CHAPTER XXXII
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 2½ 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 share holders 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, jūjitsu, 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]]