(FUKUSHIMA AND YAMAGATA)
Boswell: If you should advise me to go to Japan I believe I should.
Johnson: Why yes, Sir, I am serious.
In one of my journeys I went from Tokyo to the extreme north of Japan, travelling up the west coast and down the east. Fukushima prefecture—in which is Shirakawa, famous for a horse fair which lasts a week—encourages the eating of barley, for on the northern half of the east coast of Japan there is no warm current and the rice crop may be lost in a cold season. "Officials of the prefecture and county," someone said to me, "take barley themselves; enthusiastic gunchō take it gladly."
The prefectural station, by selecting the best varieties of rice for sowing, had effected a 10 per cent. improvement in yield. In each county an official "agricultural encourager" had been appointed. The lectures given at the experiment station were attended by 18,000 persons. The studious who listen to the lectures had formed an association that provided at the station a fine building where supper, bed, breakfast and lunch cost 30 sen. It contained a model of the Ise shrine with a motto in the handwriting of a well-known Tokyo agricultural professor, "Difficulties Polish You."
"Some villagers," said a local authority, "want to make the Buddhist temple the centre of the development of village life. In several places agricultural products are exhibited at Shinto shrines. Farmers offer them out of a kind of piety, but the products are afterwards criticised from a technical point of view. This is done on the initiative of the villagers encouraged by the prefecture."
Hereabouts the winter work of the people, in addition to basket, rope and mat making, was paper making and smoothing out the wrinkles of tobacco.[[157] ] A considerable number of people had emigrated to South America. The principal need of the villages, it was stated, was money at less than the current rate of 20 per cent. In one place I found a factory built on the side of a daimyo's castle.
I was told of crops of konnyaku which had made one man the second richest person in the prefecture and had therefore qualified him for membership in the House of Peers. (The House includes one member from each prefecture as the representative of the highest taxpayers of that prefecture.)
During my journeys I picked up many odds and ends of information by walking through the trains and having chats with country people. I was also helped by county and prefectural agricultural officials who, having learnt of my movements, were kind enough to join me in the train for an hour or so. One head of an agricultural school which was full up with students told me that there were already in Fukushima two prefectural and five county agricultural schools.
Our train, half freight with a locomotive at each end, went over the backbone of Japan through the usual series of snow shelters and tunnels. Having surmounted the heights we slid down into Yamagata. I should properly write Yamagataken, which we cannot translate Yamagatashire, for a ken (prefecture) is made up of counties. There are eleven counties in Yamagataken.
Almost any sort of dwelling looks tolerable in August, but many of the houses that first caught our attention must be lamentable shelters in winter. Some farmers, I learnt, were "in a very bad condition." We dropped from a silk and rice plateau and then to a region where the main crop was rice. The bare hills to be seen in our descent were an appalling spectacle when it was realised how close was their relation to the disastrous floods of the prefecture. A man in the train had lost 10,000 yen by floods, a large sum in rural Japan. In two years the prefecture had spent in river-bank repairs nearly a million yen. A flood some years ago did damage to the amount of 20 million yen. The prefecture had a debt of 60 million yen, chiefly due to havoc wrought by its big river. A yearly sum was spent on afforestation in addition to what was laid out by the State and by private individuals. A forestry association was trying to raise half a million yen for tree planting. But the flooding of the plains was not the only water trouble of the Yamagatans. In one district they had a stream which contained solutions of compounds of sulphuric acid so strong that crops fail for three years on ground watered from it. In other parts of the prefecture, however, farmers had the advantage, enjoyed in many parts of Japan, of being able to water from ammonia water springs.