[ [256] This question as it affects an agricultural country is discussed in A Free Farmer in a Free State.
[ [257] There is a consensus of scientific opinion that "non-meat eating" races such as the Japanese have longer alimentary tracts than flesh-eating Europeans. It is difficult to be precise on the subject, an eminent Western surgeon tells me, for bowels are as contractile as worms, which at one minute measure 100 units in length and the next minute have shortened to 30. So much depends on the state at death.
[ [258] On the other hand, the Japanese have taken up many new things at the point which we in the West have only recently reached. They begin to produce milk and supply it, not in the milkman's pail, but in sterilised bottles. They abandon candles and lamps and, practically skipping gas, adopt electric light or power. The capital invested in electric enterprises in 1919 was about 700 million yen or seven times that invested in gas.
[ [259] There is one blameless form of stock keeping which is developing in Hokkaido. Bees, which have still to make their way in Old Japan, are now 6,000 hives strong in the northern island, though a start was made only six or seven years ago.
[ [260] It is illustrative of the extent to which pickle is consumed in Japan that a family in Sapporo was found to have eaten no fewer than 283 daikon in a year.
[ [261] The reader must put away the impression which this table gives of a varied dietary. Few Japanese have such a range of food. The average man habitually lives on rice, bean products (tofu, bean jelly and miso, soft bean cheese), pickles, vegetables, tea, a little fish and sometimes eggs. People of narrow means see little of eggs and not much fish, unless it be katsubushi.
[ [262] The watering of vegetables with liquid manure, the usual practice of the Japanese farmer, and the pollution of the paddies make salads and insufficiently cooked green stuff dangerous and many water supplies of questionable purity. Great efforts have been made to provide safe tap water from the hills. Intestinal parasites are common. The build of the Japanese makes for strength, but in the urban areas there is much absence from work on the plea of ill-health. Both in Japan and in England I have been struck by the fact that when I made an excursion with an urban Japanese he often tired before I did, and on none of these trips was I in anything like first-class condition.
[ [263] Many Japanese look forward to a great production of wheat on the north-eastern Asiatic mainland under Japanese auspices. In considering imports of wheat it should be remembered that some of it is used in soy and macaroni.