When we had crossed the pass and descended on the other side and taken kuruma we soon came to a wide but absolutely dry river bed. The high embankments on either side and the width of the river bed, which, walking behind our kuruma, it took us exactly four minutes to cross, afforded yet another object lesson in the severity of the floods that afflict the country. The rock-and rubble-choked condition of the rivers inclines the traveller to severe judgments on the State and the prefectures for not getting on faster with the work of afforestation; but it is only fair to note that in many places hillsides were pointed out to me which, bare a generation ago, are now covered with trees. Within a distance of twenty-five miles hill plantations were producing fruit to a yearly value of half a million yen. As for the cultivation on either side of the roadway, along which our kurumaya were trotting us, I could not see a weed anywhere.
A favourite rural recreation in Ehime, as in Shimane on the mainland, is bull fighting. It is not, however, fighting with bulls but between bulls: the sport has the redeeming feature that the animals are not turned loose on one another but are held all the time by their owners by means of the rope attached to the nose ring. The rope is gripped quite close to the bull's head. The result of this measure of control is, it was averred, that a contest resolves itself into a struggle to decide not which bull can fight better but which animal can push harder with his head. That the bulls are occasionally injured there can be no doubt. The contests are said to last from fifteen to twenty minutes and are decided by one of the combatants turning tail. There is a good deal of gambling on the issue. In another prefecture of Shikoku the rustics enjoy struggles between muzzled dogs. A taste for this sport is also cultivated in Akita. A certain amount of dog and cock fighting goes on in Tokyo.
At an inn there was an evident desire to do us honour by providing a special dinner. One bowl contained transparent fish soup. Lying at the bottom was a glassy eye staring up balefully at me. (The head, especially the eye, of a fish is reckoned the daintiest morsel.) There was a relish consisting of grapes in mustard. A third dish presented an entire squid. I passed honourable dishes numbers two and three and drank the fish soup through clenched teeth and with averted gaze.
I interrogated several chief constables on the absence of assaults on women from the lists of crimes in the rural statistics I had collected. Various explanations were offered to me: if there were cases of assault they were kept secret for the credit of the woman's family; no prosecution could be instituted except at the instance of the woman, or, if married, the woman's husband; women did not go out much alone; the number of cases was not in fact as large as might be imagined, because the people were well behaved. An official who had had police experience in the north of Japan declared that the south was more "moral and more civilised and had higher tastes." In Ehime, for example, there was very little illegitimacy and fewer children still-born than in any other prefecture. Nevertheless four offences against women had occurred in villages in Ehime within the preceding twelve months.
One of the most interesting stories of rural regeneration I heard was told me by a blind man who had become headman of his village at the time of the war with Russia. His life had been indecorous and he had gradually lost his sight, and he took the headmanship with the wish to make some atonement for his careless years. This is his story:
"Although I thought it important to advance the economic condition of the village it was still more important to promote friendship. As the interests of landowners and tenants was the same it was necessary to bring about an understanding. I began by asking landowners to contribute a proportion of the crops to make a fund. I was blamed by only fourteen out of two hundred. But the landowners who did blame me blamed me severely, so much so that my family [[183]] were uneasy. I went from door to door with a bag collecting rice as the priests do. My eccentric behaviour was reported in the papers. The anxiety of my household and relatives grew. My children were told at the school that their father was a beggar. During the first harvest in which I collected I gathered about 40 koku (about 200 bushels). In the fourth year a hundred tenants came in a deputation to me. They said: 'This gathering of rice is for our benefit. But you gather from the landowners only. So please let us contribute every year. Some of us will collect among ourselves and bring the rice to you, so giving you no trouble.' I was very pleased with that. But I did not express my pleasure. I scolded them. I said: 'Your plan is good but you think only of yourselves. You do not give the landowners their due. When you bring your rent to them you choose inferior rice. It is a bad custom.' I advised them to treat their landowners with justice and achieve independence in the relation of tenant and landowner. They were moved by my earnestness.
"In the next year the tenants exerted themselves and the landowners were pleased with them. Thus the relation of landlord and tenant became better. The landowners in their turn became desirous of showing a friendly feeling toward the tenants. Some landlords came to me and said, 'If you wish for any money in order to be of service to the tenants we will lend it to you without interest.' I received some money. I lent money to tenants to buy manure and cattle, to attack insect pests, to provide protection against wind and flood and to help to build new dwellings nearer their work. By these means the tenants were encouraged and their welfare was promoted. The landlords were also happier, for the rice was better and the land improved. The landlords found that their happiness came from the tenants. There was good feeling between them. The landlords began to help the tenants directly and indirectly. Roads and bridges and many aids to cultivation were furnished by the landlords. A body of landlords was constituted for these purposes and it collected money. My idea was realised that the way of teaching the villages is to let landlords and tenants realise that their interests agree and they will become more friendly."
The co-operative credit society which the blind headman established not only buys and sells for its members in the ordinary way but hires land for division among the humbler cultivators. One of the departments of the society's work is the collection of villagers' savings. They are gathered every Sunday by school-children. One lad, I found from his book, had collected on a particular Sunday 5 sen each—5 sen is a penny—from two houses and 10 sen each from another two dwellings. The next Sunday he had received 5 sen from one house, 10 sen from two houses, 30 sen and 50 sen from others and a whole yen from the last house on his list. The subscriber gets no receipt but sees the lad enter in his book the amount handed over to him, and the next Sunday he sees the stamp of the bank against the sum. Some 390 householders out of the 497 in the village hand over savings to the boy and girl collectors, whose energy is stimulated with 1 per cent. on the sums they gather. In five years the Sunday collections have amassed 60,000 yen. The previous year had been marked by a bad harvest and large sums had been drawn out of the bank, but there was still a sum of 14,000 yen in hand.
In this village there had been issued one of the economic and moral diaries mentioned in an earlier chapter. The diary of this village has two spaces for every day—that is, the economic space and the moral space. The owner of this book had to do two good deeds daily, one economic and the other moral, and he had to enter them up. Further, he had to hand in the book at the end of the year to the earnest village agricultural and moral expert who devised the diary and carefully tabulates the results of twelve months' economic and moral endeavour. One might think that the scheme would break down at the handing in of the diary stage, but I was assured that there were good reasons for believing that a considerable proportion of the 440 persons who had taken out diaries would return them.
There is an old custom by which Buddhist believers, in companies of a dozen or so, meet to eat and drink together. As a good deal is eaten and drunk the gatherings are costly. Our blind headman met the difficulty of expense in his village by getting the companies of believers to cultivate together in their spare time about three acres of land. His object was to associate religion and agriculture and so to dignify farming in the eyes of young men. He also wished to provide an object lesson in the results of good cultivation. The profits proved to be, as he anticipated, so considerable as to leave a balance after defraying the cost of the social gathering. The headman prevailed on the cultivators to keep accurate accounts and they made plain some unexpected truths: as for example, that a tan of paddy did not need the labour of a man for more than twenty-three days of ten hours, and that the net income from such an area was a little more than 16 yen, and that thus the return for a day's labour was 73 sen. It was demonstrated, therefore, that labour was recompensed very well, and that instead of farming being "the most unprofitable of industries"—for in Japan as in the West there are sinners against the light who say this—it was reasonably profitable.