The Foundations of Japan Part 11

But this matter of the going up and coming down of prices has but a pa.s.sing interest for the reader. The only economic fact of which he need lay hold is that in recent years the farmers have been led into the way of spending more money--in taxation as well as in general expenses of living--and that, when account is taken of every advantage they have gained from better methods of production, they have pressing on them the limitations imposed by the size of their farms and their farming practice. Whatever the prices obtained for the: products of the soil, climatic facts,[94] the character and social condition of the people, their att.i.tude towards life and authority and the att.i.tude of authority towards them remain very much the same. And thus a narrative of things seen and heard chiefly during the first years of the War is not at all out of date even if it were not supplemented as it is by a plentiful supply of notes containing the latest statistical data.

There is one curious exception only. The reader of these pages will constantly come on references to the poverty of the tenant farmers.

They are, of course, practically labourers, for they cultivate two or three acres only, and at the end of the year, as has been shown, have merely a trifle in hand and sometimes not that. Influenced by the labour movement, which developed in the industrial centres during and after the War,[95] this depressed cla.s.s has of late shown spirit. It has begun to a.s.sert its claims against landowners. At the end of 1920 there were as many as ninety a.s.sociations of tenant farmers, and sixty of these had been started for the specific purpose of representing tenants' interests against landowners. Strikes of tenants began and continue. The end of this movement of a proverbially conservative cla.s.s is not at all certain.[96]

The outstanding facts which are to be borne in mind about agricultural j.a.pan are that the population is as thick on the ground as the population of the British Isles (thicker in reality, for so much of j.a.pan is mountain and waste)--ten times thicker than the population of the United States[97]--that j.a.pan is primarily an agricultural country, while Great Britain is largely a manufacturing and trading country, and that only 15 per cent. of j.a.pan proper (including Hokkaido) is under cultivation against 27 per cent. in Great Britain.[98] The average area cultivated per farming family in j.a.pan, counting paddy and upland together, is less than 3 acres. As the total population of j.a.pan is now (1921) 56 millions (55,960,150 in 1920, plus the annual increase of 600,000), every acre has to feed close on four persons. ("Even in Hokkaido," Dr. Sato notes, "the average area per family is only 7 acres.") Happily the number of families cultivating less than 1 acres is decreasing and the number cultivating from 1 up to 5 acres is increasing.[99] In other words, the favourite size of farm is one which finds work for all the members of the farmer's family. As on small holdings all over the world, it is found that profits are difficult to make when help has to be paid for.

The facts that in the last four years for which figures are available the number of farming families keeping silk-worms has risen by half a million and that every year the area of land under cultivation increases show that new ways of increasing income are eagerly seized on.

FOOTNOTES:

[80] For estimate of daily consumption of rice by j.a.panese, see Appendix XXIII.

[81] For statistics of imported and exported rice, see Appendix XXIV.

[82] j.a.panese. I was the only foreigner present.

[83] The old name for a considerable part of Aichi

[84] This section of the chapter was written in 1921.

[85] For the way in which "normal yield" is arrived at, see p. 70.

[86] See Appendix XXV.

[87] War with China, 1894; with Russia, 1904.

[88] For farmers' diet, see Appendix XXVI.

[89] Farmers in sericultural districts live better than the ordinary rice farmers.

[90] See Appendix XXVII.

[91] See Appendix XXVIII.

[92] For prices, see Appendix XVII.

[93] The rise in prices towards the close of the War, with the rise in the cost of living throughout the world, has been discussed on page xxv.

[94] See Appendix XXIX.

[95] See Chapter XX.

[96] Recent figures show 400 tenants' a.s.sociations, of which a third are militant.

[97] See Appendix x.x.x and page 97.

[98] See Chapter XX.

[99] See Appendix x.x.xI.

BACK TO FIRST PRINCIPLES: THE APOSTLE AND THE ARTIST

CHAPTER X

A TROUBLER OF ISRAEL

The signification of this gift of life, that we should leave a better world for our successors, is being understood.--MEREDITH

To some people in j.a.pan the countryman Kanzo Uchimura is "the j.a.panese Carlyle." To others he is a religious enthusiast and the j.a.panese equivalent of a troubler of Israel. He appeared to me in the guise of a student of rural sociology.

Uchimura is the man who as a school teacher "refused to bow before the Emperor's portrait."[100] He endured, as was to be expected, social ostracism and straitened means. But when his voice came to be heard in journalism it was recognised as the voice of a man of principle by people who heard it far from gladly. There is a seamy side to some j.a.panese journalism[101] and Uchimura soon resigned his editorial chair. He abandoned a second editorship because he was determined to brave the displeasure of his countrymen by opposing the war with Russia. To-day he deplores many things in the relations of j.a.pan and China.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Fuhei_ MUZZLED EDITORS]

Uchimura has written more than two dozen books, mostly on religion.

_How I became a Christian_ has been translated into English, German, Danish, Russian and Chinese, and is to that extent a landmark in the literary history of j.a.pan. His Christianity is an Early Christianity which places him in antagonism, not only to his own countrymen who are Shintoists, Buddhists or Confucians, or vaguely Nationalists, but to such foreign missionaries as are sectarians and literalists. His earliest training was in agricultural science, and the welfare of the j.a.panese countryside is near his heart. If he be a Carlyle, as his fibre and resolution, downright way of writing and speaking, hortatory gift, humour, plainness of life and dislike of officials, no less than his cast of countenance, his soft hat and long gaberdine-like coat have suggested, he is a Carlyle who is content to stay both in body and mind at Ecclefechan. He is not, however, like Carlyle, whom he calls "master," a peasant, but a samurai.

"As you penetrate into the lives of the farmers and discover the influences brought to bear on them," Uchimura said to me in his decisive way, "there will be laid bare to you _the foundations of j.a.pan_. You know our proverb, of course, _No wa kuni no taihon nari_ ('Agriculture is the basis of a nation')? Have you been to Nikko?"

This seemed a little inconsequent, but I told him I had not yet been to Nikko. ("Until you have seen Nikko," runs the adage, "do not say 'splendid'.") "How many of the tourists who are delighted with Nikko,"

he went on, "have heard how the richest farms near that town were devastated? A century ago a minister of the Shogun, who realised that fertility depended on trees, saw to the whole range of Nikko hills being afforested. It was a tract twenty miles by twenty miles in extent. But the 'civilised' authorities of our own days sold all the timber to a copper company for 8,000 yen. The company destroyed the fertility of the district not only by cutting down the forest but by poisoning the water with which the farmers irrigated their crops. A member of Parliament gave himself with such devotion to the cause of the ruined farmers that when he died the ashes of his cremated body were divided and preserved in four shrines erected to his memory."

It was a sad thing, said Uchimura, that the farmers of j.a.pan, because of the decreased fertility of the land due to the denudation of the hills of trees, and because of their increased expenses, should be laying out "a quarter of their incomes on artificial manures." "The enemies which j.a.pan has most to fear to-day," Uchimura declared, "are impaired fertility and floods."

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 j.a.panese 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 s.p.a.ce 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 j.a.pan[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 10 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 j.a.pan 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 cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.ses 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THE j.a.pANESE CARLYLE." p. 90]

[Ill.u.s.tration: MR. AND MRS. YANAGI. p. 98]

Uchimura spoke in the house to some thirty or more "people of the district who had accepted Christianity." His appeal was to "live Christianity as given to the world by its founder." The address, which was delivered from an arm-chair, was based on the fifth chapter of Matthew, which in the preacher's copy appeared to contain cross-references to two disciples called Tolstoy and Carlyle. When I was asked to speak I found that the women in the gathering had places in front. "The remarkable effect of Christianity among those who have come to think with us," Uchimura told me afterwards, "is seen most in their treatment of women. Our host, had he not been a Christian, would have been credited by public opinion with the possession of a concubine, and would not have been blamed for it."

When, after the speaking, we knelt in a circle and talked less formally of how best to benefit rural people, we were joined by the women folk. Later, when a dozen of the neighbours were invited to dinner, it was not served at separate tables for each kneeling guest, but at one long table, an innovation "to indicate the brotherly relation."

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHILDREN CATCHING INSECTS ON RICE-SEED BEDS]

[Ill.u.s.tration: MASTERS OF A COUNTRY SCHOOL AND SOME OF THE CHILDREN.