I should state that
the villagers seemed contented enough.
For some reason or other I was particularly struck by the sturdiness
of the small girls. This was interesting because Chiba had for long an
evil reputation for infanticide, and under a system of infanticide in
the Far East it would be supposed--I have heard this view stoutly
questioned--that more girls die than boys. The landowner-oculist was
of opinion that in stating the causes of the low economic condition of
his tenants the abating of infanticide must be put first. People no
longer restricted themselves to three of a family. The average area
available locally was only 6 _tan_ of paddy and 1.2 _tan_ of dry land.
In a one-crop district in which there was work for only a part of the
year this area was obviously insufficient and there was not enough dry
land for mulberries. Then taxation was now 2-1/2 yen per bale of rice
(_hyō_). A third of the rice went in rent.
I tried to find out what the _oaza_ might be spending on religion. The
Shinto priest seemed to get 5 sen a month per family, which as there
are eighty families would be 48 yen yearly. The Buddhist priest had
land attached to his temple and money was given him at burials and at
the _Bon_ season. The _oaza_ might spend 100 yen a year to send five
pilgrims as far away as Yamagata, on the other side of Japan. The
priests did not seem to count for much. "Their only concern with the
public," I was informed, "is to be succoured by it. They are living
very painfully. The Buddhist priests have to send money to their sect
at Kyoto." In one of my strolls I passed the Shinto priest carrying a
rice basket and looking, as my companion said, "just like any other
man." At a shrine I saw a number of bowls hung up. A hole cut in the
bottom of each seemed a pathetic symbol of need, material or
spiritual.
The keeper of the teahouse in the _oaza_ had been given a small sum by
our host to take himself off, but in the village of which the _oaza_
formed a part there were two teahouses, where ten times as much was
spent as was laid out on religion. No one had ever heard of a case of
illegitimacy in the _oaza_ but there had been in the twelve months
three cases which pointed to abortion. It was five years since there
had been an arrest. The young men's association helped twice a year
families whose boys had been conscripted.
According to what I was told in various quarters, some landowners in
Chiba did a certain amount of public work but most devoted themselves
to indoor trivialities. The fact that two banks had recently broken at
the next town, one for a quarter of a million yen, and that a
landowner had lost a total of 30,000 yen in these smashes, seemed to
show that there was a certain amount of money somewhere in the
district. No one appeared to "waste time on politics." In ten years
"there had been one or two politicians," but "one member of Parliament
set a wholesome example by losing a great deal of money in politics."
As to local politics, election to the prefectural assembly seemed to
cost about 500 yen. Membership of the village assembly might mean "a
cup of _saké_ apiece to the electors."
I was assured that this hamlet was above the economic level of the
county. The belief was expressed that it could maintain that position
for three or four years. "I do not feel so much anxiety about the
present condition of the people," my host said; "they are passive
enough: but as to the future it is a difficult and almost insoluble
question."
"The condition of our rural life is the most difficult question in
Japan," said a fellow guest.
In one of the farmers' houses a girl, with the assistance of a
younger brother, was weaving rough matting for baling up artificial
manure. Near them two Minorcas were laying in open boxes. In this
family there were seven children, "three or four of whom can work."
The hired land was 8 _tan_ of paddy and 2-1/2 of dry. There was
nothing to the good at the end of the year. Indeed rice had had to be
borrowed from the landlord. The family was therefore working merely to
keep itself alive. But it looked cheerful enough. Looking cheerful is,
however, a Japanese habit. The conditions of life here were what many
Westerners would consider intolerable. But it was not Westerners but
Orientals who were concerned, and what one had to try to guess was how
far the conditions were satisfactory to Eastern imaginations and
requirements. The people at every house I visited--as it happened to
be a holiday the mending of clothing and implements seemed to be in
order--were plainly getting enjoyment from the warm sunshine.
Undoubtedly the long spells of sunshine in the comparatively idle
period of the year make hard conditions of life more endurable.
In a very small house which was little more than a shelter, the father
and mother of a tenant were living. It is not uncommon for old
peasants to build a dwelling for themselves when they get nearly past
work, or sometimes after the eldest son marries.
I found a 1-_chō_ peasant proprietor playing _go_ and rather the worse
for saké, though it was early in the morning. A 3-_chō_ proprietor was
living in a good-sized house which had a courtyard and an imposing
gateway.
On the thatch of one house I noticed a small straw horse perhaps two
feet long. On July 7 such a horse is taken by young people to the
hills, where a bale of grass is tied on its back. On the reappearance
of the figure at the house, dishes of the ceremonial red rice and of
the ordinary food of the family are set before it. "The offering of
other than horse food indicates," it was explained, "that the desire
is to keep the straw animal as a little deity." Finally the horse is
flung on the roof.
I went some distance to visit an _oaza_ of twenty families. It was
described to me as "well off and peaceful." Alas, one peasant
proprietor had gone to Tokyo, where he had made money, and on his
return had built his second son a house with Tokyo labour instead of
with the labour of his neighbours. So the _oaza_ was "excited with
bitter inward animosity." Like our own hamlets, these _oaza_ in the
sunshine, seemingly so peaceful, whisper nothing to townsfolk of their
bickerings and feuds.
One of the thatched mud houses I came to was at once a primitive
co-operative sale-and-purchase society and the clubhouse of the old
people of the _oaza_. The rent the old folk received from the society
was enough to maintain the building. The oldsters gather from time to
time in order to eat, drink and make merry with gossip and dancing.
Dancing is a possibility for old people because it is swaying, sliding
and attitudinising, with an occasional stamp of the foot, rather than
hopping and whirling. One of the best amateur dances I have seen was
performed by a grandsire. Such clubhouses, places for the comfort of
the ageing and aged, are found in many villages. Young people are not
admitted. The subscription to this particular clubhouse was 2 yen and
3 _sho_ of saké on joining and 2 yen a year.
As we went on our way there was pointed out to me a house the owner of
which had sold half a _tan_ of land for 120 yen and was drinking
steadily. He had tried to make money by opening an open-air village
theatre which owing to rain had been a failure.
I visited an _oaza_ where all the land belonged to the man I called
upon. He assured me that most of his tenants "made ends meet." The
remainder had a deficiency at the end of the year due to "lack of will
to save" and to their "lack of capital which caused them to pay
interest to manure dealers." A co-operative society had just been
started.
In looking at a map of the village to which some of these _oaza_
belonged I noticed many holdings tinted a special colour. These were
called "jump land." They consisted of land subdued from the wild by
strangers. The properties were regarded as belonging to the _oaza_ in
which their cultivators lived.
I walked through a bit of woodland which had formerly been held in
common and had been divided up, amid felicitations no doubt, at the
rate of half a tan each to every family. But the well-to-do people
soon got hold of their poorer neighbours' portions.
In a roughish tract I came on burial grounds. One portion was set
apart for the eight families which recognised the chief landlord as
their head. The graves of lowlier folk seemed to occur anywhere. Each
grave was covered by a pyramidal mound of sandy earth with a piece of
twig stuck in it. Sometimes a tree had been planted and had grown. A
child's grave had some tiny bowls of food and a clay doll before a
little headstone. By way of shelter for these offerings there was hung
on the headstone a peasant's wide straw hat. A large beehive-shaped
bamboo basket over another grave was a reminder of the time when a
grave needed such protection in order to save the body from wild
animals.
I saw at a distance in the midst of paddies two tree-covered mounds, a
large one and a small one. They looked like the grave mounds I had
seen in China, but it was suggested that they were probably on an old
frontier line and marked spots at which ceremonies for scaring off
disease were performed.
In one place I found the people planting plum trees in order to meet
their communal taxation. It was reckoned that the yield of one tree
when it came into full bearing would defray the taxes of a
moderate-sized family.
An open space in a wood was pointed out to me as the spot on which
dead horses were formerly thrown to the dogs and birds. Nowadays
notice was given to the Eta that a dead horse was to be cast away, and
they came and, after skinning the animal, buried the body. Farther
off, on the high road, I saw an 8 ft. high monument to a local steed
that had died in Manchuria.
One of my further visits to Chiba was in the spring. The paddies,
which had been fallow since November, were under water; but much of
the stubble had been turned over with the long-bladed mattock. The
seed beds from which the rice is transplanted to the paddies were a
vivid green. On the high ground I saw good clean crops of barley and
wheat, beans and peas, on soil of very moderate quality.
The name of Funabashi at a station reminded me of a Japanese friend
having told me that it was "famous for a shrine and a very immoral
place." But I afterwards heard that the keeper of that shrine, "acting
from conscientious motives, gave up his lucrative post and died a poor
man." It is said of one of the most sacred places in Japan that it is
also the "most immoral." Kyoto which contains nine hundred shrines is
also supposed to harbour several thousand women of bad character.
I passed a place where 25,000 Russian prisoners had been detained.
There was an old peasant there who told his son that he could not
understand why so many Japanese went abroad at such great cost to see
the different peoples of the world. If they would only stay at home,
he said, they would see them all in turn, for first there had been the
Chinese prisoners, then the Russians and now there were the Germans.
In the uplands it was peaceful and restful to walk through the shady
lanes between the tree-studded homesteads or along the road passing
between plots of mulberry, tea, vegetables or grain, cultivated with
the care given to plants in a garden. In the herbage by the roadside,
but not among the crops I need hardly say, I noticed dandelions, sow
thistles, Scots thistles, plantains and some other familiar weeds.
In the paddies some men wore only a narrow band of red cotton between
their legs joined to a waist string, which, though convenient wear in
paddies, was comically conspicuous. I recall a friend's story of a
little foreign girl of seven who stayed with her mother in a Japanese
hamlet and struck up a friendship with a kindly old peasant. One hot
summer day the child came home carrying all her scanty garments over
her arm, and covered with mud to the waist. In answer to her mother's
enquiries the child said, "Well, mother, Ito San has all his clothes
off, and I could not go into the paddy to help him with mine on."
I visited an elementary school which was little more than a shed. The
roofing was of bark and the paper-covered window shutters were of the
roughest. It said much for the stamina of the children that they could
sit there in bleak weather. An attempt had been made to shut off the
classes from one another by pieces of thin cotton sheeting fastened to
a string. But such essential furniture, from a hygienic point of view,
as benches with backs had been provided, for it is considered by the
national educational authorities that kneeling in the Japanese manner
is inimical to physical development. I noticed, also, that when the
children sang they had been taught to place their hands on their hips
in order that their chests might benefit from the vocal exercise. The
earnestness and kindliness of the men and women teachers were evident.
All the teachers came to school bare-foot on _geta_.[210]
The sea was not far off and we went to the beach where there was
nothing between us and America. My companion and I were carried over
shallows on the backs of fishermen, wonderful bronze-coloured figures.
Above high-water mark heaps of small fish were drying. They were to be
turned into oil and fish-waste manure. I saw an earthenware vase with
a hole in the bottom like a flowerpot and found that it was used, with
a rope attached to the rim, for catching octopus. When the octopus
comes across such a vase on the sea bottom he regards it as a shelter
constructed on exactly the right principles and takes up his abode
therein. He is easily captured, for he refuses to let go his vase when
it is brought to the surface. Indeed the only way to dislodge him is
to pour hot water through the hole in the bottom of his upturned
tenement.
FOOTNOTES:
[203] The Japanese firepot, which is made of wood or porcelain as well
as metal, contains pieces of charcoal smouldering in wood ash.
[204] I saw poultry of the table breeds which we call Indian Game or
Malay; the Japanese call them Siamese.
[205] See Appendix LVIII.
[206] In 1918 carp was produced to the value of a million and a half
yen and eels to the value of nearly a million.
[207] See Appendix LIX.
[208] See Appendix LX.
[209] To cite a word already used in these pages, there are half a
dozen words spelt _ko_ and as many as fourteen spelt _kō_, but all
have a different ideograph. When the prolongation of the educational
course by the ideographs is dwelt on, it is wholesome for us to
remember Professor Gilbert Murray's declaration that "English spelling
entails a loss of one year in the child's school time." Other
authorities have considered the loss to be much more.
[210] For statistics of stamina, heights and weights of children, see
Appendix LXI.