CHAPTER VI

BEFORE OKUNITAMA-NO-MIKO-NO-KAMI [[36]]

Nor do I see why we should take it for granted that their gods are unworthy of respect.—Valerius

In Aichi prefecture I was asked to plant trees (persimmons) in the grounds of three temples or shrines and on the land of several farmers. In an exposed position on a hill-top I found persimmons being grown on a system under which the landlord provided the land, trees and manures and the farmer the labour, and the produce was equally divided.

The cryptomeria at one of the shrines I visited were of great age. All of them had lost their tops by lightning. It cannot be easy for those who have never seen cryptomeria or the redwoods of California to realise the impression made by dark giant trees that have stood before some shrine for generations. At the approach to the shrine of which I speak there were venerable wooden statues. I recall one figure carved in wood as full of life as that of the famous Egyptian headman.

The aged chief priest, who was assisted by two younger priests, kindly invited me to take part in a Shinto service. First, I ceremonially washed my hands and rinsed my mouth. Then, having ascended the steps, my shoes were removed for me so that my hands should not be defiled. On entering the shrine I knelt opposite the young priests, one of whom brought me the usual evergreen bough with paper streamers. On receiving it I rose to my feet, passed through the beautiful building and advanced to what I may call, for the lack of a more accurate term, the altar table. On this table, which, as is usual in Shinto ceremonies, was of new white wood following the ancient design, I laid the offering. Then I bowed and gave the customary three smart hand-claps which summon the attention of the deity of the shrine, and bowed again. On returning to my former kneeling-place one of the priests offered me saké and a small piece of dried fish in paper.[[37] ] The chief priest was good enough to read and to hand to me an address headed, "Words of Congratulation to the Investigator," which may be Englished as follows:

"I, Yukimichi Otsu, the chief priest, speak most respectfully and reverently before the shrine of the august deity, Okunitama-no-miko-no-kami, and other deities here enshrined: Dr. Robertson Scott, of England, is here this good day. He comes to see the things of Japan under the governance of our gracious Emperor. I, having made myself quite pure and clean, open the door of gracious eyes that they may look upon those who are here. May Dr. Robertson Scott be protected during night and day, no accident happening wherever he may go. Dr. Robertson Scott goes everywhere in this country; he may cross a hundred rivers and pass over many hills. May there be no foundering of his boat, no stumbling of his horse. Offering produce of land and sea, I say this most respectfully before the shrine."

After the shrine I visited a co-operative store, curiously reminiscent of many a similar rural enterprise I had seen in Denmark. Sugar, coarser than anything sold at home, was dear. Half the price paid for sugar in Japan is tax. I was informed that there were no fewer than 400 cooperative organisations in the prefecture.

AUTHOR QUESTIONING OFFICIALS—

AND PLANTING COMMEMORATIVE TREES

At several places, although the villagers were busy rice planting, the young men's association turned out. The young men were reinforced by reservists and came sharply to attention as our kuruma (jinrikisha, usually pneumatic-tyred) passed. Some of the villages we bowled through were off the ordinary track, and the older villagers observed the ancient custom of coming out from their houses or farm plots, dropping on their knees and bowing low as we passed.[[38] ] All over Japan, a villager encountered on the road removed the towel from his head before bowing. If a cloak or outer coat was worn, it was taken off or the motion of taking it off was made. Frequently, in showery weather, cyclists who were wearing mackintoshes or capes, alighted and removed these outer garments before saluting.

RICE POLISHING BY FOOT POWER.

I saw a village which a few years ago had been "disorderly and poor" and in continual friction with its landlord. Eventually this man realised his responsibility, and, inspired by Mr. Yamasaki, took the situation in hand. He talked in a straightforward way with his villagers, reduced a number of rents and spent money freely in ameliorative work. To-day the village is "remarkable for its good conduct" and the relation between landlord and tenant seems to be everything that can be desired. The landlord is not only the moving spirit of the co-operative store but has started a school for girls of from fifteen to twenty. They bring their own food but the schooling is free.

On the gables of one or two houses near the roof I noticed ventilators which were cut in the form of the Chinese ideograph which means water, a kind of charm against fire. At the door of one rather well-to-do peasant house I saw several paper charms against toothache. There was also an inscription intimating that the householder was a director of the co-operative society and another announcing that he was an expert in the application of the moxa.[ [39]] Every house I went into had a collection of charms. One charm, a verse of poetry hung upside-down, as is the custom, was against ants. Another was understood to ensure the safe return of a straying cat.

In one house in the village my attention was drawn to the fact that the rice pot contained a large percentage of barley.

In two or three places I passed pits for the excavation of lignite, which does not look unlike the wood taken out of bogs. A pit I stopped at was twenty-two fathoms deep. There were twenty miners at work and air was being pumped down.

One of the things we in the West might imitate with advantage is the village crematorium. In Japan it is of the simplest construction. The rate for villagers was 50 sen, that for outsiders 2 yen. No doubt there would be an additional yen for the priest. In a little building which was thirty years old 200 bodies had been cremated.

I looked into a small co-operative rice storehouse. The building was provided by a number of members "swearing" to save at the rate of a yen and a half a month each until the funds needed had accumulated. The money was obtained by extra labour in the evening. Just before I left Japan the Department of Agriculture was arranging to spend 2 million yen within a ten-years' period to encourage the building of 4,000 rice storehouses.

As I watched the water pouring from one rice field to another and wondered how the rights of landowners were ever reconciled, someone reminded me of the phrase, "water splashing quarrels," that is disputes in which each side blames the other without getting any farther forward. To take an unfair advantage in controversy is to draw water into one's own paddy. The equivalent for "pouring water on a duck's back" is "flinging water in a frog's face." A Western European is always astonished in Japan by the lung power of Far Eastern frogs. The noise is not unlike the bleating of lambs.

Every now and again one comes on a fragrant bed of lotus in its paddy field. It seems odd at first that lotus—and burdock—should be cultivated for food. As a pickle burdock is eatable, but lotus and some unfamiliar tuberous plants are pleasant food resembling in flavour boiled chestnuts. Konnyaku (hydrosme rivieri), a near relative of the arum lily, is produced to the weight of 11 million kwan—a kwan is roughly 8¼ lbs.[[40]] The yield of burdock is about 44 million kwan. The chief of all vegetables is the giant radish, of which 7¼ million kwan are grown. Taro yields about 150 million kwan. Foreigners usually like the young sprouts taken from the roots of the bamboo, a favourite Japanese vegetable.

This is as convenient a place as any to speak of an important agricultural fact, the enormous amount of filth worked into the paddies. As is well known, hardly any of the night soil of Japan is wasted. Japanese agriculture depends upon it. Formerly the night soil was removed from the houses after being emptied into a pair of tubs which the peasant carried from a yoke. Such yoke-carried tubs are still seen, but are chiefly employed in carrying the substance to the paddies. The tubs which are taken to dwellings are now mostly borne on light two-wheeled handcarts which carry sometimes four and sometimes six. A farmer will push or pull his manure cart from a town ten or twelve miles off. It is difficult to leave or enter a town without meeting strings of manure carts. The men who haul the carts get together for company on their tedious journey. They seem insensible to the concentrated odour. Often the wife or son or daughter may be seen pushing behind a cart. There is a certain amount of transportation by horse-drawn frame carts, carrying a dozen or sixteen tubs, and by boats. I was told of a city of half a million inhabitants which had thirty per cent. of its night soil taken ten miles away. The work was undertaken by a co-operative society which paid the municipality the large sum of 70,000 yen a year. The removal of night soil, its storage in the fields in sunken butts and concrete cisterns—carefully protected by thatched, wooden or concrete roofs—and its constant application to paddy fields or upland plots cause an odour to prevail which the visitor to Japan never forgets. [[41]]

It must not be supposed that, because the Japanese are careful to utilise human waste products, no other manure is employed. There is an enormous consumption of chemical fertilisers. Then there are brought into service all sorts of crop-feeding materials, such as straw, grass, compost, silkworm waste, fish waste, and of course the manure produced by such stock as is kept. [[42]] In Aichi the value of human waste products used on the land is only a quarter of the value of the bean cake and fish waste similarly employed.

At Mr. Yamasaki's excellent agricultural school (prefectural), which I visited more than once, [[43]] I was struck by the grave bearing of the students. I saw them not only in their classrooms but in their large hall, where I was invited to speak from a platform between the busts of two rural worthies, Ninomiya, of whom we have heard before, and another who was "distinguished by the righteousness of his public career." As in the Danish rural high schools, store is set on hard physical exercise. An hour of exercise—judō (jujitsu), sword play or military drill—is taken from six to seven in the morning and another at midday with the object of "strengthening the spirit" and "developing the character," for "our farmers must not only be honest and determined but courageous." Severe physical labour, shared by the teacher, is also given out of doors, for example, in heaping manure. "We believe," said one of the instructors, "in moral virtue taught by the hands."

For an hour a day "the main points of moral virtue" are put before the different grades of students, according to their ages and development. The school has a guild to which the twenty teachers and all the students belong. It is a kind of co-operative society for the "purchase and distribution of daily necessities," but one of its objects is "the maintenance of public morality." Then there is the students' association which has literary and gymnastic sides, the one side "to refine wisdom and virtue," the other "for the rousing of spirit." Mention may also be made of a "discipline calendar" of fixed memorial days and ceremonies "that all the students should observe": the ceremony of reading the Imperial Rescript on education, thrift and morality, and the ceremonies at the end of rice planting, at harvest and at the maturity of the silk-worm. The fitting-up of the school is Spartan but the rooms are high and well lighted and ventilated. The students' hot bath accommodates a dozen lads at a time. The studies are also the dormitories, and in the corner of each there is stored a big mosquito netting. Except for a few square yards near the doors, these rooms consist of the usual raised platform covered with the national tatami or matting.

I heard a characteristic story of the Director. During the Russo-Japanese war everybody was economising, and many people who had been in the habit of riding in kuruma began to walk. Our agricultural celebrity had always had a passion for walking, so it was out of his power to economise in kuruma. What he did was to cease walking and take to kuruma riding, for, he said, "in war time one must work one's utmost, and if I move about quickly I can get more done."

I may add a story which this rare man himself told me. I had seen in his house a photograph of a memorial slab celebrating the heroic death of a peasant. It appeared that in a period of scarcity there was left in this peasant's village only one unbroken bale of rice. This rice was in the possession of the peasant, who was suffering from lack of food. But he would not cook any of the rice because he knew that if he did the village would be without seed in spring. Eventually the brave man was found dead of hunger in his cottage. His pillow had been the unopened bale of rice.

In the house of a small peasant proprietor I visited the inscriptions on the two gaku signified "Buddha's teaching broken by a beautiful face" and "Cast your eyes on high." On the wall there was also a copy of a resolution concerning a recent Imperial Rescript which 500 rural householders, at a meeting in the county, had "sworn to observe," and, as I understood, to read two or three times a year.

Japan, as I have already noted, has always been a more democratic country than is generally understood; but the people have been accustomed to act under leaders. Some time ago an official of the Department of Agriculture visited a certain district in order to speak at the local temple in advocacy of the adjustment of rice fields. (See Chapter VIII.) A dignitary corresponding to the chairman of an English county council was at the temple to receive the official, but at the time appointed for the meeting to begin the audience consisted of one old man. Although the official from Tokyo and the gunchō (head of a county) waited for some time, no one else put in an appearance. So they asked the old man the reason. He replied by asking them the object of the meeting. They told him. He said that he had so understood and that the community had so understood, but the farmers were very busy men. Therefore, as he was the oldest man in the district, they had sent him as their representative. Their instructions were that he would be able to tell from his experience of the district whether what the authorities proposed would be a good thing for it or not. If he considered it to be a bad thing they would not do it, but if he thought it to be a good thing they would do it. He was to hear all that was said and then to give a decision on the community's behalf to the officials who might attend. "So," said the old man to the Tokyo official and the gunchō, "if you convince me you have convinced the village." And after two hours' explanation they convinced him!

There are in Japan hydraulic engineering works as remarkable in their way as any I have seen in the Netherlands. Some of these works, for example the tunnels for conducting rice-field water through considerable hills, have been the work of unlettered peasants. In one place I found that 80 miles or more of irrigation was based on a canal made two centuries ago. It is good to see so many embankings of refractory streams and excavations of river beds commemorated by slabs recording the public services of the men who, often at their own charges, carried out these works of general utility.

In various parts of the country I came upon smallholders who had reached a high degree of proficiency in the fine art of dwarfing trees. One day I stopped to speak with a farmer who by this art had added 1,000 yen a year to his agricultural income. A thirty-years-old maple was one of his triumphs. Another was a pomegranate about a foot and a half high. It was in flower and would bear fruit of ordinary size. The wonder of dwarfing is wrought, as is now well known, by cramping the roots in the pot and by extremely skilful pruning, manuring and watering. While we drank tea some choice specimens were displayed before a screen of unrelieved gold. In the room in which we sat the farmer had arranged in a bowl of water with great effectiveness hydrangea, a spray of pomegranate and a cabbage.

One marks the respect shown to the rural policeman. In his summer uniform of white cotton, with his flat white cap and white gloves, and an imposing sword, he looks like a naval officer, even if, as sometimes happens, his feet are in zori. He gets respect because of his dignified presence and sense of official duty, because of the considerable powers which he is able to exercise, because he stands for the Government, and because he is sometimes of a higher social grade than that to which policemen belong in other countries. At the Restoration many men of the samurai class did not think it beneath them to enter the new sword-wearing police force and they helped to give it a standing which has been maintained. As to the policeman being a representative of the Government, the ordinary Japanese has a way of speaking of the Government doing this or that as if the Government were irresistible power. Average Japanese do not yet conceive the Government as something which they have made and may unmake[[44] ]. But is it likely that they should, parliamentary history, the work of their betters, being as short as it is? It is not without significance that the Chambers of the Diet are housed in temporary wooden buildings.

The rural policeman is not only a paternal guardian of the peace but an administrative official. He keeps an eye on public health. He is charged with correctly maintaining the record of names and addresses—and some other particulars—of everybody in the village. It is his duty to secure correct information as to the name, age, place of origin and real business of every stranger. He attends all public meetings, even of the young men's and young women's associations, and no strolling players can give their entertainment without his presence. As to the movements of strangers, my own were obviously well known. Indeed a friend told me that in the event of my losing myself I had only to ask a policeman and he would be able to tell me where I was expected next! At the houses of well-to-do people I was struck by the way in which the local police officer—sometimes, no doubt, a sergeant or perhaps a man of the rank of our superintendent or chief constable—called with the headman and joined our kneeling circle in the reception-room. Nominally he came to pay his respects, but his chief object, no doubt, was to take stock of what was going on. I invariably took the opportunity of closely interviewing him.

The extraordinary degree to which Japanese are commonly accustomed in their differences of opinion to refrain from blows makes many of their quarrels harmless. The threat to send for the policeman or the actual appearance of the policeman has an almost magical effect in calming a disturbance. The Japanese policeman believes very much in reproving or reprimanding evil doers and in reasoning with folk whose "carelessness" has attracted attention. Sometimes for greater impressiveness the admonitions or exhortations are delivered at the police station[ [45]]. In more than one village I heard a tribute paid to the good influence exerted on a community by a devoted policeman.

The chief of an agricultural experiment station also seems to obtain a large measure of respect, to some extent, no doubt, because he occupies a public office. The regard felt for Mr. Yamasaki goes deeper. A few years ago he was sent on a mission abroad and in his absence his local admirers cast about for a way of showing their appreciation of his work. They began by raising what was described to me as "naturally not a large but an honourable sum." With this money they decided to add three rooms to his dwelling. They had noted how visitors were always coming to his house in order to profit by his experience and advice. Mr. Yamasaki uses the rooms primarily as "an hotel for people of good intentions—those who work for better conditions." I was proud to stay at this "hotel" and to receive as a parting gift an old seppuku blade.

Which reminds me that one night at a house in the country I found myself sitting under photographs of the late General and Countess Nogi and of the gaunt bloodstained room of the depressing "foreign style" house in which they committed suicide on the day of the funeral of the Emperor Meiji[ [46]]. One of my fellow-guests was a professor at the Imperial University; the other was a teacher of lofty and unselfish spirit. They were both samurai. I mentioned that a man of worth and distinction has said to me that, while he recognised the nobility of Nogi's action, he could but not think it unjustifiable. I was at once told that Japanese who do not approve of Nogi's action "must be over-influenced by Western thought." "Those who are quintessentially Japanese," it was explained, "think that Nogi did right. Bodily death is nothing, for Nogi still lives among us as a spirit. He labours with a stronger influence. Many hearts were purified by his sacrifice. One of Nogi's reasons for suicide was no doubt that he might be able to follow his beloved Emperor, but his intention was also to warn many vicious or unpatriotic people. Some politicians and rich people say they are patriotic, but they are animated by selfish motives and desires. Nogi's suicide was due to his loving his fellow-countrymen sincerely. Surely he was acting after the manner of Christ. Nogi crucified himself for the people in order to atone in a measure for their sins and to lead them to a better way of life."

I heard from my friends something of Nogi's demeanour. The old general was a familiar figure in Tokyo. In the street cars—those were the days when they were not over-crowded—he was always seen standing. His admirers used to say that his face "beamed with beneficence." But Nogi, though he loved to be within reach of the Emperor and did his part as head of the Peers' School, liked nothing better than to get away to the country. He was originally a peasant and he still possessed a chō of upland holding. He was glad to work on it with the digging mattock of the farmer.