The foundations of Japan

by J. W. Robertson Scott

"THE SIGHT OF A GOOD MAN IS ENOUGH"

It has been said that we should emulate rather than imitate them. All I say is, Let us study them.—Matthew Arnold

For seven years in succession the men, old, middle-aged and young, who had done the most remarkable things in the agriculture of the prefecture had been invited to gather in conference. I went to this annual "meeting of skilful farmers." Among the speakers were the local governor and chiefs of departments who had been sent down by the Ministry of Agriculture and the Home Office. According to our ideas, everybody but the unpractised speakers—the expert farmers who were called from time to time to the platform—spoke too long. But the kneeling audience found no fault. Indeed, a third of it was taking notes. It was an audience of seeking souls.

One of the impromptu speakers, a white-haired, toil-marked farmer, told how forty years before he had gone to the next prefecture and opened new land. "With his spectacles and moustache," explained the chairman—if the man who takes the initiative from time to time at a Japanese meeting may be properly called a chairman—"he looks like a gentleman; but he works hard." And the man showed his hands as a testimony to the severity of his labours.

"It was in the winter," he said, "that I went away from my home and obtained a certain tract of waste. I had no acquaintance near. I brought some food, but when I fell short I had no more. I had gone with my third boy. We lived in a small hut and were in a miserable condition. Then a fierce wind took off the roof. It was at four in the morning when the roof blew off. In February I began to open a rice field. Gradually we got a chō. At length I opened another chō, but there was much gravel. Some of my newly opened fields are very high up the hill. If you chance to pass my house please come to see me. The maple leaves are very beautiful and you can enjoy the sight of many birds."

The early meetings of the expert farmers used to last not one day but two, for the men delighted in narrating their experiences to one another. Some of the audience used to weep as the older men told their tales. The farmers would sit up late round a farmer or a professor who was talking about some subject that interested them. The originator of these gatherings, Mr. Yamasaki, told me that he was "more than once moved to tears by the merits and pure hearts of the farmer speakers."

Of the regard and respect which the farmers had for this man I had many indications. Like not a few agricultural authorities, he is a samurai.[^[25] ] He is exceptionally tall for a Japanese, looks indeed rather like a Highland gillie, and when one evening I prevailed on him to put on armour, thrust two swords in his obi and take a long bow in his hand, he was an imposing figure. He carries the ideals of bushido into his rural work. He does not sleep more than five hours, and he is up every morning at five.

But I am getting away from the meeting. There was a priest who spoke, a man curiously like Tolstoy. (He had, no doubt, Ainu blood in him.) He wore the stiff buttoned-up jacket of the primary school teacher and spoke modestly. "Formerly the rice fields of my village suffered very much from bad irrigation," he said, "but when that was put right the soil became excellent. In the days when the soil was bad the people were good and no man suspected another of stealing his seal.[^[26]] But when the soil became good the disposition of the people was influenced in a bad way, and they brought their seals to the temple to be kept safe.

"At that time the organiser of this meeting came and made a speech in my village. On hearing his speech I thought it an easy task to make my village good. At once I began to do good things. I formed several men's and women's associations, all at once, as if I were Buddha. But the real condition of the people was not much improved. There came many troubles upon me, and our friend wrote a letter. I was very thankful, and I have been keeping that letter in the temple and bowing there morning and evening.

"I began to ask many distinguished persons to help me. They influenced the farmers. The sight of a good man is enough. Speech is unnecessary. The villagers were not educated enough to understand moralisings or thinking, but the kind face of a good man has efficacy. There was a man in the village who was demoralised, and when I told of him to a distinguished man who lives near our village he sympathised very much. That distinguished man is eighty-four years old, but he accompanied that demoralised man for three days, giving no instruction but simply living the same life, and the demoralised man was an entirely changed man and ever thankful.

"I am a sinful man. Sometimes it happens that after I have been working for the public benefit I am glad that I am offered thanks. I know it is not a good thing when people express gratitude to me, for I ought not to accept it. When I know I am doing a good thing and expecting thanks, I am not doing a good thing. My thanks must not come from men but from Buddha. I am trying to cast out my sinful feelings. It must not be supposed that I am leading these people. You skilful farmers kindly come to my village if you pass. You need not give any speech. Your good faces will do."

But the two speeches I have reported are hardly a fair sample of the discourses which were delivered. The addresses of the earnest Tokyo officials and the Governor were directed towards urging on the farmers increased production and increased labour, and the duty was pressed upon them, as I understood, in the name of the highest patriotism and of devotion to their ancestors. This talk was excellent in its way, but when I got up I hazarded a few words on different lines. If I venture to summarise my somewhat elementary address it is because it furnishes a key to some of the enquiries I was to make during my journeys. I was told the next day that the local daily had declared that my "tongue was tipped with fire," which was a compliment to my kind and clever interpreter, who, when he let himself go, seemed to be able to make two or three sentences out of every one of mine:

I said that my Japanese friends kept asking me my impressions, and one thing I had to say to them was that I had got an impression in many quarters of spiritual dryness. I dared to think that some responsibility for a materialistic outlook must be shared by the admirable officials and experts who moved about among the farmers. They were always talking about crop yields and the amount of money made, and they unconsciously pressed home the idea that rural progress was a material thing.

But the rural problem was not only a problem of better crops and of greater production. Man did not live by food alone. Tolstoy wrote a book called What Men Live By, and there was nothing in it about food. Men lived not by the number of bales of rice they raised, but by the development of their minds and hearts. It might be asked if it was not the business of rural experts to teach agriculture. But a poet of my country had said that it took a soul to move a pig into a cleaner sty. It was necessary for a man who was to teach agriculture well to know something higher than agriculture. The teacher must be more advanced than his pupils. There must be a source from which the energy of the rural teacher must be again and again renewed. There must be a well from which he must be continually refreshed and stimulated. Some called that well by the name of religion, unity with God. Some called it faith in mankind, faith in the destiny of the world, that faith in man which is faith in God. But it must be a real belief, not a half-hearted, shivering faith.

Agriculture was not only the oldest and the most serviceable calling, it was the foundation of everything. But the fact must not be lost sight of that agriculture, important and vital though it was, was only a means to an end. The object in view was to have in the rural districts better men, women and children. The highest aim of rural progress was to develop the minds and hearts of the rural population, and in all discussion of the rural problems it was necessary not to lose in technology a clear view of the final object.

But when account is taken of all the drab materialism in the rural districts there remains a leaven of unworldliness. It takes various forms. Here is the story of a landlord at whose beautiful house I stayed. "When a tenant brings his rent rice to this landlord's storehouse," a fellow-guest told me, "it is never examined. The door of the storehouse is left unpadlocked, and the rent rice is brought by the tenant when he is minded to do so. No one takes note of his coming. If he meets his landlord on the road he may say, 'I brought you the rent,' and the landlord says, 'It is very kind of you.' It is an old custom not to supervise the tenants' bringing of the rent.

"Nowadays, however, some tenants are sly. They say, 'Our landlord never looks into our payments. Therefore we can bring him inferior rice or less than the quantity.' The landlord loses somewhat by this, but it is not in accordance with the honour of his family to change the method of collecting his rent. He is now chairman of the village co-operative society as well as of the young men's society, and he aims to improve his village fundamentally."

I also heard this narrative. The tenants in a certain place wished to cultivate rice land rather than to farm dry land. But when silkworm cultivation became prosperous they began to prefer dry land again in order that they might extend the area of mulberries. Therefore the landlords raised the rents of the dry farms. But there was one landlord who said, "If this dry farm land had been improved by me I should be justified in raising the rent. But I did not improve it. Therefore it would be base to take advantage of economic conditions to raise the rent."

So he did not raise the rent. Then he was excluded from social intercourse by the other landlords because their tenants grumbled. These landlords said to him, "You can afford not to raise your rents, but we cannot." Therefore the landlord who had not raised his rents called his tenants together. He said to them, "It is a hard thing for me to have no social intercourse with my equals. Therefore I will now raise the rents. But I cannot accept that raised portion, and I will take care of it for you, and in ten years I think it will amount to enough for you to start a cooperative society."

That was eight years ago and the formation of the society was now proceeding. In order that the reader may not forget on what a very different scale landlordism exists in Japan, I may mention that the area owned by this landlord was only 10 chō.

I was told the story of a landlord's solution of the rent reduction problem. "Tenants," the narrator said, "sometimes pretend that their crops are poorer than they are. Landlords may reduce the payment due, but sometimes with a certain resentment. One landowner was asked for a reduction for several years in succession on account of poor crops, and gave it. But he was trying to think of a plan to defeat the pretences of his tenants. At last he hit on one. While the tenants' rice was young he often visited the fields, and when any insects were to be seen he sent his labourers secretly to destroy them. In the same way, when crops seemed to be under-manured, he secretly cast artificial manure on them. At last his tenants found out what he was doing, and they said, 'As our landlord is so kind to us, we must not pretend that we need a reduction.' And they did not, and things are going on very well there. This is an illustration of the fact that our people are moved more by feeling than by logic."

This was capped by another story. "A landlord, a samurai, has for his tenants his former subjects, so something of the relation of master and servant still remains. He wished to raise his tenants to the position of peasant proprietors, so when land was for sale in the village he advised them to buy. They said they had no money, but he answered, 'Means may perhaps be found.' He secretly subscribed a sum to the Shinto shrine and then advised the formation of a co-operative society, which could borrow from the shrine for a tenant, so that the tenant need not go to the landlord to thank him and feel patronised by him. He need only to go to the shrine and give thanks there." "The landlord," added the speaker in his imperfect English, "has entirely hided himself from the business." A third of the tenants had become peasant proprietors.

In order to better the feeling between the farmers and landowners this landlord and several others had begun to ask their tenants to their gardens, where they were given tea and fruit. "In Japan," said one man to me, "we see feudal ideas broken down by the upper, not the lower class."

I visited the romantic coast of a peninsula a dozen miles from the railway. Some 10,000 pilgrims come in a year to the eighty-eight temples on the peninsula, and in some parts the people are such strict Buddhists that in one village the county authorities find great difficulty in overcoming an objection to destroying the insect life which preys on the rice crops. When rice land does not yield well, one landlord causes an investigation to be made and gives advice based upon it to the tenant, saying, "Do this, and if you lose I will compensate you. If you gain, the advantage will be yours." Money is also contributed by the landlord to enable tenants to make journeys in order to study farming methods.

A landlord here—I had the pleasure of being his guest—had started an agricultural association. It had developed the idea of a secondary school for practical instruction, "rich men to give their money and poor men their labour." In order to obtain a fund to enable tenants to get money with which to set up as peasant proprietors, this landlord had thought of the plan of setting aside each harvest 250 shō[27] of rice to each tenant's 3 shō.

Good work was done in teaching farmers' wives. "When no instruction is given," I was informed, "a wife may say, when her husband is testing his rice seed with salt water, 'Salt is very dear, nowadays, why not fresh water?' If a husband is kind he will explain. If not, some unpleasantness may arise, so wives are taught about the necessity of selecting by salt water."

LANDOWNER'S SON AND DAUGHTER OFF TO THE VILLAGE SCHOOL.

BUDDHIST SHRINE IN A LANDOWNER'S HOUSE.

Tenants are advised to save a farthing a day. In order to keep them steadfast in their thriftiness they are asked to bring their savings to their landlord every ten days. It is troublesome to be constantly receiving so many small sums, but the landlord and his brother think that they should not grudge the trouble. In two years nearly 1,000 yen have been saved. Said one tenant to his landlord, "I know how to save now, therefore I save."

MR. YAMASAKI, DR. NITOBE, THE AUTHOR AND PROFESSOR NASU.

THE HOME IN WHICH THE TEA CEREMONY TOOK PLACE.

One of my hosts, who was thirty-two, hoped to see all his tenants peasant proprietors before he was fifty. The relation of this landlord and his tenants was illustrated by the fact that on my arrival several farmers brought produce to the kitchen "because we heard that the landlord had guests." The village was very kind in its reception of the foreign visitor. A meeting was called in the temple. I told the story of Wren's Si monumentum requiris circumspice and pointed a rural moral. Some months afterwards I received a request from my host to write a word or two of preface to go with a report of my address which he was giving to each of his tenants as a New Year gift.

This landlord's family had lived in the same house for eleven generations. The courtesy of my host and his relatives and the beauty of their old house and its contents are an ineffaceable memory. From the time my party arrived until the time we left no servant was allowed to do anything for us. The ladies of the house cooked our food and the landlord and his younger brother brought it to us. The younger brother waited upon us throughout our meals, even peeling our pears. At night he spread our silk-covered futon (mattresses). In the morning he folded them up, arranged my clothes, swept the room and stood at hand with towels, all of which were new, while I washed.

When on our arrival in the house we sat and talked in the first reception-room we entered, I noticed that outside the lattice a company of villagers was listening with no consciousness of intrusion, in full view of our host, to the sound of foreign speech. It was a Shakespearean scene.

Out of its setting, as it is often witnessed to-day, the tea ceremony seems meaningless and wearisome, an affected simplicity of the idle. But as a guest of this old house of fine timbers weathered to silver-grey I found the secret of Cha-no-yu. This flower of Far Eastern civilisation is an æsthetic expression of true good-fellowship, and a gentle simplicity and sincerity are of its essence. The admission of a foreigner to a family Cha-no-yu was a gesture of confidence.

Five of us gathered late in the afternoon of an August day in the cool matted rest-room in the garden. We looked on the beauty that generations of gardeners of a single vision had created. Our minds rested in the quiet as in the quaint phrase, we "tasted the sound of the kettle and listened to the incense." At length at a signal we rose. Led by the priestess of the ceremony, our host's aunt, a slight figure in grey with snow-white tabi and new straw sandals, we passed by the dripping rocky fountain, with its lilies, and the azure hydrangea of the hills which, some say, suggests distance. The hut-like tea-room, traditionally rude in the material of which it was built but perfect in every detail of its workmanship, we entered one by one. According to old custom we humbly crept through the small opening which serves as entrance, the idea being that all worldly rank must bow at the sanctuary of beauty. The tiny chamber held, besides the wonderful vessels of the ceremony, a flower arrangement of blue Michaelmas daisies, and an exquisite scroll of wild duck in flight in the miniature tokonoma,[ ^[28]] the tea mistress, our host and four guests. We drank from a black daimyo bowl which had been made four hundred years before. We passed an hour together and in the twilight we came out from the little room as from a sacrament of friendship. A year afterwards my host wrote to me, "Yesterday we had Cha-no-yu again and you were in our thoughts. During the ceremony we placed your photograph in the tokonoma."

After dinner we had kyōgen[ ^[29]] by distinguished amateurs, one of whom, a neighbouring landowner, had lately appeared before the Emperor. After the plays he painted kyōgen scenes for us on kakemono and fans. He painted the kakemono as he knelt with his paper lying on a square of soft material on the floor.

The plays were performed in ancient costumes or copies of old ones and of course without scenery. The players were lighted by oily candles two inches in diameter, which flamed and guttered in candlesticks not of this century nor of the last. A player may make his exit merely by sitting down. The players are men; masks are used in playing women's parts. The stories are of the simplest. There was the well-known tale of the sly servant who was sent to town by a stupid daimyo in order to buy a fan, and, though he brought back an umbrella, succeeded in imposing it on his master. There was also the play of the fox who comes to a farmer to advise him not to kill foxes, but is himself caught in a trap. I also recall a story of two good tenants who had been rewarded by their landlord with an order that they should receive hats. Owing to an oversight they received one hat only between the two. Problem, how to meet the difficulty. It was solved by the rustics fastening two pieces of wood together T-shape, raising the hat of honour upon the structure and walking home in triumph under either side of the T.

The next morning I was greeted by the aged father and mother of our host. The household was an interesting one, for the landlord and his brother were married to two sisters. Before taking our departure we knelt with our landlord and his father before the Buddhist shrine on which rested the memorial tablets of former heads of the house. I expressed my sense of the privilege extended to strangers. The reply was, "Our ancestors will feel pleasure in your being among us."