II
In the year of the Coronation—it took place three years after the Emperor's accession—two prefectures had the honour of being chosen to produce the rice to be placed before gods, Emperor and dignitaries at Kyoto. The work was not undertaken without ceremony. I was a witness of the rites performed at the planting of the rice in one of the prefectures. Plots had been prepared with enormous care. Along the top of the special fencing were the Shinto straw bands and paper streamers. A small shrine had been built to overlook the plots. Even the instruments of the little meteorological station near, by which the management of the crop would be guided, were surrounded by straw bands and streamers—religion protecting science. The mattocks and other implements which had been used in the preparation of the paddy or were to be used in getting in the crops and in cultivating, harvesting, threshing and cleaning it were all new. Even the herring which had manured the plot had been "specially selected and blessed." Further, there was a special bath-house where the young men and women who were to plant the rice had washed ceremonially at an early hour.
We had reached the spot through a crowd of twenty or thirty thousand people who were gathering to witness the ceremony. A covered platform had been built in front of the rice field shrine, and on either side were large roofed-in spaces for some scores of Shinto priests and the favoured spectators. The ceremony lasted two hours. It carried us magically away from a Japan of frock coats to Japan of a thousand, it may be two thousand years ago. Between the wail of ancient wood and wind instruments and the cinema operators who missed nothing external and some bored top-hatted spectators who furtively puffed a cigarette before the ceremony came to an end, [[82]] what a gulf! Platter after platter of food, sometimes rice, sometimes vegetables, sometimes fruit, sometimes a big fish, was passed by one priest to another in the sunlight until all the offerings were reverently placed by a special dignitary on one of those unpainted, unvarnished, undecorated but exquisitely proportioned altars which are an artistic glory of Shintoism. The shrine was wholly open on the side of the rice field, and the high priest was in full view as he stood before the altar with bowed head and folded hands, his robe caught by the breeze, and delivered in a loud voice his zealous invocation. His words were stressed not only by an acolyte who twanged the strings of a venerable harp, but by the song of a lark which rose with the first strains of the harpist. The purpose of the ceremony was to call down the gods and to gain their blessing for the crop and the new reign. At the moment of highest solemnity the thousands assembled bowed their heads: the gods were deigning to descend and accept the offering. More ancient music, more ceremonial, and the gods having been called upon to return to high heaven, the laden platters were gravely removed, and the rice planting in the adjoining field began. To the sound of drum the young men and women in special costumes strode through the wicket into the mud of the paddies, and, under the supervision of the director of the prefectural agricultural experiment station in a silk hat, planted out the tufts of rice seedlings in scrupulously measured rows.
I asked a distinguished Japanese who was standing near me—he is a Christian—how many of the educated people in the assembly believed that the gods had descended. His answer was, "I may not believe that the gods of a truth descended, but I find something beautiful in calling on the gods with a harp of Old Japan, and I do believe that our humble and natural offering to-day may be acceptable to whatever gods there may be and that it is a worthy exercise for us to undertake and may also be conducive to a good harvest." My friend attempted the following rough rendering of a song which had been sung by the rice planters before the shrine:
This day the beginning of sowing at an auspicious time— Long life to the rice! May it be a token of the years of the Reign, The seed of peace for the world— May it start from this consecrated field! One in heart we see to it that our seedlings are well matched. Mikawa's[[83]] millennium and the millennium of rice. Let us pray for an abundant shooting. Now let us plant the seedlings straight; Pleasing to the gods are the ways that are not crooked.
After this ceremony, in which the staple crop of the country and the labour of the farmer in his paddy field had been honoured by the State and dignified by ancestral blessings, there was luncheon in one of those deftly contrived reed-covered structures, of the building of which the Japanese have the knack, and the Governor asked some of us to say a few words. Then on a raised platform in the open there was enacted a comic interlude such as might have been seen in England in the Middle Ages. In the evening I was bidden to a dinner of the officials responsible for the day's doings. The Governor made a kindly reference to my labours and the local M.P. presented me with a kimono length of the cotton material which had been woven for the planters of the sacred rice.
III[[84]]
The production of rice has increased more quickly than the growth of the population. If we consider, along with the advance in population, the crops of the years 1882 and 1913, which were held to be average, and, in order to be as up-to-date as possible, the normal annual yield[[85] ] of the five-years period 1912-18, we find that, as between 1882 and 1913, the population increased 45 per cent. and rice production increased 63 per cent., while as between 1882 and the normal annual yield period of 1912-18, the population increased 55 per cent, and the crop 75 per cent.[ [86]]
This is a noteworthy fact. But equally noteworthy is the fact that in the 1882-1913 period, in which the production of rice increased 63 per cent. and the population only 45 per cent., the price of rice did not fall. On the contrary it rose. This was due largely[[87]] to the fact that people had begun to eat rice who had not before been able to afford it. Many people who grow rice eat, as has been noted, barley or barley mixed with a little rice. From the 'eighties onwards more and more rice was eaten.[ [88]]
The reason was that, what with the cash obtained from cocoons through the enormous development of sericulture, [[89]] what with the money received by the girls who had gone to the factories, what with the growth of big cities causing an increased demand for vegetables, eggs and especially fruit at good prices, what with the use of better seed and more artificial manure, what with agricultural co-operation, paddy-field adjustment and the taking-in of new land, the farmer, in spite of increased taxation,[ [90]] was doing better, or at any rate was minded to live better. In the thirty-years period 1882-1913, his crop increased 63 per cent. although his area under cultivation increased by only 17 per cent. In the following pages we shall hear more of the methods by which the farmer's receipts have been increased. We shall hear also, alas! of the ways in which his expenditure has increased. He is indeed in a trying situation. Everything depends on his character and education and on the influences, social and political, moral and religious, under which he lives. That is why this book, in devoting itself to an examination of the foundations of an agricultural country, is concerned with rural sociology rather than with the technique of crops and cropping.
The outstanding problem of the rice grower is fluctuations in price.[[91] ] It is also the problem of the landlord, for rents are fixed not at so much money but at so many koku of rice. This means that on rent day the farmer must pay the same amount of rice whether his crop has been good or bad. It also means that when the price of rice rises the amount of rent is automatically raised. If rent were paid, not in so many koku of rice but in money at a fixed amount, the landlord would know where he was and the tenant would be in an easier position, for when the rice crop failed the price would be high and he would be able to meet his rent by selling a smaller amount of rice. The counsel of the prudent to the rice producer is to build storehouses and not to sell the whole of his crop immediately after harvest, but to extend the sale over the whole year, marketing each month about the same amount if possible. The Government Granary plan came into force in 1921, some 3 million koku of unpolished rice being bought in five grades at from 27 yen to 33 yen. In the year before the War rice was selling at 20 yen per koku (5 bushels). The previous year (1912) it had been 21 yen—had risen at times to 23 yen—an unheard-of price. Between 1894 and 1912 it had climbed merely from about 7 yen to a maximum of 16 yen. [[92]] In the year in which the War broke out, it dropped as low as 12 yen, and in 1915 it was only 11 yen. By 1916 it had not risen beyond 14 yen.
The fall in prices was due to exceptional harvests in 1914 and 1915 (that is, 57,006,541 koku and 55,924,590 koku as compared with the 50,255,000 koku of the year before the War, or the 51,312,000 which may be taken as the average of the seven-years period 1907-13). Such exceptional harvests as those of 1914 and 1915 showed a surplus of from 4½ to 6 million koku over and above the needs of the country, which are roughly estimated at 1 koku per head including infants and the old and feeble. In 1916 it was established, when account was taken of stored rice, that the actual surplus was something like 6 or 7 million koku. Therefore a fall in price took place. The extent to which rice is imported and exported is shown in [Appendix XXIV]. This Chapter would become much more technical than is necessary if I entered into the question of the correctness of rice statistics. Roughly, the statistics show a production 15 per cent. less than the actual crops. Formerly the under-estimation was 20 per cent. The practice has its origin in the old taxation system.
The notes for the account of rural life in Japan which will be found in this book were chiefly made in the second and third years of the War. Since that time there has been an enormous rise in the price of everything. For a time the farmers prospered as they had prospered in the high rice-price years, 1912-13. [[93]] The high prices of all grain as well as the fabulous price of raw silk (due to increased export to America and to increased home consumption) were a great advantage.
MINISTER OF AGRICULTURE'S EFFORTS TO KEEP THE PRICE OF RICE FROM RISING
Then came the rice riots of the city workers, the general slump and finally the commercial and industrial crash. Raw silk fell nearly to one-third of its top price, and farmers had to sell cocoons under the cost of production. Everywhere countrymen and countrywomen employed in the factories were discharged in droves. A large proportion of these unfortunates returned to their villages to dispel some rural dreams of urban Eldorado.
But this matter of the going up and coming down of prices has but a passing interest for the reader. The only economic fact of which he need lay hold is that in recent years the farmers have been led into the way of spending more money—in taxation as well as in general expenses of living—and that, when account is taken of every advantage they have gained from better methods of production, they have pressing on them the limitations imposed by the size of their farms and their farming practice. Whatever the prices obtained for the: products of the soil, climatic facts,[ [94]] the character and social condition of the people, their attitude towards life and authority and the attitude of authority towards them remain very much the same. And thus a narrative of things seen and heard chiefly during the first years of the War is not at all out of date even if it were not supplemented as it is by a plentiful supply of notes containing the latest statistical data.
There is one curious exception only. The reader of these pages will constantly come on references to the poverty of the tenant farmers. They are, of course, practically labourers, for they cultivate two or three acres only, and at the end of the year, as has been shown, have merely a trifle in hand and sometimes not that. Influenced by the labour movement, which developed in the industrial centres during and after the War,[ [95]] this depressed class has of late shown spirit. It has begun to assert its claims against landowners. At the end of 1920 there were as many as ninety associations of tenant farmers, and sixty of these had been started for the specific purpose of representing tenants' interests against landowners. Strikes of tenants began and continue. The end of this movement of a proverbially conservative class is not at all certain.[ [96]]
The outstanding facts which are to be borne in mind about agricultural Japan are that the population is as thick on the ground as the population of the British Isles (thicker in reality, for so much of Japan is mountain and waste)—ten times thicker than the population of the United States[ [97]]—that Japan is primarily an agricultural country, while Great Britain is largely a manufacturing and trading country, and that only 15½ per cent. of Japan proper (including Hokkaido) is under cultivation against 27 per cent. in Great Britain.[[98] ] The average area cultivated per farming family in Japan, counting paddy and upland together, is less than 3 acres. As the total population of Japan is now (1921) 56 millions (55,960,150 in 1920, plus the annual increase of 600,000), every acre has to feed close on four persons. ("Even in Hokkaido," Dr. Sato notes, "the average area per family is only 7½ acres.") Happily the number of families cultivating less than 1¼ acres is decreasing and the number cultivating from 1¼ up to 5 acres is increasing.[[99]] In other words, the favourite size of farm is one which finds work for all the members of the farmer's family. As on small holdings all over the world, it is found that profits are difficult to make when help has to be paid for. The facts that in the last four years for which figures are available the number of farming families keeping silk-worms has risen by half a million and that every year the area of land under cultivation increases show that new ways of increasing income are eagerly seized on.