CUTTING GRASS
"Some revolutionising of Japanese farming is necessary, in combined threshing, for instance," the expert who had opened our discussion said. "This combined threshing is now seen in several districts, and combined threshing will be extended. But there is the objection to the threshing machine that it breaks the straw and thus spoils it for farmers' secondary industries. It should not be impossible to invent some way of avoiding this, but the threshing machine is also too heavy for narrow roads between paddies. It is difficult to deliver the crops to the machine in sufficient bulk. Necessity may show us ways, but small threshing machines are not so economical. Of course we must have much more co-operative buying of rural requirements, and certainly there is room in some places for the Western scythe made smaller, but our people, as you have seen, are dexterous with their extremely sharp, short sickle, and fodder is often cut on rather difficult slopes, from which it is not easy to descend loaded, with a scythe. Some foreigners who speak so positively about machinery for paddies, and for, I suppose, the sloping uplands to which our arable farming is relegated, do not really grasp the physical conditions of our agriculture. And they are always forgetting the warm dankness of our climate. They forget, too, that implements for hand use are more efficient than machinery, and, if labour be cheap, more economical. They forget above all that we are of necessity a small-holdings country."
Is it such a bad thing to be a small-holdings country? Does the rural life of countries which are pre-eminently small-holding, like Denmark and Holland, compare so unfavourably with that of England? I wonder how much money has been sunk—most of it lost—during the past quarter of a century in attempts to increase small holdings in England.
"Because we have much remote, wild, uncultivated land," the speaker I have interrupted continued, "that is not to say that most of it, often at a high elevation, or sloping, or poor in quality, as well as remote, can be profitably broken up for paddies. Much of this land can be and ought to be utilised in one fashion or another, but we have found some experiments in this direction unprofitable, even when rice was dear. But it may be said, Why break up this wild land into paddies? Why not have nice grassy slopes for cattle as in Switzerland? But our experts have tried in vain to get grass established. The heavy rains and the heat enable the bamboo grass to overcome the new fodder grass we have sown. The first year the fodder grass grows nicely, but the second year the bamboo grass conquers. In Hokkaido and Saghalien we are conquering bamboo grass with fodder grass. The advice to go in largely for fruit ignores the fact of our steamy damp climate, which encourages sappy growth, disease and those insects which are so numerous in Japan. We cannot do much more than grow for home consumption."
"The advice to draw the cultivation of our small farms under group control has not always been profitable when followed by landlords," one who had not yet spoken remarked. "They have not always made more when they farmed themselves than when they let their land. All the world over, land workers do better for themselves than for others. Proposals further to capitalise farming which, with a rural exodus already going on, would have the effect of driving people off the land who are employed on it healthily and with benefit to the social organism, do not seem to offer a more satisfactory situation for Japan. No country has shown itself less afraid of business combination than Japan, and the world owes as much to industry as to agriculture, and I am not in the least afraid of machinery and capital; but production is not our final aim. Production is to serve us; we are not to serve production. If people can live in self-respect on the land they are better off in many ways than if they are engaged in industry in some of its modern developments."
"The world is also better off," my interpreter in his notes records me as saying when I was pressed to state my opinion. "The day will come when the uselessness and waste of a certain proportion of industry and commerce will be realised, when the saving power of an export and import trade in unnecessary things will be questioned and when the cultivator of the ground will be restored to the place in social precedence he held in Old Japan. With him will rank the other real producers in art, literature and science, industry and commerce. The industrialisation of the West and its capitalistic system have not been so perfectly successful in their social results for it to be certain that Japan should be hurried more quickly in the industrial and capitalistic direction than she is travelling already.[[292]] If she takes time over her development, the final results may be better for her and for the world. I have not noticed that Japanese rural people who have departed from a simple way of life through the acquirement of many farms or the receipt of factory dividends have become worthier. On the question of the alleged over-population of rural Japan, one Japanese investigator has suggested to me that as many as 20 per cent. could be advantageously spared from agricultural labour. But he was not himself an agriculturist or an ex-agriculturist. He was not even a rural resident. Further, he conceived his 20 per cent. as entering rural rather than urban industry.
"A great deal of afforestation and better use of a large proportion of forest land, much more co-operation for borrowing and buying, improved implements where improved implements can be profitably used, animal and mechanical power where they can be employed to advantage, paddy adjustment to the limit of the practical, more intelligent manuring, a wider use of better seeds,[ [293]] the bringing in of new land which is capable of yielding a profit when an adequate expenditure is made upon it, a mental and physical education which is ever improving—all these, joined to better ways of life generally, are obvious avenues of improvement, in Northern Japan particularly, not to speak of Hokkaido.[ [294]] But it is not so much the details of improvement that seem urgently to need attention. It is the general principles. I have been assured again and again by prefectural governors and agricultural experts—and in talking to a foreigner they would hardly be likely to exaggerate—that considered plans for the prevention of disastrous floods, for the breaking up of new land, for the provision of loans and for the development of public intelligence and well-being were hindered in their areas by lack of money alone. The degree to which rural improvements, with which the best interests of Japan now and in the future are bound up, may have been arrested and may still be arrested by erroneous conceptions of national progress and of the ends to which public energy and public funds [[295]] may be wisely devoted is a matter for patriotic reflection. [[296]] No impression I have gained in Japan is sharper than an impression of ardent patriotism. For good or ill, patriotism is the outstanding Japanese virtue. What some patriots here and elsewhere do not seem to realise, however, is what a quiet, homely, everyday thing true patriotism is. The Japanese, with so many talents, so many natural and fortuitous advantages, and with opportunities, such as no other nation has enjoyed, of being able to profit by the social, economic and international experience of States that have bought their experience dearly and have much to rue, cannot fairly expect to be lightly judged by contemporaries or by history. If the course taken by Japan towards national greatness is at times uncertain, it is due no doubt to the fascinations of many will-o'-the-wisps. There can be one basis only for the enlightened judgment of the world on the Japanese people: the degree to which they are able to distinguish the true from the mediocre and the resolution and common-sense with which they take their own way."
"Our rural problems," a sober-minded young professor added, after one of those pauses which are usual in conversations in Japan, "is not a technical problem, not even an economic problem. It is, as you have realised, a sociological problem. It is bound up with the mental attitude of our people—and with the mental attitude of the whole world."