The Foundations of Japan Part 22

Those enlisted in the army shall render their service at the cost of their lives.

Those who stay at home shall do their best, complying with the principles laid down by the Minister of Agriculture.

Relatives of soldiers at the front shall be helped and sympathised with.

All shall subscribe to war bonds as much as possible.

All shall practise thrift and economy in accordance with their social standing.

Musical entertainments shall be given up for two years.

Methods proved to be effective in cultivation shall be reported.

In the warm, cloudy days insects multiply rapidly. Think of your brothers at the front, struggling against one of the mighty military powers of the world, and be ashamed to be vanquished by hordes of insects or ma.s.ses of vegetable growth in your fields. For the purpose of destroying insects an ample supply of oil is to be had at the experimental farm, as during last year; and payment therefor may be deferred until after harvest.

A communication to agents and managers says: "Comport yourselves in a way suitable to the dignity of an agent of the clan. Bear in mind the privileges and favours you enjoy, and exert yourselves to requite these favours. Respect the name and the coat-of-arms of the clan." In the neighbourhood there are about a hundred families bearing the name of Homma.

FOOTNOTES:

[158] In the three years 1916-18 the percentage of conscripts suffering from trachoma was 15.8.

[159] For farmers' budgets, see Appendix XIII (end).

BACK AGAIN BY THE EAST COAST

CHAPTER XXII

"BON" SONGS AND THE SILENT PRIEST

(YAMAGATA, AKITA,[160] AOMORI, IWATE, MIYAGI, f.u.kUSHIMA AND IBARAKI)

The worst of our education is that it looks askance, looks over its shoulder at s.e.x.--R.L.S.

A village headman, encountered in the train just as we were leaving Yamagata prefecture, gave me some insight into the life of his little community. The fathers of two-score families were shopkeepers and tradesmen--- that is, tradesmen in the old meaning of the word. There were also a few labourers. About two hundred and fifty families owned land and some of them rented additional tracts. Another sixty were simply tenants. The poorer farmers were also labourers or artisans.

Most of them were "comfortable enough." There were, however, half a dozen people in the village who were helped from village funds. Of the middle-grade farmers "it might be said that they do not become richer or poorer."

The headman had formed a society which sent its members to visit prefectures more developed agriculturally. This society had engaged an instructor from without the prefecture and he had taught horse tillage and the management of upland fields and had made model paddies. Five stallions had been obtained and a simple adjustment of paddy-land had been brought about. As a result the rice yield had risen.

This headman had also had addresses delivered in the village for the first time. Further, after buying a number of books, he had visited all the villagers in turn and shown them the books and had said to each of them, "I wish you to buy a book and, after reading it, to give it to the library." "And," he told me, "none of them objected." Soon a valuable library came into existence.

This admirable functionary felt some satisfaction at having been able to abate the custom according to which the young men, with the tacit permission of their parents, had gone into the neighbouring town after harvest "to visit the immoral women." "They used to spend as much as 5 yen," said our headman. He had started worthier forms of after-harvest relaxation, and "the cost of the amus.e.m.e.nt days is now only 50 or 60 sen."

When we got on the main line again and pursued our way farther north, it was through even stouter snow shelters and through many tunnels.

Not a few miserable dwellings were to be seen as we pa.s.sed into Akita prefecture. We broke our journey after some hours' travelling to stay the night at a rather primitive hot spring inn four or five miles up in the hills. A slight rain was falling. Four pa.s.sengers at a time made the ascent to the hotel, squatting on a mat in an old contractor's wagon, pushed along roughly laid rails by two perspiring youths in rain-cloaks of bark strips. At the inn, on going to the bath, I found therein a miscellaneous collection of people of both s.e.xes from grandparents to grandchildren. One bather enlivened us by performances on the flute, which, if a musical instrument must be played in a bath, seems as suitable as any. In this rambling inn there were many farmers who, by preparing their own food and doing for themselves generally, were holiday-making at bedrock prices.

As it was the _Bon_ season, when the spirits of the dead are supposed to return, I was a witness of the method adopted to help the ghosts to find their old homes. At the top of a 30 or 40 ft. pole a lantern is fixed with a pulley. Fastened up beside the lantern is a bunch of green stuff, cryptomeria in many cases. The lantern is lighted each evening for a week. Having heard a good deal about the suppression of _Bon_ dances and songs I was interested when a fellow-guest began talking about them. He had seen many _Bon_ dances and had heard many _Bon_ songs. There can be no doubt that there has been some unenlightened interference with the _Bon_ gathering. The country people seem to be suffering from the determination of officialdom to make an end of everything in country as well as town that may be considered "uncivilised" by any foreigner, however ill instructed. In towns the s.e.xes are not accustomed to meet, but country people must work together; therefore they find it natural to dance and sing together. As to the _Bon_ songs, it is common sense that expressions which may be regarded as outrageous and indecent in a drawing-room may not be so terrible on a hilltop among rustics used to very plain speech and to easy recognition of natural facts that are veiled from townspeople. My chance acquaintance at the inn recited a number of _Bon_ songs and next morning brought me some more that he had remembered and had been kind enough to write down. They merely established the fact that bucolic wit is as elemental in j.a.pan as in other lands. Most of the songs had a Rabelaisian touch, some were nasty, but nearly all had wit. The following is an entirely harmless example:

Mr. Potato of the Countryside Got his new European suit.

But a potato is still a potato.

He took one and a half _rin_[161] out of his bag And bought _ame_[162] and licked at it.

Here are three others:

Tip-toe, tip-toe, Creaks the floor.

Girl made prayer, Dreading ghost.

But 'twas her lover Who stealthily came.

Dancer, dancer, Do not laugh at me.

My dance is very bad, But I only began last year.

How thin a thin-legged man may be If he does not take his _miso_ soup.[163]

The quality of these dramatic songs will be entirely missed if the reader does not bear in mind the mimetic skill of the amateur j.a.panese dancer and his power as a contortionist. Clever dancers often use their powers in a humorous pretence of clumsiness. Of the freer sort of songs I may quote two:

Never buy vegetables in Third Street,[164]

You'll lose 30 sen and your nose.

Onions from a basket hanging in the _benjo_[165]

Were cooked in _miso_[166] and given to a blind man, But that chap was greatly delighted.

Some of the other songs may be described, I suppose, as obscene, if obscene be, as the dictionary says, "something which delicacy, purity and decency forbid to be exposed"; but "delicacy, purity and decency"

must be considered in relation to climate, work and social usage. What one feels about some critics of _Bon_ songs and dances is that they need a course of _The Golden Bough_. Such an ill.u.s.tration as _Bon_ songs furnish of the moral and mental conditions from which country folk must raise themselves is of value if rural sociology is a real thing. There is far too much theorising about the countryman and the countrywoman, far too much idealising of them and far too much rating of them as clods. If country people of all lands are free-spoken let us be neither hypercritical nor hypocritical. A big gap seems to yawn between the paddy-field peasant in his breech clout and the immaculate clubman, but what difference is there between the savour of the average _Bon_ song and of many a smoking-room jest which is not to the credit of the peasant? At an inn in Naganoken a j.a.panese artist on holiday showed me his sketch book. Among his drawings was a representation of a shrine festival which he had witnessed in a remote village. A festival car was being pushed by a knot of youths and by about an equal number of young women and all of them were nude. But no enlightened person believes that either decency or morals depends on clothing, or would expect to find more essential indecency and immorality in that village than in a modern city. What one would expect to find would be marriages between physically well-developed men and women.

How the race moves on is shown in the famous tale of a saintly Zen priest which I first heard in that little hill inn but was afterwards to see in dramatic form on the stage of a Tokyo theatre. An unmarried girl in the village in which the priest's temple was situated was about to have a child. She would not confess to her angry father the name of her lover. At last she attributed her condition to the greatly honoured priest. Her father was astonished but he was also glad that his daughter was in the favour of so eminent a man. So he went to the priest and said that he brought him good tidings: the girl whom he had deigned to notice was about to have a child. The father went on to express at length his sense of obligation to the priest for the honour done to his family. All the priest said in reply was, _So desuka_? (Is that so?) Soon after the birth of the child the girl besought her father to marry her to a certain young farmer. The father, proud of the a.s.sociation with the priest, refused. Finally the girl told her parent that it was not the priest but the young farmer who was the father of her child. The parent was aghast and chagrined as he recalled the terms in which he had addressed the saintly man. He betook himself at once to the temple and expressed in many words his feelings of shame and deep contrition. The priest heard him out, but all he said was, _So desuka_?

Yamagata signifies "shape of a mountain" and Akita means "autumn rice field." Although Akita prefecture is mountainous there is a greater proportion of level land in it than in Yamagata. I find "Rice, rice, rice" written in my notebook. An agricultural expert gave me to understand that fifteen per cent. of the farmers were probably living on rents or on the dividends of silk factories, that 55 or 60 per cent. were of the middle grade with an annual income of 300 yen, that 25 or 30 per cent. had about 150 yen--the lowest sum on which a family could be supported--and that there were 3 or 4 per cent. of farm labourers who earned less than 150 yen. There had been much paddy adjustment and the prefecture was spending 300,000 yen a year for the encouragement of adjustment and the opening of new paddies. In the case of newly opened fields, tenants had contracts, but ordinary tenancies were by word of mouth generation after generation. A great deal of agricultural instruction was given by the prefecture, the counties and the villages, and in 30 years the rice crop had been doubled although the area had remained about the same. In order to secure help in the work of rural amelioration a gathering of Buddhist priests and another of Shinto priests had been lectured to at the prefectural office. Nearly 300,000 yen had been spent in twelve months on afforestation. The following year a special effort was to be made to spend 500,000 yen. A society raised young trees and sold them at cheap rates to farmers. Every young men's a.s.sociation in the prefecture had land and had planted trees. It was in Akita that I first saw peat in j.a.pan. There are said to be 7,000 acres of it in the country.

The prefecture of Aomori forms the northern tip of the mainland. Apart from its enormous forest area and the railroad stacks of sawn lumber, what caught my eye were the apple orchards and the number of farmers on horseback or seated in wagons. Who that has been in j.a.pan has not a memory of narrow winding roads along which men and women and young people are pulling and pushing carts? Here many farming folk rode. I was told that Akita produced apples and potatoes to the value of a million yen each and that there were ten co-operative apple societies.

Much of the fruit went to Russia.

Having pa.s.sed through the city of Aomori we started to come down the east coast. An agricultural authority said that the net profit of a dry farm, that is a farm without any paddy, was almost negligible.

Because of low prices, cattle keeping had decreased to half what it used to be. (The only cattle I saw from the train were on the road with harness on their backs.) Only 18 yen could be got for a two-year-old; the Aomori cattle were indeed the cheapest in j.a.pan. The expert added, "There are no buyers; only robbers."

But the dealers were not the only robbers. Boats came from Hokkaido and stole cattle from the prefecture to the number of a hundred a year. Sometimes horses were taken too, but horse thefts were rare "because you cannot kill a horse and sell it for meat." The average price of a two-year-old not thus illicitly vended was 70 yen. (It was a little less in the next prefecture of Iwate and in Hokkaido.) Half of the stallions belonging to the "Bureau of Horse Politics" of the Ministry of Agriculture were bought in Aomori.

The farmers by the lake that we pa.s.sed on our way south were described as "very poor," for their soil was barren and their climate bad. Their crops were only a third of what could be raised in another part of the prefecture. The agriculture of all the prefectures through which I now journeyed south to Tokyo suffer from the cold temperature of the sea.

The east-coast temperature drops in winter to 7 degrees below freezing.[167] "Living is more and more difficult," said someone to me. "The number of tenants increases because farmers get into debt and have to sell their land. Millet and buckwheat are much eaten. Although the temperature is 5 per cent. colder in Hokkaido, the people do worse here because our soil is barren and there is no profitable winter occupation like lumbering. Only 10 per cent. of the rural population save anything. In bad times 65 per cent. of the families get into debt."

At Morioka in Iwate prefecture I visited the excellent higher agricultural college, where there were 300 students. The compet.i.tion for places, as at every educational inst.i.tution in j.a.pan, was keen.

The number who sat at the last entrance examinations--the average age was twenty--was 317, of whom only 80 got in. There were 15 professors and 10 a.s.sistants. The charge to students was 300 yen for a year of ten months. The annual cost of the college to the Government was 70,000 yen. Of the foreign volumes among the 20,000 books in the library 50 per cent. were German, 30 per cent. English and 20 per cent. American.

An apiary of a single skep in a roped-off enclosure was an ill.u.s.tration of unfamiliarity with bees. It seemed strange to find that in this up-to-date and efficient inst.i.tution the biggest implement for cutting gra.s.s which was in use, a sickle of course, had a blade no longer than 8 inches. Hung up at the back of a shed I noticed a rusty scythe. When I tried to show what it could do it was suggested that the implement was "too heavy, too difficult and too dangerous."

Iwate is the poorest of the northern prefectures, for bad weather so often comes when the rice is in flower. As many as 40 per cent. of the people were just making ends meet. Another 40 per cent. were always dogged by poverty. Millet was the food of 10 per cent. of the farmers; millet, salted vegetables and bean soup were the meagre diet of 5 per cent; the staple food of the remainder was barley and rice. There are few temples in Iwate compared with the rest of j.a.pan. "Education is more backward than in other prefectures," someone said. "The farmers are not able. Too much _sake_ is drunk." Farmers come in to Morioka to sell charcoal and wood and I saw some of them turning into the _sake_ shops.