The Foundations of Japan Part 36

Said one of these to me: "We j.a.panese are not inherently a warlike people and have no desire to be militarists; but we are suffering from German influence not only in the army but through the middle-aged legal, scientific and administrative cla.s.ses who were largely educated in Germany or influenced by German teaching. This German influence may have been held in check to some extent, perhaps, by the artistic world, which has certainly not been German, except in relation to music, and after all that is the best part of Germany. Many young people have taken their ideas largely from Russia; more from the United States and Great Britain. But Germany will always make her appeal on account of her reputation with us for system, order, industry, depth of knowledge, persistence and nationalism."

On the family system, the study of which was more than once urged upon me in connection with the rural problem, this statement was made to me by an agricultural expert: "I will tell you the story of an official whose salary was that of a Governor. His father was a farmer. The farmer borrowed money to educate his son. When the son became an official he paid the money back, but on the small salaries he received this repayment was a strain. Then two brothers came to his house frequently for money, and when they received it spent it in ridiculous ways. This begging has gone on for nine years. My friend has to live not like an Excellency but like a _guncho_. He cannot treat his wife and children fairly. But of the money he gives to his brothers he says, 'It is my family expense.'"

I also heard this story: "A married B. B died without having any children. A next married B's sister, C. Then, because of the necessity of having a male heir for the maintenance of his family, and because he thought it was unlikely that his wife C would have children as her dead sister B had had none, he adopted his wife's younger brother, D.

But the wife C did have children. Consequently, not only is A's wife his sister-in-law and his eldest 'son' his wife's brother, but his children are his eldest 'son's' nephews. The eldest of these children, E, is legally the younger son. He says, 'I am glad that instead of an uncle I have an elder brother. I am much attached to him and he is attached to me. I am not sorry to be younger instead of elder brother, for when my father dies my adopted brother will become head of the family and he must then bring up his younger brothers and sisters, manage the family fortunes, bear the family troubles and keep all the cousins and uncles in good humour by inviting them occasionally and at other times by visiting them and giving them presents.'[225]

"It is obvious that our family system, for speaking in criticism of which officials have been dismissed from their posts, puts too much stress on the family and too little on the individual. The family is the unit of society. Any member of it is only a fraction of that unit.

For the sake of the family every member of it must sacrifice almost everything.[226] Sometimes the development of the individual character and individual initiative is checked by the family system. An eldest son is often required to follow his father's calling irrespective of his tastes. Nowadays some eldest sons go abroad, but their departure attracts attention and you seldom find such a thing happening among farmers. The family system, by which all is subordinated to family, is convenient to farmers for it means increased labour and economy of living. Sometimes there may be two married sons living at home and then there is often strife. Generally speaking, the family system at one and the same time keeps young men from striking out in the world and compels their early marriage so that the helping hands to the family may be more numerous. The family system concentrates the attention on the family and not on society. There is no energy left for society.

"Again, the family system gives too much power to relatives and leads to disagreeable interference. In the case of a marriage being proposed between family A and family B, the families related to A or B who will be brought into closer connection by the marriage may object. On the other hand, the family system has the advantage that the relatives who interfere may also be looked upon for help. Not a few people are all for maintaining the family system. But the spirit of individualism is entering into some families and here and there children are beginning to claim their rights and to act against relatives' wishes. One hears of farmers sending boys, even elder sons, to the towns, and for their equipment borrowing from the prefectural agricultural bank instead of spending on the development of their business."

At a Christmas-day luncheon I met four students of rural problems, two of whom were peers, one a governor of an important prefecture, and a fourth a high official in the agricultural world. One man, speaking of the family system, said "the success of agriculture depends on it."

"In my opinion," someone remarked, "the foundation of the family system is common production and common consumption, so when these things go there must be a gradual disappearance of the family system."

"No," came the rejoinder, "the only enemy of the family system is Western influence." "Yes," the fourth speaker added, "an enemy whose blows have told."

Someone suggested that the j.a.panese rural emigrant always hoped to return home, that is if he could return with dignity--does not the proverb speak of the desirability of returning home in good clothes?

One of the company said that he had seen in Kyushu rows of white-washed slated houses which had been erected by returned emigrants. "But they were successful prost.i.tutes. Often, however, these girls invest their money unwisely and have to go abroad again."

Everybody at table agreed that there was in the villages a slow if steady slackening of "the power of the landlord, of the authorities and of religion," and a development of a desire and a demand for better conditions of life. One who proclaimed himself a conservative urged that changes of form were too readily confounded with changes of spirit. The change in thought in j.a.pan, he said, was slow, and some occurrences might be easily misjudged. I said that that very day I had heard from my house the drone of an aeroplane prevail over the sound of a temple bell, happening to speak of _The Golden Bough_, I asked my neighbour, who had read it, if to a j.a.panese who got its penetrating view some things could ever be the same again. He answered frankly, "There are things in our life which are too near to criticise. Do you know that there are parts of j.a.pan where folklore is still being made?"

I was invited one evening to dinner to meet a dozen men conspicuous in the agricultural world. Priests were apologised for because most of them were "very poor men and also poorly educated." Very few had been even to a middle school. Many priests read Chinese scriptures aloud but they did not understand what they were reading.

One man reported that an old farmer had said to him that paddy-field labour was harder than dry-land labour, but young men did not go off to Tokyo because of the severity of the work; they went away because of "the bondage of rural life."

How much has the economic stress affected old convictions? How general and how eager is the j.a.panese resolution to Westernise farther? None of the rural sociologists had given any thought apparently to a new factor in the rural problem: the way in which compulsory military service, in taking farmers' sons to the cities as soldiers and bluejackets, is giving them an acquaintance with neo-Malthusianism. In Tokyo and other large cities certain articles are prominently advertised on the h.o.a.rdings. It is of some importance to consider what will be the effect of this knowledge in compet.i.tion with the national appreciation of large families.[227] Is it likely that an intensely "practical" people, which has bolted so much of European and American "civilisation," will be wholly uninfluenced by the Western practice of limitation of offspring? What is to-day the actual strength of the social needs which have produced the large j.a.panese family?[228]

Whatever middle-aged j.a.panese may think, the matter is not in their hands, but in the hands of the younger generation. Most Western economists would no doubt argue that if fewer babies arrived in j.a.pan there would not be so many farmers' boys and university graduates bent on emigrating.

Without the voluntary limitation of families, however, the number of children born is likely to be diminished by the increased cost of living and by the postponement of marriage. I know j.a.panese men who were married before they were twenty; the younger generation of my friends is marrying nearer thirty.[229]

There is reason to believe that the population has not increased of recent years at the old rate.[230] A responsible authority expressed the opinion to me that the necessities of the population are unlikely to overtake the means of production in the near future.[231]

The j.a.panese are intensely practical, but they have, as we have seen, another side. If that other side is not "spiritual," in the sense in which the word is largely used in the West, it is at least regardful of other considerations than the "practical." It is with thoughts of that vital side of the national character that I recall a story told me by Dr. Nitobe of the last days of the Forty-seven Ronin. It is well authenticated. When the Ronin had slain their dead lord's persecutor and had given themselves up to the authorities, they were found worthy of death. But the Shogun was in some anxiety as to what might justly be done. He sent privily to a famous abbot saying that it was at all times the duty of the Shogun to condemn to death men who had committed murder. Yet it was the privilege of a priest to ask for mercy, and in the matter of the lives of the Ronin the Shogun would not be unwilling to listen to a plea for mercy. The abbot answered that he sympathised deeply with the Ronin, but because he so sympathised with them he was unwilling to take any steps which might hinder the carrying out of the sentence. It was true, he said, that there were old men among the Ronin, but many, of them were young men--one was only fifteen--and it had to be borne in mind that if they escaped death at the hands of the law it was hardly likely that during the whole course of their after-lives they could hope to escape committing sin of some sort or another. At the moment they had reached a pinnacle of n.o.bility which they could never pa.s.s and it was a thing to be desired for them that they should die now, when they would live to all posterity as heroes.

The happiest fate for the Ronin was a righteous death, and as their admiring sympathiser the abbot expressed his unwillingness to do anything which might have the effect of saving them from so glorious an end.

FOOTNOTES:

[221] Someone said to me, "I have in mind one village where there is a poorly cared-for school and a score of teahouses giving employment to nearly two hundred people."

[222] "Small boards with crude designs painted on them. They may be prayers, thank-offerings or protective charms. A shrine where many thanks _ema_ have been left is clearly that of a G.o.d ready to hear and answer prayer. Worshippers flock to the place and the acc.u.mulation of painted boards--whether prayers or thanks--increases."--FREDERICK STARR, _Transactions of the Asiatic Society of j.a.pan_, vol. xlviii.

[223] The percentage in conscripts in 1918 was 2.2 per cent, against 2.5 per cent, in 1917 and 2.7 per cent, in 1916. ("Not less than 10 per cent. of the population of our large towns are infected with syphilis and a much larger proportion with gonorrha."--SIR JAMES CRICHTON-BROWNE.) The figures for the general population of j.a.pan must be higher.

[224] See Appendix LXIII.

[225] It sometimes happens that an adopted son is dismissed with "a sufficient monetary compensation" when a real son is born.

[226] I met a fine ex-daimyo, who after the Restoration had served as a prefectural governor. He was so generous in giving money to public objects in his prefecture that his family compelled him to resign office.

[227] See Appendix x.x.x.

[228] It is only within the last quarter of a century that the authorities have taken a stand against infanticide. There is no traditional dislike of an artificial diminution of progeny, for many of the fathers and grandfathers of the present generation practised it. Methods of procuring abortion were also common. A certain plant has a well-known reputation as an abortifacient. A young peer and his wife are now conducting a campaign on behalf of smaller families, and the discussion has advanced far enough for a magazine to invite Dr.

Havelock Ellis to express his views.

[229] According to the 1918 figures the ages at which men and women married were as follows per 1,000: before 20, m. 37.6, w. 259.0; 20-25, m. 304.9, w. 434.8; 26-30, m. 347.9, w. 159.4; 31-35, m. 145.1, w. 67.3; 36-40, m. 70.0, w. 37.1; 41-45, m. 41.8, w. 21.4; 46-50, m.

22.8, w. 10.5; 51-55, m. 14.7, w. 6.0; 56-60, m. 7.3, w. 2.5; 61 and upwards, m. 7.9, w. 2.

[230] See Appendix x.x.x.

[231] See Appendices XXV and Lx.x.x; also page 363 for the reasons operating against emigration. Mr. J. Russell Kennedy, of Kokusai-Reuter, declared (1921) that it was "a myth that j.a.pan must find an outlet for surplus population; j.a.pan has plenty of room within her own border," that is, including Korea and Formosa as well as Hokkaido in j.a.pan. Mr. S. Yoshida, Secretary of the j.a.panese Emba.s.sy in London, in an address also delivered in 1921, stressed the value of the fishing-grounds and the mercantile marine as openings for an increased population. "The resources of the sea," he said, "give j.a.pan more room for her population than appears."

REFLECTIONS IN HOKKAIDO

CHAPTER x.x.xVII

COLONIAL j.a.pAN AND ITS UN-j.a.pANESE WAYS

Above all, this is not concerned with poetry.--WILFRED OWEN

When the traveller stands at the northern end of the mainland[232] of j.a.pan he is five hundred miles from Tokyo. In the north of Hokkaido he is a thousand miles away. Hokkaido, the most northerly and the second biggest of the four islands into which j.a.pan is divided, is curiously American. The wide straight streets of the capital, Sapporo,[233] laid out at right angles, the rough buggies with the farmer and his wife riding together, the wooden houses with stove stacks, and, instead of paper-covered _shoji_, window panes: these things are seen nowhere else in j.a.pan and came straight from America. It was certainly from America that the farmers had their cries of "Whoa." One of the best authorities on Hokkaido has declared that the administrative and agricultural instructors whom America sent there from about the time of the Franco-Prussian war "gave j.a.pan a fairer, kindlier conception of America than all her study of American history."

In Old j.a.pan there is always something which speaks of the centuries that are gone; in Sapporo there is nothing that matters which is fifty years old. One of the most remarkable facts in the agricultural history of j.a.pan is that a country with a teeming population and an intensive farming should have left entirely undeveloped to so late a period as the early seventies a great island of 35,000 square miles which lies within sight of its sh.o.r.es. The wonder is that an attempt on Yezo[234] was not made by the Russians, who, but for the vigorous action of a British naval commander, would undoubtedly have taken possession of the island of Tsushima, 700 miles farther south and midway between j.a.pan and Korea. Up to the time of the fall of the Shogun the revenue of the lords of Yezo was got by taxing the harvest of the sea and the precarious gains of hunters. The Imperial Rescript carried by the army which was sent against certain adherents of the Shogun who had fled there said: "We intend to take steps to reclaim and people the island."[235] It is doubtful if at that period the population was more than 60,000[236] (including Ainu).[237]

When Count Kuroda was put at the head of the Colonial Government he went over to America and secured as his adviser-in-chief the chief of the Agricultural Department at Washington. Stock, seeds, fruit trees, implements and machinery, railway engines, buildings, practically everything was American in the early days of Hokkaido. During a ten-year period, in which forty-five American instructors were sent for, five Russians, four Britons, four Germans, three Dutchmen and a Frenchman were also imported.[238]

Governor Kuroda had a million yen placed at his disposal for ten years in succession, and a million yen was a big sum in those days. Before long there were flour mills, breweries, beet-sugar factories, canning plants, lead and coal mining and silk manufacturing and an experiment in soldier colonisation which owed something to Russian experiments in Cossack farming. An agricultural school grew into a large agricultural college; and this agricultural college has lately become the University of Hokkaido, with nearly a thousand students.[239] How much of a pioneer Sapporo College was may be gathered from the fact that when I was in Hokkaido 67 out of the 140 men who were members of the faculty had been themselves taught there. Dean Sato (j.a.pan's first exchange lecturer to American universities), Dr. Nitobe (j.a.panese Secretary of the League of Nations) and Kanzo Uchimura were among the first students. There have always been American professors at Sapporo--its first president came from Ma.s.sachusetts--and the professorship of English has always been held by an American.

The 50 acres of elm-studded land in which the University buildings stand are a surprise, for the elm grows nowhere else in j.a.pan but Hokkaido.[240] The extent of the University's landed possessions is also unexpected. There are two training farms of 185 and 260 acres respectively, beautifully kept botanic gardens, a tract of 15,000 acres on which there are already more than a thousand tenants, and 300,000 acres of forests in Hokkaido, Saghalien and Korea. Four or five times as many students as can be admitted offer themselves at Sapporo.

There is in Hokkaido an agricultural and rural life conceived for a country where stock may be kept and a farmer does not need to practise the superintensive farming of Old j.a.pan. At the first University farm I looked over it was clear that not only American but Swedish, German and Swiss farming practice had had its influence. No longer was the farmer content with mattocks, hoes and flails. A silo dominated the scene, and maize, eaten from the cob in Old j.a.pan, was a crop for stock.[241] I also noticed crops of oats and rye.

I arrived in Hokkaido in the last week of August in a linen suit and was glad to put on a woollen one. By September 29 it was snowing.

Snow-shoes were shown among the products of the island at the prefectural exhibition. Canadians have likened the climate of Hokkaido to that of Manitoba. Hokkaido is on the line of the Great Lakes, but the cold current from the North makes comparisons of this sort ineffective. It is only in southern Hokkaido that apples will grow.

Thirty years ago wolves and bear were shot two miles from Sapporo and bear may still be found within ten miles.

The sea fisheries of Hokkaido are valuable but agriculture and forestry are greater money makers. Even without forestry agriculture is well ahead of factory industry, which is also eclipsed by mining.

Industry is aided by the presence of coal. Among manufactures, brewing stands out even more conspicuously than wood-pulp making or canning.

One of the three best-known beers in j.a.pan comes from Hokkaido.[242]

In contrast with the situation in Old j.a.pan, where the land is half paddy and half upland, there is in Hokkaido only a ninth of the cultivated land under rice.[243] When I was in Hokkaido there were 600,000 _cho_ under cultivation, a hundred and fifty times more than there were in 1873. The line marking the northern or rather the north-eastern limit of rice shows roughly a third of the island on the northern and eastern coasts to be at present beyond the skill of rice growers. There is always uncertainty with the rice crop in Hokkaido.

As the growing period is short, half the rice is not transplanted but sown direct in the paddies. A bad crop is expected once in seven years. In such a season there is no yield and even the straw is not good.

Immigrants get 5 _cho_, but if they are without capital they first go to work as tenants. There are contractors in the towns who supply labourers to farmers and factories at busy times. When newcomers have capital and are keen on rice growing and are families working without hired labour, they are strongly recommended not to devote more than 2-12 _cho_ to rice--from 3 to 5 _cho_ are the absolute limit--against 1-12 or 2 _cho_ to other crops. When the holder of a 5-_cho_ holding prospers he buys a second farm and more horses and implements, and hires labour for the busy period. But 10 or 15 _cho_ is considered as much as can be worked in this way. If the area is more than 10 or 15 _cho_ it is difficult to get labour in the busy season, for it is the busy season for everybody. Labourers from a distance can be got only at an unprofitable rate. It is first the lack of capital and then the lack of labour which prevents the farmer extending his holding.[244]

The limit of practical mixed farming is 30 _cho_. (Stock farming is for milk rather than for meat, and more than one condensed-milk factory is in operation.) Even in Hokkaido large farming, as it is understood in Great Britain and America, is not easy to find.[245]

On my journey north from Sapporo the first thing which brought home to me the colonial character of the agriculture was the tree stumps sticking up in the paddies. The second was the extent to which the rivers were still uncontrolled. The longest river in j.a.pan, 260 miles long, is in Hokkaido. There was obviously a vast moorland area in need of draining. Peat--there are 300,000 _cho_ of it--may be a standby when the waste of timber that is going on brings about a shortage of fuel other than coal. From poor peat soil, which was growing oats, buckwheat and millet, we pa.s.sed to land capable of producing rice, and saw ploughing with horses. One region had been opened for only twenty years, but already the farmers had cultivated the hillsides in the a.s.siduous fashion of Old j.a.pan.