Governor Kuroda had a million yen placed at his disposal for ten years in succession, and a million yen was a big sum in those days. Before long there were flour mills, breweries, beet-sugar factories, canning plants, lead and coal mining and silk manufacturing and an experiment in soldier colonisation which owed something to Russian experiments in Cossack farming. An agricultural school grew into a large agricultural college; and this agricultural college has lately become the University of Hokkaido, with nearly a thousand students.[[239]] How much of a pioneer Sapporo College was may be gathered from the fact that when I was in Hokkaido 67 out of the 140 men who were members of the faculty had been themselves taught there. Dean Sato (Japan's first exchange lecturer to American universities), Dr. Nitobe (Japanese Secretary of the League of Nations) and Kanzō Uchimura were among the first students. There have always been American professors at Sapporo—its first president came from Massachusetts—and the professorship of English has always been held by an American.
The 50 acres of elm-studded land in which the University buildings stand are a surprise, for the elm grows nowhere else in Japan but Hokkaido.[ [240]] The extent of the University's landed possessions is also unexpected. There are two training farms of 185 and 260 acres respectively, beautifully kept botanic gardens, a tract of 15,000 acres on which there are already more than a thousand tenants, and 300,000 acres of forests in Hokkaido, Saghalien and Korea. Four or five times as many students as can be admitted offer themselves at Sapporo.
There is in Hokkaido an agricultural and rural life conceived for a country where stock may be kept and a farmer does not need to practise the superintensive farming of Old Japan. At the first University farm I looked over it was clear that not only American but Swedish, German and Swiss farming practice had had its influence. No longer was the farmer content with mattocks, hoes and flails. A silo dominated the scene, and maize, eaten from the cob in Old Japan, was a crop for stock.[ [241]] I also noticed crops of oats and rye.
I arrived in Hokkaido in the last week of August in a linen suit and was glad to put on a woollen one. By September 29 it was snowing. Snow-shoes were shown among the products of the island at the prefectural exhibition. Canadians have likened the climate of Hokkaido to that of Manitoba. Hokkaido is on the line of the Great Lakes, but the cold current from the North makes comparisons of this sort ineffective. It is only in southern Hokkaido that apples will grow. Thirty years ago wolves and bear were shot two miles from Sapporo and bear may still be found within ten miles.
The sea fisheries of Hokkaido are valuable but agriculture and forestry are greater money makers. Even without forestry agriculture is well ahead of factory industry, which is also eclipsed by mining. Industry is aided by the presence of coal. Among manufactures, brewing stands out even more conspicuously than wood-pulp making or canning. One of the three best-known beers in Japan comes from Hokkaido. [[242]] In contrast with the situation in Old Japan, where the land is half paddy and half upland, there is in Hokkaido only a ninth of the cultivated land under rice.[ [243]] When I was in Hokkaido there were 600,000 chō under cultivation, a hundred and fifty times more than there were in 1873. The line marking the northern or rather the north-eastern limit of rice shows roughly a third of the island on the northern and eastern coasts to be at present beyond the skill of rice growers. There is always uncertainty with the rice crop in Hokkaido. As the growing period is short, half the rice is not transplanted but sown direct in the paddies. A bad crop is expected once in seven years. In such a season there is no yield and even the straw is not good.
Immigrants get 5 chō, but if they are without capital they first go to work as tenants. There are contractors in the towns who supply labourers to farmers and factories at busy times. When newcomers have capital and are keen on rice growing and are families working without hired labour, they are strongly recommended not to devote more than 2-1\2 chō to rice—from 3 to 5 chō are the absolute limit—against 1-1\2 or 2 chō to other crops. When the holder of a 5-chō holding prospers he buys a second farm and more horses and implements, and hires labour for the busy period. But 10 or 15 chō is considered as much as can be worked in this way. If the area is more than 10 or 15 chō it is difficult to get labour in the busy season, for it is the busy season for everybody. Labourers from a distance can be got only at an unprofitable rate. It is first the lack of capital and then the lack of labour which prevents the farmer extending his holding. [[244]] The limit of practical mixed farming is 30 chō. (Stock farming is for milk rather than for meat, and more than one condensed-milk factory is in operation.) Even in Hokkaido large farming, as it is understood in Great Britain and America, is not easy to find. [[245]]
On my journey north from Sapporo the first thing which brought home to me the colonial character of the agriculture was the tree stumps sticking up in the paddies. The second was the extent to which the rivers were still uncontrolled. The longest river in Japan, 260 miles long, is in Hokkaido. There was obviously a vast moorland area in need of draining. Peat—there are 300,000 chō of it—may be a standby when the waste of timber that is going on brings about a shortage of fuel other than coal. From poor peat soil, which was growing oats, buckwheat and millet, we passed to land capable of producing rice, and saw ploughing with horses. One region had been opened for only twenty years, but already the farmers had cultivated the hillsides in the assiduous fashion of Old Japan.
From Ashigawa we made some excursions in a prim basha to places which were always several miles farther on than they were supposed to be and were usually reached by tracks covered with stones from 6 to 9 ins. long and having ruts a foot deep.
We visited a large estate with 350 tenants who were mostly working 2½ chō, though some had twice as much. Nearly all of these tenants appeared to have one or two horses, although the estate manager had advised them to use oxen or cows as more economical draught animals. When I remembered the distance the farmers were from the town and the state of the roads, and noticed the satisfaction which the men we passed displayed in being able to ride, it was easy to believe that the possession of a horse might have its value as a means of social progress. During the last ten years half the tenants had made enough to enable them to buy farms. The tenants on this estate had two temples and one shrine. [[246]]
I visited a fifteen-years-old co-operative alcohol factory with a capital of 300,000 yen. Of its materials 80 per cent. seemed to be potato starch waste and 20 per cent. maize. The product was 6,000 or 7,000 koku of alcohol. The dividend was 8 per cent. On the waste a large number of pigs was fed. The animals were kept in pens with boarded floors within a small area, and I was not surprised to learn that three or four died every month. Starch making, which produces the waste used by the alcohol factory, is managed on quite a small scale. An outfit may cost no more than 30 or 50 yen. I went over a small peppermint-making plant. Most of the peppermint raised in Japan—it reaches a value of 2 million yen—is grown in Hokkaido.