CHAPTER XVI
PROBLEMS BEHIND THE PICTURESQUE
(SAITAMA, GUMMA, NAGANO AND YAMANASHI)
A foreigner who comes among us without prejudice may speak his mind freely.—Goldsmith
I went back to Nagano to visit the silk industrial regions. My route lay through the prefectures of Saitama and Gumma. I left Tokyo on the last day of June. Many farmers were threshing their barley. On the dry-land patches, where the grain crop had been harvested, soya bean, sown between the rows of grain long before harvest, was becoming bushier now that it was no longer overshadowed. Maize in most places was about a foot high, but where it had been sown early was already twice that height. The sweet potato had been planted out from its nursery bed for weeks. Here and there were small crops of tea which had been severely picked for its second crop. I noticed melons, cucumbers and squashes, and patches of the serviceable burdock. Many paddy farmers had water areas devoted to lotus, but the big floating leaves were not yet illumined by the mysterious beauty of the honey-scented flowers.
In order to imagine the scene on the rice flats, the reader must not think of the glistering paddy fields [[136]] as stretching in an unbroken monotonous series over the plain. Occasionally a rocky patch, outcropping from the paddy tract, made a little island of wood. Sometimes it was a sacred grove in which one caught a glimpse of a Shinto shrine or the head stones of the dead. Sometimes there was a little clump of cropped tree greenery which kept a farmhouse cool in summer and, at another time of the year, sheltered from the wind. Few householders were too poor or too busy to be without their little patch of flowers.
Before the train climbed out of the Kwanto plain temperature of not far below 100° F. the planting of rice seemed to be almost an enviable occupation. The peasant had his great umbrella-shaped straw hat, sometimes an armful of green stuff tied on his back, and a delicious feeling of being up to the knees in water or mud on a hot day-one recalled the mud baths of the West-when the alternative was walking on a dusty road, digging on the sun-baked upland or perspiring in a house or the train.
With the rise in the level a few mulberries began to appear and gradually they occupied a large part of the holdings. Sometimes the mulberries were cultivated as shoots from a stump a little above ground level, and sometimes as a kind of small standard. As mulberry culture increased, the silk factories' whitewashed cocoon stores and the tall red and black iron chimneys of the factories themselves became more numerous. It is a pity that the silk factory is not always so innocent-looking inside as the pure white exterior of its stores might suggest. It is certain that the overworked girl operatives, sitting at their steaming basins, drawing the silk from the soaked cocoons, were glad to find the weather conditions such that they could have the sides of their reeling sheds removed.
At many of the railway stations there were stacks of large, round, flat bean cakes, for the farmer feeds his "cake" to his fields direct, not through the medium of cattle. Although a paddy receives less agreeable nutritive materials than bean cake, the extensive use of this cake must be comforting to a little school of rural reformers in the West. These ardent vegetarians have refused to listen to the allegation that vegetarianism was impossible because without meat-eating there would be no cattle and therefore no nitrogen for the fields.
It was not only the bean cakes at the stations which caught my attention but the extensive use of lime. Square miles of paddy field were white with powdered lime, scattered before the planting of the rice, an operation which in the higher altitudes would not be finished until well on in July.
A contented and prosperous countryside was no doubt the impression reflected to many passengers in the train that sunny day. But I knew how closely pressed the farmers had been by the rise in prices of many things that they had got into the way of needing. I had learnt, too, the part that superstition[ [137]] as well as simple faith played in the lives of the country folk. When, however, I pondered the way in which the rural districts had been increasingly invaded by factories run under the commercial sanctions of our eighteen-forties, I asked myself whether there might not be superstitions of the economic world as well as of religious and social life.
I heard a Japanese speak of being well treated at inns in the old days for 20 sen a night. It should be remembered, however, that there is a system not only of tipping inn servants but of tipping the inn. The gift to the inn is called chadai and guests are expected to offer a sum which has some relation to their position and means and the food and treatment they expect. I have stayed at inns where I have paid as much chadai as bill. To pay 50 per cent. of the bill as chadai is common. The idea behind chadai is that the inn-keeper charges only his out-of-pocket expenses and that therefore the guest naturally desires to requite him. In acknowledgment of chadai the inn-keeper brings a gift to the guest at his departure—fans, pottery, towels, picture postcards, fruit or slabs of stiff acidulated fruit jelly (in one inn of grapes and in another of plums) laid between strips of maize leaf. The right time to give chadai is on entering the hotel, after the "welcome tea." In handing money to any person in Japan, except a porter or a kurumaya, the cash or notes are wrapped in paper.
On the journey from the city of Nagano to Matsumoto, wonderful views were unfolded of terraced rice fields, and, above these, of terraced fields of mulberry. How many hundred feet high the terraces rose as the train climbed the hills I do not know, but I have had no more vivid impression of the triumphs of agricultural hydraulic engineering. We were seven minutes in passing through one tunnel at a high elevation.
I spoke in the train with a man who had a dozen chō under grapes, 20 per cent. being European varieties and 80 per cent. American. He said that some of the people in his district were "very poor." Some farmers had made money in sericulture too quickly for it to do them good. He volunteered the opinion, in contrast with the statement made to me during our journey to Niigata, that the people of the plains were morally superior to the people of the mountains. The reason he gave was that "there are many recreations in the plains whereas in the mountains there is only one." In most of the mountain villages he knew three-quarters of the young men had relations with women, mostly with the girls of the village or the adjoining village. He would not make the same charge against more than ten per cent. of the young men of the plains, and "it is after all with teahouse girls." He thought that there were "too many temples and too many sects, so the priests are starved."
An itinerant agricultural instructor in sericulture who joined in our conversation was not much concerned by the plight of the priests. "The causes of goodness in our people," he said, "are family tradition and home training. Candidly, we believe our morals are not so bad on the whole. We are now putting most stress on economic development. How to maintain their families is the question that troubles people most. With that question unsolved it is preaching to a horse to preach morality. We can always find high ideals and good leaders when economic conditions improve. The development of morality is our final aim, but it is encouraged for six years at the primary school. The child learns that if it does bad things it will be laughed at and despised by the neighbours and scolded by its parents. We are busy with the betterment of economic conditions and questions about morality and religion puzzle us."
When I reached Matsumoto I met a rural dignitary who deplored the increasing tendency of city men to invest in rural property. "Sometimes when a peasant sells his land he sets up as a money-lender." I was told that nearly every village had a sericultural co-operative association, which bought manures, mulberry trees and silk-worm eggs, dried cocoons and hatched eggs for its members and spent money on the destruction of rats. Of recent years the county agricultural association had given 5 yen per tan to farmers who planted improved sorts of mulberry. About half the farmers in the county had manure houses. Some 800 farmers in the county kept a labourer.
I went to see a gunchō and read on his wall: "Do not get angry. Work! Do not be in a hurry, yet do not be lazy." "These being my faults," he explained, "I specially wrote them out." There was also on his wall a kakemono reading: "At twenty I found that even a plain householder may influence the future of his province; at thirty that he may influence the future of his nation; at forty that he may influence the future of the whole world." Below this stirring sentiment was a portrait of the writer, a samurai scholar, from a photograph taken with a camera which he had made himself. He lived in the last period of the Shogunate and studied Dutch books. He was killed by an assassin at the instance, it was believed, of the Shogun.
One of the noteworthy things of Matsumoto was the agricultural association's market. Another piece of organisation in that part of the world was fourteen institutes where girls were instructed in the work of silk factory hands. The teachers' salaries were paid by the factories. So were also the expenses of the silk experts of the local authorities. On the day I left the city the daily paper contained an announcement of lectures on hygiene to women on three successive days, "the chief of police to be present." This paper was demanding the exemption of students from the bicycle tax, the rate of which varies in different prefectures.
A young man was brought to see me who was specialising in musk melons. He said that the Japanese are gradually getting out of their partiality for unripe fruit.
On our way to the Suwas we saw many wretched dwellings. The feature of the landscape was the silk factories' tall iron chimneys, ordinarily black though sometimes red, white or blue.
It is not commonly understood that Japanese lads by the time they "graduate" from the middle school into the higher school have had some elementary military training. A higher-school youth knows how to handle a rifle and has fired twice at a target. At Kami Suwa the problem of how middle-class boys should procure economical lodging while attending their classes had been solved by self-help. An ex-scholar of twenty had managed to borrow 4,000 yen and had proceeded to build on a hillside a dormitory accommodating thirty-six boarders. Lads did the work of levelling the ground and digging the well. The frugal lines on which the lodging-house was conducted by the lads themselves may be judged from the fact that 5 yen a month covered everything. Breakfast consisted of rice, miso soup and pickles. Cooking and the emptying of the benjo [[138]] were done by the lads in turn. A kitchen garden was run by common effort. Among the many notices on the walls was one giving the names of the residents who showed up at 5 o'clock in the morning for a cold bath and fencing. I also saw the following instruction written by the founder of the house, which is read aloud every morning by each resident in turn:
Be independent and pure and strive to make your characters more beautiful. Expand your thought. Help each other to accomplish your ambitions. Be active and steady and do not lose your self-control. Be faithful to friends and righteous and polite. Be silent and keep order. Do not be luxurious (sic). Keep everything clean. Pay attention to sanitation. Do not neglect physical exercises. Be diligent and develop your intelligence.
The borrower of the 4,000 yen with which the institution was built managed to pay it back within seven years with interest, out of the subscriptions of residents and ex-residents.
An agricultural authority whom I met spoke of "farming families living from hand to mouth and their land slipping into the possession of landlords"; also of a fifth of the peasants in the prefecture being tenants. A young novelist who had been wandering about the Suwa district had been impressed by the grim realities of life in poor farmers' homes and cited facts on which he based a low view of rural morality.
Suwa Lake lies more than 3,500 ft. above sea level and in winter is covered with skaters. The country round about is remarkable agriculturally for the fact that many farmers are able to lead into their paddies not only warm water from the hot springs but water from ammonia springs, so economising considerably in their expenditure on manure. A simple windmill for lifting the fertilising water is sold for only 4 yen.
We went to Kōfu, the capital of Yamanashi prefecture, through many mountain tunnels and ravines. Entrancing is the just word for this region in the vicinity of the Alps. But joy in the beauty through which we passed is tinged for the student of rural life by thoughts of the highlander's difficulties in getting a living in spots where quiet streams may become in a few hours ungovernable torrents. I remember glimpses of grapes and persimmons, of parties of middle-school boys tramping out their holiday—every inn reduces its terms for them—and of half a dozen peasant girls bathing in a shaded stream. But there were less pleasing scenes: hills deforested and paddies wrecked by a waste of stones and gravel flung over them in time of flood. Here and there the indomitable farmers, counting on the good behaviour of the river for a season or two, were endeavouring, with enormous labour, to resume possession of what had been their own. The spectacle illustrated at once their spirit and their industry and their need of land. At night we slept at Kōfu at "the inn of greeting peaks." In the morning a Governor with imagination told me of the prefecture's gallant enterprises in afforestation and river embanking at expenditures which were almost crippling.