It may be well, perhaps, to explain for a few readers how floods do their ill work. The rain which falls on treeless mountains is not absorbed there. The water washes down the mountain sides, bringing with it first good soil and then subsoil, stones and rock. The hills eventually become those peaked deserts the queer look of which must have puzzled many students of Japanese pictures. The debris washed away is carried into the rivers, along with trees from the lower slopes, and the level of the river beds is raised. Because there is less space in the river beds for water the rivers overflow their banks, and disastrous floods take place. The farmers, the local authorities and the State raise embankments higher and higher, but embankment building is costly and cannot go on indefinitely. The real remedy is to decrease the supply of water by planting forests in the mountains[[102] ]. In many places the rivers are flowing above the level of the surrounding country. The imagination is caught by the fact that there are four earthquakes a day in Japan [[103]] and that within a twelvemonth fires destroy 400 acres or so of buildings; but every year, on an average, floods, tidal waves and typhoons together drown more than 600 people and cause a money loss of 25 million yen! Every year 10½ million yen are spent by the State and the prefectures on river control alone.
Uchimura put on his famous wideawake and we went out for a walk. "I should like," he said, "to press the view that the vaunted expansion of Japan has meant to the farmers an increase of prices and taxes and of armaments out of all proportion to our population[[104]]."
Uchimura stood stock still in the little wood we had entered. "There is one thing more," he added gravely. "Before you can get deeply into your subject you must touch religion. There you see the depths of the people. A large part of the deterioration of the countryside is due to the deterioration of Buddhism. You must ask about it. You will see in the villages much of what your old writers used to call 'priestcraft.' You will hear of the thraldom of many of the people. You will see with your own eyes that real Christianity may be a moral bath for a rural district."
"The essentials, not the forms of Christianity," he declared, would save the countryside by "brotherly union." "Brotherly union" would make a better life and a better agriculture. The rural class, he explained, was more sharply divided than foreigners understood into owners of land who lived on their rents and farmers who farmed[[105]]. The division between the two classes was "as great as an Indian caste division." "To the landowner who lives in his village like a feudal lord the simple Gospel, with its insistence on the sacredness of work, comes as an intellectual revolution." Women as well as men of means received from Christianity "a new conception of humanity." They ceased to "look upon their own glory and to take delight in the flattery of poor people." They changed their way of speaking to the peasants. They developed an interest, of which they knew nothing before, in the spiritual and material betterment of the men, women and children of their village.
I went a two-days journey into the country with Uchimura. We stayed at the house of a landowner who was one of his adherents. I found myself in a large room where two swallows were flitting, intent on building on a beam which yearly bore a nest. In this room stood a shrine containing the ancestral tablets. The daily offerings were no longer made, but Uchimura's counsel, unlike that of some zealots, was to preserve not only this shrine but the large family shrine in the courtyard. Near by was an engraving of Luther.
"THE JAPANESE CARLYLE."
