A CRADLE
I found upon enquiry that in the village in which I had been living there had been one arrest only during the previous year. The charge was one of theft. Half a dozen other people had got into trouble but their arrests had been "postponed." Two of these six delinquents had "caused fire accidentally," two had been guilty of petty theft, and the remaining two had sold things of small value which did not belong to them. During the twelve months there had been no charges of immorality and no gambling. Perhaps, however, there may have been police admonitions. It seemed to have been a long time since there had been a case of what we should call illegitimacy or of a child being born in the first months of a young couple's marriage. Someone mentioned, however, that the girls who went to the silk factories were, as a consequence of their life there, "debased morally and physically."
A notable thing in the village was four fires, two the month before we arrived and two while we were there. They were suspected to have been the work of a person of weak intellect. (As in our own villages half a century ago, there is in every community at least one "natural.") On the night of the first fire we were awakened about 3 a.m. by shouting, by the clanging of the fire bell and by the booming of the great bell in the temple yard. The fire was about four houses away. It was a still night and the flames and sparks went straight up. As the possibility of the wind shifting and the fire spreading could not be entirely excluded we quickly got our more important possessions on the engawa—at least a young maidservant did so. The continual experience which the Japanese have of fires makes them self-possessed on these occasions, and this girl had futon, bags, etc., neatly tied in big furoshiki (wrapping cloths) in the shortest possible time. It was only when she was satisfied that our belongings were in readiness for easy removal that she went to look after her own. The matter-of-fact, fore-sighted, neat way in which she got to work was admirable. With great kindness one of the elders of the village came hurriedly to the temple, evidently thinking we should feel alarmed, and cried out, "Yoroshii, Yoroshii" ("All right").
FIRE ALARM AND OBSERVATION POST
As I stood before the blaze what struck me most was the orderliness and quiet of the crowd and the way in which whatever help was needed was at once forthcoming without fuss. The fire brigades were working in an orderly way and everything was so well managed that the scene seemed almost as if it were being rehearsed for a cinema. One difference between what I saw and what would be seen at home at a fire was that the scene was well lighted from the front, for the members of the fire brigades carried huge lanterns on high poles. From the mass of old wet reed in the roadway I judged that the first act of the firemen had been to use their long hooks to denude the roof of the burning house of its thatch, which in the lightest wind is so dangerous to surrounding dwellings. Nobody in the village is insured, but the neighbours seem to meet about a third of the loss caused by a fire. It is an illustration of local values that a larger subscription than 2 yen would not be accepted from me. In connection with this fire someone mentioned to me that incendiarism is specially prevalent in some prefectures, while in others the use of the knife is the usual means of wiping out scores. The phrase used by a person who threatens arson is, "I will make the red worm creep into your roof."
During the winter there is too much drinking—"generally by poor men"—but there is said to be less of this than formerly. Some people stop their newspaper in the summer and resume taking it during the greater leisure of the winter. It has been noted, among other small matters, that the local vocabulary has expanded during the past fifteen years. During our stay the young midwife, who was going to America to join her husband, was eager to give her service in the kitchen for the chance of improving her English. We also gave help in the evenings thrice a week to one of the school teachers who had managed to obtain a fair reading knowledge of English. The earnestness with which these two people studied was touching. While I was in the village the young men's association began the issue of a magazine. Lithographic ink was brought to me so that I might contribute in autograph as well as in translation. The association, which receives 10 yen a year from the village, cultivates several plots of paddy and dry land. The bigger schoolboys drilled with imitation rifles, imitation bayonets and imitation cartridges. I felt that I should know more about the villagers if I could learn, like Synge, their topics of conversation when no stranger was present. One day while strolling with a friend I asked him what was being said by two girls who were working among the mulberries and were hidden from us by a hedge (hedges only occur round mulberry plots). He told me that one was enhancing to her companion the tremendous dignity of the Crown Prince by exaggerating grotesquely the size of the house he lived in, which reminded me of the servant who told her friend that "Queen Victoria was so rich that she had a piano in her kitchen." Generally the conversational topics of the villagers seemed to be people and prices. Undoubtedly, I was told, the subjects which were most popular, "because they provoked hilarity," were family discords and sexual questions. One man with whom I spoke about the morality of the village said cautiously, "They say there are some moneylenders here."