The Foundations of Japan

ver gods ther

art of the grain is lost. No wonder that sensible people in Japan and the West demand the grey unpolished rice. In Japan some enterprising person has started selling bottled stuff made from the part of

acrifice their health to a most absurd gratification of a misjudging

for lunch and rice for dinner. If they have anything to eat between meals it is as like as not to be rice cakes-- to the foreigner's taste a loathly, half-cooked compost of rice flour or pounded rice and water, a sort of te

oon, the only spoon ever seen at a Japanese meal. A man may have three helpings or four in a bowl about as big as a large breakfast cup. The etiquette is that, though other dishes may be pecked at, the rice in one's bowl must be finished. The usage on this point may have originated in the feeling that it was almost impious to waste the staple food of the country. It is not difficult to pick up t

e eater picks up now and then from a small saucer a piece of pickle which may have either a salty or a sweet fermented taste. The nutrition gained at a Japanese meal is largely in soups in which the bean preparations, tofu and miso, and occasionally eggs, are used. A

plement the home supply is inferior to their own.[81] Inferior means that they prefer the f

ormous care. Along the top of the special fencing were the Shinto straw bands and paper streamers. A small shrine had been built to overlook the plots. Even the instruments of the little meteorological station near, by which the management of the crop would be guided, were surrounded by straw bands and streamers-religion protecting science. The mattocks and other implements which h

mes vegetables, sometimes fruit, sometimes a big fish, was passed by one priest to another in the sunlight until all the offerings were reverently placed by a special dignitary on one of those unpainted, unvarnished, undecorated but exquisitely proportioned altars which are an artistic glory of Shintoism. The shrine was wholly open on the side of the rice field, and the high priest was in full view as he stood before the altar with bowed head and folded hands, his robe caught by the breeze, and delivered in a loud voice his zealous invocation. His words were stressed not only by an acolyte who twanged the strings of a venerable harp, but by the song of a lark which rose with the first strains of the harpist. The purpose

a truth descended, but I find something beautiful in calling on the gods with a harp of Old Japan, and I do believe that our humble and natural offering to-day may be acceptable to whatever gods there may be and

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the building of which the Japanese have the knack, and the Governor asked some of us to say a few words. Then on a raised platform in the open there was enacted a comic interlude such as might have been seen in England in the Middle Ages. In the evening I

I[

d to be average, and, in order to be as up-to-date as possible, the normal annual yield[85] of the five-years period 1912-18, we find that, as between 1882 and 1913, the population increased

y 45 per cent., the price of rice did not fall. On the contrary it rose. This was due largely[87] to the fact that people had begun to eat rice who had not before been a

adjustment and the taking-in of new land, the farmer, in spite of increased taxation,[90] was doing better, or at any rate was minded to live better. In the thirty-years period 1882-1913, his crop increased 63 per cent. although his area under cultivation increased by only 17 per cent. In the following pages we shall hear more of the methods by which the farmer's receipts have been increased. We shall hear also, alas

w where he was and the tenant would be in an easier position, for when the rice crop failed the price would be high and he would be able to meet his rent by selling a smaller amount of rice. The counsel of the prudent to the rice producer is to build storehouses and not to sell the whole of his crop immediately after harvest, but to extend the sale over the whole year, marketing each month about the same amount if possible. The Government Granary plan came into force in 1921, some 3

illion koku over and above the needs of the country, which are roughly estimated at 1 koku per head including infants and the old and feeble. In 1916 it was established, when account was taken of stored rice, that the actual surplus was something like 6 or 7 million koku. Therefore a fall in price took place. The extent to which rice is imported and e

ere has been an enormous rise in the price of everything. For a time the farmers prospered as they had prospered in the high rice-price years, 1912-13. [93] The

rd of its top price, and farmers had to sell cocoons under the cost of production. Everywhere countrymen and countrywomen employed in the factor

f 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 attitude t

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 class has of late shown spirit. It has begun to assert its claims against landowners. At the end of 1920 there were as many

in Great Britain.[98] The average area cultivated per farming family in Japan, counting paddy and upland together, is less than 3 acres. As the total population of Japan 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 i

TNO

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Appendi

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ices, see A

e War, with the rise in the cost of living thro

e Appen

ee Cha

0 tenants' associations, of

pendix XXX

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NCIPLES: THE APOS