The foundations of Japan

by J. W. Robertson Scott

I saw at a distance in the midst of paddies two tree-covered mounds, a large one and a small one. They looked like the grave mounds I had seen in China, but it was suggested that they were probably on an old frontier line and marked spots at which ceremonies for scaring off disease were performed.

In one place I found the people planting plum trees in order to meet their communal taxation. It was reckoned that the yield of one tree when it came into full bearing would defray the taxes of a moderate-sized family.

An open space in a wood was pointed out to me as the spot on which dead horses were formerly thrown to the dogs and birds. Nowadays notice was given to the Eta that a dead horse was to be cast away, and they came and, after skinning the animal, buried the body. Farther off, on the high road, I saw an 8 ft. high monument to a local steed that had died in Manchuria.

One of my further visits to Chiba was in the spring. The paddies, which had been fallow since November, were under water; but much of the stubble had been turned over with the long-bladed mattock. The seed beds from which the rice is transplanted to the paddies were a vivid green. On the high ground I saw good clean crops of barley and wheat, beans and peas, on soil of very moderate quality.

The name of Funabashi at a station reminded me of a Japanese friend having told me that it was "famous for a shrine and a very immoral place." But I afterwards heard that the keeper of that shrine, "acting from conscientious motives, gave up his lucrative post and died a poor man." It is said of one of the most sacred places in Japan that it is also the "most immoral." Kyoto which contains nine hundred shrines is also supposed to harbour several thousand women of bad character.

I passed a place where 25,000 Russian prisoners had been detained. There was an old peasant there who told his son that he could not understand why so many Japanese went abroad at such great cost to see the different peoples of the world. If they would only stay at home, he said, they would see them all in turn, for first there had been the Chinese prisoners, then the Russians and now there were the Germans.

In the uplands it was peaceful and restful to walk through the shady lanes between the tree-studded homesteads or along the road passing between plots of mulberry, tea, vegetables or grain, cultivated with the care given to plants in a garden. In the herbage by the roadside, but not among the crops I need hardly say, I noticed dandelions, sow thistles, Scots thistles, plantains and some other familiar weeds.

In the paddies some men wore only a narrow band of red cotton between their legs joined to a waist string, which, though convenient wear in paddies, was comically conspicuous. I recall a friend's story of a little foreign girl of seven who stayed with her mother in a Japanese hamlet and struck up a friendship with a kindly old peasant. One hot summer day the child came home carrying all her scanty garments over her arm, and covered with mud to the waist. In answer to her mother's enquiries the child said, "Well, mother, Ito San has all his clothes off, and I could not go into the paddy to help him with mine on."

I visited an elementary school which was little more than a shed. The roofing was of bark and the paper-covered window shutters were of the roughest. It said much for the stamina of the children that they could sit there in bleak weather. An attempt had been made to shut off the classes from one another by pieces of thin cotton sheeting fastened to a string. But such essential furniture, from a hygienic point of view, as benches with backs had been provided, for it is considered by the national educational authorities that kneeling in the Japanese manner is inimical to physical development. I noticed, also, that when the children sang they had been taught to place their hands on their hips in order that their chests might benefit from the vocal exercise. The earnestness and kindliness of the men and women teachers were evident. All the teachers came to school bare-foot on geta. [^[210]]

The sea was not far off and we went to the beach where there was nothing between us and America. My companion and I were carried over shallows on the backs of fishermen, wonderful bronze-coloured figures. Above high-water mark heaps of small fish were drying. They were to be turned into oil and fish-waste manure. I saw an earthenware vase with a hole in the bottom like a flowerpot and found that it was used, with a rope attached to the rim, for catching octopus. When the octopus comes across such a vase on the sea bottom he regards it as a shelter constructed on exactly the right principles and takes up his abode therein. He is easily captured, for he refuses to let go his vase when it is brought to the surface. Indeed the only way to dislodge him is to pour hot water through the hole in the bottom of his upturned tenement.