With these facts before me, as I have said, I did not make any vainglorious boasts of the great educational progress of our own states these last twenty years: However much progress we have made, these brown Japanese "heathen" have beaten us. While there is no official census on the question of illiteracy here, every Japanese man in his twenties must serve {21} two years in the army (unless he is in a normal school studying to be a teacher), and a record is made as to the literacy or illiteracy of each recruit. That is to say, there is a place where the fact of any recruit's inability to read would be recorded, but the Department of Education informed me to-day that the illiterate column is now absolutely blank.
There are no illiterates among Japan's rising generation.
More than this, we have to reflect that it is in their poverty that the Japanese are thus doing more than we are doing in our plenty. We waste more in a year than they make. Even with a hundred acres of land the American farmer is likely to consider himself poor, but when I asked my Japanese guide the other day if two cho (five acres) would be an average sized farm here he said: "No, not an average; such a man would be regarded as a middle-class farmer--a rather large farmer." And the figures which I have just obtained in a call on the national Department of Agriculture and Commerce more than justify the reply.
Forty-six farmers out of every 100 in Japan own less than one and one quarter acres of land; 26 more out of every 100 own less than two and one half acres, and only one man in a hundred owns as much as twenty-five acres. (In the matter of cultivation also I find that 70 per cent, cultivate less than two and one half acres, and nearly half are tenants.)
This year the situation is even worse than usual, for disastrous floods have reduced the rice crop, which represents one half Japan's crop values, 20 per cent, below last year's figures, and many people will suffer.
Ordinarily, however, these little handkerchief-sized farms yield amazingly. It has been shown by Prof. F. H. King that the fields of Japan are cultivated so intensively, fertilized so painstakingly, and kept so continuously producing some crop, that they feed 2277 people to the square mile--21,321 square miles of cultivated fields in the main islands supporting a population of 48,542,376. If the tilled fields of Iowa, for {22} example, supported an equal number of people per square mile, the population so supported would be over 100,000,000. That state alone could feed the entire population of the United States and then have an excess product left for export to other countries! If North Carolina did as well with her cultivated land she would support 30,000,000 people, and if Mississippi's 11,875 square miles of land under cultivation supported each 2277 persons, then 27,041,375 people, or thirteen times the present population of the state, could live off their produce!
And yet these Japanese lands have been in cultivation for unnumbered centuries. Some of them may have been cleared when King Herod trembled from his dream of a new-born rival in Judea, and certainly "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome" had not faded from the earth when some of these fields began their age-long ministry to human need. And they have been kept fertile simply by each farmer putting back on the ground every ounce of fertility taken from it, for commercial fertilizers were absolutely unknown until our own generation.
Of course, with a population so dense and with each man cultivating an area no larger than a garden-patch in America, the people are poor, and the wonder is that they are able to produce food enough to keep the country from actual want. Practically no animal meat is eaten; if we except fish, the average American eats nearly twice as much meat in a week as the average Japanese does in a year: to be exact, 150 pounds of meat per capita is required per year for the average American against 1.7 pounds for the average Japanese! Many of the farmers here are too poor even to eat a good quality of rice. Consequently Japan presents the odd phenomenon of being at once an exporter and a large importer of rice. Poor farmers sell their good rice and buy a poorer quality brought in from the mainland of Asia and mix it with barley for grinding.
Only about one farmer in three has a horse or an ox; in most cases all the work must be done by hand and with crude tools. {23} It is pitiful--or rather I should say, it would be pitiful if they did not appear so contented--to see men breaking the ground not by plowing but by digging with kuwas: long-handled tools with blades perhaps six inches wide and two feet long. At the Agricultural College farm in Komaba I saw about thirty Japanese weeding rice with the kama--a tool much like an old-fashioned sickle except that the blade is straight: the right hand quickly cut the roots of the weed or grass plant and the left hand as quickly pulled it up. With the same sickle-like kamas about thirty other Japanese were cutting and shocking corn: they are at least too advanced to pull fodder, I was interested to notice!
With land so scarce, it is of course necessary to keep something on the ground every growing day from year's end to year's end. Truckers and gardeners raise three crops a year. Rice, as a rule, is not sown as with us, but the plants are transplanted as we transplant cabbage or tomato plants (but so close together, of course, that the ripening fields look as if they had been sown), in order that the farmer may save the time the rice plants are getting to the transplanting stage. That is to say, some other crop is maturing on the land while the rice plants are growing large enough to transplant. Riding through the country almost anywhere you will notice the tender young plants of some new crop showing between the rows of some earlier-planted crop now maturing or newly harvested.