In the evening I talked with two distinguished men until a late hour. "We are not a metaphysical people," one of them said. "Nor were our forefathers as religious as some students may suppose. Those who went before us gave to the Buddhist shrine and even worshipped there, but their daily life and their religion had no close connection. We did not define religion closely. Religion has phases according to the degree of public instruction. Our religion has had more to do with propitiation and good fortune than with morality. If you had come here a century ago you would have been unable to find even then religion after another pattern. If it be said that a man must be religious in order to be good the person who says so does not look about him. I am not afraid to say that our people are good as a result of long training in good behaviour. Their good character is due to the same causes as the freedom from rowdiness which may be marked in our crowds."
"What is wanted in the villages," said the other personage, "is one good personality in each." I said that the young men's association seemed to me to be often a dull thing, chiefly indeed a mechanism by means of which serious persons in a village got the young men to work overtime. "Yes," was the response, "the old men make the young fellows work."
The first speaker said that there had been three watchwords for the rural districts. "There was Industrialisation and Increase of Production. There was Public Spirit and Public Welfare. There was The Shinto Shrine the Centre of the Village. We have a certain conception of a model village, but perhaps some hypocrisy may mingle with it. They say that the village with well-kept Buddhist and Shinto shrines is generally a good village."
"In other words," I ventured, "the village where there is some non-material feeling."
The rejoinder was: "Western religion is too high, and, I fear, inapplicable to our life. It may be that we are too easily contented. But there are nearly 60 millions of us. I do not know that we feel a need or have a vacant place for religion. There is certainly not much hope for an increase of the influence of Buddhism."
As we went along in the train I was told that on a sixth of the rice area in Tottori there had been a loss of 70 per cent. by wind. When a man's harvest loss exceeds this percentage he is not liable for rates and taxes. A passenger told me about "nursery pasture." This is a patch of grass in the hills to which a farmer sends his ox to be pastured in common with the oxen of other farmers under the care of a single herdsman. It is from cattle keeping on this modest scale that the present beef requirements of the country are largely met.[[194]]
Although the opinions expressed to me by Governors of prefectures have been frequently recorded in these pages, I have not felt at liberty to identify more than one of the Excellencies who were good enough to express their views to me. A friend who knew many Governors offered me the following criticism, which I thought just: "They are too practical and too much absorbed in administration to be able to think. Often they read very little after leaving the university. They have seldom anything to tell you about other than ordinary things, and they seldom show their hearts. You cannot learn much from Governors who have nothing original to say or are fearful or live in their frock coats or do not mean to show half their minds or are practising the old official trick of talking round and round and always evading the point. One fault of Governors is that they are being continually transferred from prefecture to prefecture. You have no doubt yourself noticed how often Governors were new to their prefectures. But with all the faults that our Governors have, there are not a few able, good and kind men among them and they are not recruited from Parliament but must be members of the Civil Service. One of the most common words in our political life is genshitsu, 'responsibility for one's own words.' If Governors fear to assume the responsibility of their own views they are only of a part with a great deal of the official world."
We turned away from the northern sea coast and struck south in order to cross Japan to the Inland Sea en route for Kobe and Tokyo.
As we came through Hyogo prefecture my companion pointed to hill after hill which had been afforested since his youth. One of the things which interested me was the number and the tameness of the kites which were catching frogs in the paddies.
Before I left Hyogo I had the advantage of a chat with one who for many years past had thought about the rural situation in Japan generally. He spoke of "the late Professor King's idealising of the Japanese farmer's condition." He went on: "While King laid stress on the ability to be self-supporting on a small area he ignored the extent to which many rural people are underfed. The change in the Meiji era has been a gradual transference from ownership to tenancy. Many so-called representative farmers have been able to add field to field until they have secured a substantial property and have ceased to be farmers. An extension of tenancy is to be deplored, not only because it takes away from the farmer a feeling of independence and of incentive, but because it creates a parasitic class which in Japan is perhaps even more parasitic than in the West. A landowner in the West almost invariably realises that he has certain duties. In Japan a landowner's duties to his neighbourhood and to the State are often imperfectly understood.