COLONIAL JAPAN AND ITS UN-JAPANESE WAYS
Above all, this is not concerned with poetry.—Wilfred Owen
When the traveller stands at the northern end of the mainland[[232]] of Japan he is five hundred miles from Tokyo. In the north of Hokkaido he is a thousand miles away. Hokkaido, the most northerly and the second biggest of the four islands into which Japan is divided, is curiously American. The wide straight streets of the capital, Sapporo,[[233]] laid out at right angles, the rough buggies with the farmer and his wife riding together, the wooden houses with stove stacks, and, instead of paper-covered shoji, window panes: these things are seen nowhere else in Japan and came straight from America. It was certainly from America that the farmers had their cries of "Whoa." One of the best authorities on Hokkaido has declared that the administrative and agricultural instructors whom America sent there from about the time of the Franco-Prussian war "gave Japan a fairer, kindlier conception of America than all her study of American history."
In Old Japan there is always something which speaks of the centuries that are gone; in Sapporo there is nothing that matters which is fifty years old. One of the most remarkable facts in the agricultural history of Japan is that a country with a teeming population and an intensive farming should have left entirely undeveloped to so late a period as the early seventies a great island of 35,000 square miles which lies within sight of its shores. The wonder is that an attempt on Yezo[ [234]] was not made by the Russians, who, but for the vigorous action of a British naval commander, would undoubtedly have taken possession of the island of Tsushima, 700 miles farther south and midway between Japan and Korea. Up to the time of the fall of the Shogun the revenue of the lords of Yezo was got by taxing the harvest of the sea and the precarious gains of hunters. The Imperial Rescript carried by the army which was sent against certain adherents of the Shogun who had fled there said: "We intend to take steps to reclaim and people the island." [[235]] It is doubtful if at that period the population was more than 60,000 [[236]] (including Ainu).[[237]]
When Count Kuroda was put at the head of the Colonial Government he went over to America and secured as his adviser-in-chief the chief of the Agricultural Department at Washington. Stock, seeds, fruit trees, implements and machinery, railway engines, buildings, practically everything was American in the early days of Hokkaido. During a ten-year period, in which forty-five American instructors were sent for, five Russians, four Britons, four Germans, three Dutchmen and a Frenchman were also imported.[ [238]]
Governor Kuroda had a million yen placed at his disposal for ten years in succession, and a million yen was a big sum in those days. Before long there were flour mills, breweries, beet-sugar factories, canning plants, lead and coal mining and silk manufacturing and an experiment in soldier colonisation which owed something to Russian experiments in Cossack farming. An agricultural school grew into a large agricultural college; and this agricultural college has lately become the University of Hokkaido, with nearly a thousand students.[[239]] How much of a pioneer Sapporo College was may be gathered from the fact that when I was in Hokkaido 67 out of the 140 men who were members of the faculty had been themselves taught there. Dean Sato (Japan's first exchange lecturer to American universities), Dr. Nitobe (Japanese Secretary of the League of Nations) and Kanzō Uchimura were among the first students. There have always been American professors at Sapporo—its first president came from Massachusetts—and the professorship of English has always been held by an American.
The 50 acres of elm-studded land in which the University buildings stand are a surprise, for the elm grows nowhere else in Japan but Hokkaido.[ [240]] The extent of the University's landed possessions is also unexpected. There are two training farms of 185 and 260 acres respectively, beautifully kept botanic gardens, a tract of 15,000 acres on which there are already more than a thousand tenants, and 300,000 acres of forests in Hokkaido, Saghalien and Korea. Four or five times as many students as can be admitted offer themselves at Sapporo.
There is in Hokkaido an agricultural and rural life conceived for a country where stock may be kept and a farmer does not need to practise the superintensive farming of Old Japan. At the first University farm I looked over it was clear that not only American but Swedish, German and Swiss farming practice had had its influence. No longer was the farmer content with mattocks, hoes and flails. A silo dominated the scene, and maize, eaten from the cob in Old Japan, was a crop for stock.[ [241]] I also noticed crops of oats and rye.
I arrived in Hokkaido in the last week of August in a linen suit and was glad to put on a woollen one. By September 29 it was snowing. Snow-shoes were shown among the products of the island at the prefectural exhibition. Canadians have likened the climate of Hokkaido to that of Manitoba. Hokkaido is on the line of the Great Lakes, but the cold current from the North makes comparisons of this sort ineffective. It is only in southern Hokkaido that apples will grow. Thirty years ago wolves and bear were shot two miles from Sapporo and bear may still be found within ten miles.
The sea fisheries of Hokkaido are valuable but agriculture and forestry are greater money makers. Even without forestry agriculture is well ahead of factory industry, which is also eclipsed by mining. Industry is aided by the presence of coal. Among manufactures, brewing stands out even more conspicuously than wood-pulp making or canning. One of the three best-known beers in Japan comes from Hokkaido. [[242]] In contrast with the situation in Old Japan, where the land is half paddy and half upland, there is in Hokkaido only a ninth of the cultivated land under rice.[ [243]] When I was in Hokkaido there were 600,000 chō under cultivation, a hundred and fifty times more than there were in 1873. The line marking the northern or rather the north-eastern limit of rice shows roughly a third of the island on the northern and eastern coasts to be at present beyond the skill of rice growers. There is always uncertainty with the rice crop in Hokkaido. As the growing period is short, half the rice is not transplanted but sown direct in the paddies. A bad crop is expected once in seven years. In such a season there is no yield and even the straw is not good.
Immigrants get 5 chō, but if they are without capital they first go to work as tenants. There are contractors in the towns who supply labourers to farmers and factories at busy times. When newcomers have capital and are keen on rice growing and are families working without hired labour, they are strongly recommended not to devote more than 2-1\2 chō to rice—from 3 to 5 chō are the absolute limit—against 1-1\2 or 2 chō to other crops. When the holder of a 5-chō holding prospers he buys a second farm and more horses and implements, and hires labour for the busy period. But 10 or 15 chō is considered as much as can be worked in this way. If the area is more than 10 or 15 chō it is difficult to get labour in the busy season, for it is the busy season for everybody. Labourers from a distance can be got only at an unprofitable rate. It is first the lack of capital and then the lack of labour which prevents the farmer extending his holding. [[244]] The limit of practical mixed farming is 30 chō. (Stock farming is for milk rather than for meat, and more than one condensed-milk factory is in operation.) Even in Hokkaido large farming, as it is understood in Great Britain and America, is not easy to find. [[245]]
On my journey north from Sapporo the first thing which brought home to me the colonial character of the agriculture was the tree stumps sticking up in the paddies. The second was the extent to which the rivers were still uncontrolled. The longest river in Japan, 260 miles long, is in Hokkaido. There was obviously a vast moorland area in need of draining. Peat—there are 300,000 chō of it—may be a standby when the waste of timber that is going on brings about a shortage of fuel other than coal. From poor peat soil, which was growing oats, buckwheat and millet, we passed to land capable of producing rice, and saw ploughing with horses. One region had been opened for only twenty years, but already the farmers had cultivated the hillsides in the assiduous fashion of Old Japan.
From Ashigawa we made some excursions in a prim basha to places which were always several miles farther on than they were supposed to be and were usually reached by tracks covered with stones from 6 to 9 ins. long and having ruts a foot deep.
We visited a large estate with 350 tenants who were mostly working 2½ chō, though some had twice as much. Nearly all of these tenants appeared to have one or two horses, although the estate manager had advised them to use oxen or cows as more economical draught animals. When I remembered the distance the farmers were from the town and the state of the roads, and noticed the satisfaction which the men we passed displayed in being able to ride, it was easy to believe that the possession of a horse might have its value as a means of social progress. During the last ten years half the tenants had made enough to enable them to buy farms. The tenants on this estate had two temples and one shrine. [[246]]
I visited a fifteen-years-old co-operative alcohol factory with a capital of 300,000 yen. Of its materials 80 per cent. seemed to be potato starch waste and 20 per cent. maize. The product was 6,000 or 7,000 koku of alcohol. The dividend was 8 per cent. On the waste a large number of pigs was fed. The animals were kept in pens with boarded floors within a small area, and I was not surprised to learn that three or four died every month. Starch making, which produces the waste used by the alcohol factory, is managed on quite a small scale. An outfit may cost no more than 30 or 50 yen. I went over a small peppermint-making plant. Most of the peppermint raised in Japan—it reaches a value of 2 million yen—is grown in Hokkaido.
One day in the eastern part of the island I met in a small hotel, which was run by a man and his wife who had been in America, several old farmers who had obviously made money. They declared that formerly only 20 per cent. of the colonists succeeded, but now the proportion was more than 65 per cent. I imagine that they meant by success that the colonists did really well, for it was added that it was rare in that district for people to return to Old Japan. One of the company said that not more than 5 per cent. returned. "Land is too expensive at home," he continued; "when a Japanese comes here and gets some, he works hard." A good man, they said, should make, after four or five years, 70 to 100 yen clear profit in a year.
I rather suspect that the men I talked with had made some of their money by advancing funds to their neighbours on mortgage. They all seemed to own several farms. When I asked how religion prospered in Hokkaido they said with a smile, "There are many things to do here, so there is no spare time for religion as in our native places." There is a larger proportion of Christians in Hokkaido than on the mainland. One village of a thousand inhabitants contained two churches and a Salvation Army barracks. It was reputed, also, to have eight or ten "waitresses" and five saké shops. It is said that a good deal of shochu, which is stronger than saké, is drunk.
The roughest basha ride I made was to a place seven miles from railhead in the extreme north-east. Such roads as we adventured by are little more than tracks with ditches on either side. The journey back, because there were no horses to ride, we made in a narrow but extraordinarily heavy farm wagon with wheels a foot wide and drawn by a stallion. Shortly after starting there was a terrific thunderstorm which soaked us and hastened uncomfortably the pace of the animal in the shafts. When the worst of the downpour was over, and we had faced the prospect of slithering about the wagon for the rest of the journey, for the stallion had decided to hurry, a farmer's wife asked us for a lift and clambered in with agility. My companion and I were then sitting in a soggy state with our backs against the wagon front and our legs outstretched resignedly. The cheery farmer's wife, who was wet too, plopped down between us and, as the bumps came, gripped one of my legs with much good fellowship. She was a godsend by reason of her plumpness, for we were now wedged so tight that we no longer rocked and pitched about the wagon at each jolt. And no doubt we dried more quickly. Providence had indeed been good to us, for shortly afterwards we passed, lying on its side in a spruit, the basha that had carried us on our outward journey.
We were three hours in all in the wagon. Our passenger told us that her husband had several farms and that they were very comfortably off and very glad that they had come to Hokkaido. When the farmer's wife had to alight a mile from our destination we chose to walk. Bad roads are a serious problem for the Hokkaido farmer. In one district, only fifteen miles from the capital, they are so bad that rice is at half the price it makes in Sapporo. It is unfortunate that the roads are at their worst in autumn and spring when the farmer wants to transport his produce.
I visited the 700-acre settlement which Mr. Tomeoka has opened in connection with his Tokyo institution for the reclamation of young wastrels. His formula is, "Feed them well, work them hard and give them enough sleep." Among the volumes on his shelves there were three books about Tolstoy and another three, one English, one American and one German, all bearing the same title, The Social Question. Needless to say that Self-Help had its place.
I liked Mr. Tomeoka's idea of an open-air chapel on a tree-shaded height from which there was a fine view. It reminded me of the view from an open space on rising ground near the famous Danish rural high school of Askov, from which, on Sundays, parties of excursionists used to look down enviously on Slesvig and irritate the Germans by singing Danish national songs. Mr. Tomeoka believed in better houses and better food for farmers and in money raised by means of the kō—"the rules and regulations of co-operative societies are too complicated for farmers to understand."
I saw the huts of some settlers who had weathered their first Hokkaido winter. Buckwheat, scratched in in open spaces among the trees, was the chief crop. The huts consisted of one room. Most of the floor was raised above the ground and covered with rough straw matting. In the centre of the platform was the usual fire-hole. The walls were matting and brushwood. I was assured that "the snow and good fires, for which there is unlimited fuel, keep the huts warm."
The railway winds through high hills and makes sharp curves and steep ascents and descents. There are tracts of rolling country under rough grass. Sometimes these areas have been cleared by forest fires started by lightning. Wide spaces are a great change from the scenery of closely farmed Japan. The thing that makes the hillsides different from our wilder English and Scottish hillsides is that there are neither sheep nor cattle on them.
When the culpable destruction of timber in Hokkaido is added to what has been lost by forest fires, due to lightning or to accident—one conflagration was more than 200 acres in extent—it is easy to realise that the rivers are bringing far more water and detritus from the hills than they ought to do and are preparing flood problems with which it will cost millions to cope when the country gets more closely settled. It is deplorable that, apart from needless burning on the hillsides, the farmers have not been dissuaded from completely clearing their arable land of trees. On many holdings there is not even a clump left to shelter the farmhouse and buildings. In not a few districts the colonists have created treeless plains. In place after place the once beautiful countryside is now ugly and depressing.