The Foundations of Japan Part 18

A contented and prosperous countryside was no doubt the impression reflected to many pa.s.sengers in the train that sunny day. But I knew how closely pressed the farmers had been by the rise in prices of many things that they had got into the way of needing. I had learnt, too, the part that superst.i.tion[137] as well as simple faith played in the lives of the country folk. When, however, I pondered the way in which the rural districts had been increasingly invaded by factories run under the commercial sanctions of our eighteen-forties, I asked myself whether there might not be superst.i.tions of the economic world as well as of religious and social life.

I heard a j.a.panese speak of being well treated at inns in the old days for 20 sen a night. It should be remembered, however, that there is a system not only of tipping inn servants but of tipping the inn. The gift to the inn is called _chadai_ and guests are expected to offer a sum which has some relation to their position and means and the food and treatment they expect. I have stayed at inns where I have paid as much _chadai_ as bill. To pay 50 per cent. of the bill as _chadai_ is common. The idea behind _chadai_ is that the inn-keeper charges only his out-of-pocket expenses and that therefore the guest naturally desires to requite him. In acknowledgment of _chadai_ the inn-keeper brings a gift to the guest at his departure--fans, pottery, towels, picture postcards, fruit or slabs of stiff acidulated fruit jelly (in one inn of grapes and in another of plums) laid between strips of maize leaf. The right time to give _chadai_ is on entering the hotel, after the "welcome tea." In handing money to any person in j.a.pan, except a porter or a _kurumaya_, the cash or notes are wrapped in paper.

On the journey from the city of Nagano to Matsumoto, wonderful views were unfolded of terraced rice fields, and, above these, of terraced fields of mulberry. How many hundred feet high the terraces rose as the train climbed the hills I do not know, but I have had no more vivid impression of the triumphs of agricultural hydraulic engineering. We were seven minutes in pa.s.sing through one tunnel at a high elevation.

I spoke in the train with a man who had a dozen _cho_ under grapes, 20 per cent. being European varieties and 80 per cent. American. He said that some of the people in his district were "very poor." Some farmers had made money in sericulture too quickly for it to do them good. He volunteered the opinion, in contrast with the statement made to me during our journey to Niigata, that the people of the plains were morally superior to the people of the mountains. The reason he gave was that "there are many recreations in the plains whereas in the mountains there is only one." In most of the mountain villages he knew three-quarters of the young men had relations with women, mostly with the girls of the village or the adjoining village. He would not make the same charge against more than ten per cent. of the young men of the plains, and "it is after all with teahouse girls." He thought that there were "too many temples and too many sects, so the priests are starved."

An itinerant agricultural instructor in sericulture who joined in our conversation was not much concerned by the plight of the priests. "The causes of goodness in our people," he said, "are family tradition and home training. Candidly, we believe our morals are not so bad on the whole. We are now putting most stress on economic development. How to maintain their families is the question that troubles people most.

With that question unsolved it is preaching to a horse to preach morality. We can always find high ideals and good leaders when economic conditions improve. The development of morality is our final aim, but it is encouraged for six years at the primary school. The child learns that if it does bad things it will be laughed at and despised by the neighbours and scolded by its parents. We are busy with the betterment of economic conditions and questions about morality and religion puzzle us."

When I reached Matsumoto I met a rural dignitary who deplored the increasing tendency of city men to invest in rural property.

"Sometimes when a peasant sells his land he sets up as a money-lender." I was told that nearly every village had a sericultural co-operative a.s.sociation, which bought manures, mulberry trees and silk-worm eggs, dried coc.o.o.ns and hatched eggs for its members and spent money on the destruction of rats. Of recent years the county agricultural a.s.sociation had given 5 yen per _tan_ to farmers who planted improved sorts of mulberry. About half the farmers in the county had manure houses. Some 800 farmers in the county kept a labourer.

I went to see a _guncho_ and read on his wall: "Do not get angry.

Work! Do not be in a hurry, yet do not be lazy." "These being my faults," he explained, "I specially wrote them out." There was also on his wall a _kakemono_ reading: "At twenty I found that even a plain householder may influence the future of his province; at thirty that he may influence the future of his nation; at forty that he may influence the future of the whole world." Below this stirring sentiment was a portrait of the writer, a samurai scholar, from a photograph taken with a camera which he had made himself. He lived in the last period of the Shogunate and studied Dutch books. He was killed by an a.s.sa.s.sin at the instance, it was believed, of the Shogun.

One of the noteworthy things of Matsumoto was the agricultural a.s.sociation's market. Another piece of organisation in that part of the world was fourteen inst.i.tutes where girls were instructed in the work of silk factory hands. The teachers' salaries were paid by the factories. So were also the expenses of the silk experts of the local authorities. On the day I left the city the daily paper contained an announcement of lectures on hygiene to women on three successive days, "the chief of police to be present." This paper was demanding the exemption of students from the bicycle tax, the rate of which varies in different prefectures.

A young man was brought to see me who was specialising in musk melons.

He said that the j.a.panese are gradually getting out of their partiality for unripe fruit.

On our way to the Suwas we saw many wretched dwellings. The feature of the landscape was the silk factories' tall iron chimneys, ordinarily black though sometimes red, white or blue.

It is not commonly understood that j.a.panese lads by the time they "graduate" from the middle school into the higher school have had some elementary military training. A higher-school youth knows how to handle a rifle and has fired twice at a target. At Kami Suwa the problem of how middle-cla.s.s boys should procure economical lodging while attending their cla.s.ses had been solved by self-help. An ex-scholar of twenty had managed to borrow 4,000 yen and had proceeded to build on a hillside a dormitory accommodating thirty-six boarders.

Lads did the work of levelling the ground and digging the well. The frugal lines on which the lodging-house was conducted by the lads themselves may be judged from the fact that 5 yen a month covered everything. Breakfast consisted of rice, _miso_ soup and pickles.

Cooking and the emptying of the _benjo_[138] were done by the lads in turn. A kitchen garden was run by common effort. Among the many notices on the walls was one giving the names of the residents who showed up at 5 o'clock in the morning for a cold bath and fencing. I also saw the following instruction written by the founder of the house, which is read aloud every morning by each resident in turn:

Be independent and pure and strive to make your characters more beautiful. Expand your thought. Help each other to accomplish your ambitions. Be active and steady and do not lose your self-control. Be faithful to friends and righteous and polite. Be silent and keep order. Do not be luxurious (_sic_). Keep everything clean. Pay attention to sanitation. Do not neglect physical exercises. Be diligent and develop your intelligence.

The borrower of the 4,000 yen with which the inst.i.tution was built managed to pay it back within seven years with interest, out of the subscriptions of residents and ex-residents.

An agricultural authority whom I met spoke of "farming families living from hand to mouth and their land slipping into the possession of landlords"; also of a fifth of the peasants in the prefecture being tenants. A young novelist who had been wandering about the Suwa district had been impressed by the grim realities of life in poor farmers' homes and cited facts on which he based a low view of rural morality.

Suwa Lake lies more than 3,500 ft. above sea level and in winter is covered with skaters. The country round about is remarkable agriculturally for the fact that many farmers are able to lead into their paddies not only warm water from the hot springs but water from ammonia springs, so economising considerably in their expenditure on manure. A simple windmill for lifting the fertilising water is sold for only 4 yen.

We went to Kofu, the capital of Yamanas.h.i.+ prefecture, through many mountain tunnels and ravines. Entrancing is the just word for this region in the vicinity of the Alps. But joy in the beauty through which we pa.s.sed is tinged for the student of rural life by thoughts of the highlander's difficulties in getting a living in spots where quiet streams may become in a few hours ungovernable torrents. I remember glimpses of grapes and persimmons, of parties of middle-school boys tramping out their holiday--every inn reduces its terms for them--and of half a dozen peasant girls bathing in a shaded stream. But there were less pleasing scenes: hills deforested and paddies wrecked by a waste of stones and gravel flung over them in time of flood. Here and there the indomitable farmers, counting on the good behaviour of the river for a season or two, were endeavouring, with enormous labour, to resume possession of what had been their own. The spectacle ill.u.s.trated at once their spirit and their industry and their need of land. At night we slept at Kofu at "the inn of greeting peaks." In the morning a Governor with imagination told me of the prefecture's gallant enterprises in afforestation and river embanking at expenditures which were almost crippling.

FOOTNOTES:

[135] The three leading silk prefectures are in order: Nagano, f.u.kus.h.i.+ma and Gumma.

[136] At this time of the year, when the rice plants are small, the water in the paddies is still conspicuous.

[137] An old j.a.pan hand once counselled me that "the thing to find out in sociological enquiries is not people's religions but their superst.i.tions."

[138] See Appendix IV.

CHAPTER XVII

THE BIRTH, BRIDAL AND DEATH OF THE SILK-WORM

(NAGANO)

The mulberry leaf knoweth not that it shall be silk.--_Arab proverb_

One acre in every dozen in j.a.pan produces mulberry leaves for feeding the silk-worms which two million farming families--more than a third of the farming families of the country--painstakingly rear.

But the mulberry is not the only mark of a sericultural district. Its mark may be seen in the tall chimneys of the factories and in the structure of the farmers' houses. Breeders of silk-worms are often well enough off to have tiled instead of thatched roofs; they have frequently two storeys to their dwellings; and they have almost always a roof ventilator so that the vitiated air from the _hibachi_-heated silk-worm chambers may be carried off. Yet another sign of sericulture being a part of the agricultural activities of a district is its prosperity. Silk-worms produce the most valuable of all j.a.panese exports. j.a.pan sends abroad more raw silk than any other country.[139]

It is in the middle of the country that sericulture chiefly nourishes.

The smallest output of raw silk is from the most northerly prefecture and from the prefecture in the extreme south-west of the mainland. But human apt.i.tude plays its part as well as climate. The j.a.panese hand is a wonderful piece of mechanism--look at the hands of the next j.a.panese you meet--and in sericulture its delicate touch is used to the utmost advantage.

The gains of sericulture are not made without corresponding sacrifices. Silk-worm raising is infinitely laborious. The constant picking of leaves, the bringing of them home and the chopping and supplying of these leaves to the smallest of all live stock and the maintenance of a proper temperature in the rearing-chamber day and night mean unending work. The silk-worms may not be fed less than four or five times in the day; in their early life they are fed seven or eight times. This is the feeding system for spring caterpillars.

Summer and autumn breeds must have two or three more meals. The men and women who attend to them, particularly the women, are worn out by the end of the season. "The women have only three hours' rest in the twenty-four hours," I remember someone saying. "They never loose their _obi_."

When the caterpillars emerge from the tiny, pin-head-like eggs of the silk-worm moth they are minute creatures. Therefore the mulberry leaves are chopped very fine indeed. They are chopped less and less fine as the silk-worms grow, until finally whole leaves and leaves adhering to the shoots are given. Some rearers are skilful enough to supply from the very beginning leaves or leaves still on the shoots.

The caterpillars live in bamboo trays or "beds" on racks. In the house of one farmer I found caterpillars about three-quarters of an inch long occupying fifteen trays. When the silk-worms grew larger they would occupy two hundred trays.

The eggs, when not produced on the farm, are bought adhering to cards about a foot square. There are usually marked on these cards twenty-eight circles about 2 ins. in diameter. Each circle is covered with eggs. The eggs come to be arranged in these convenient circles because, as will be explained later on, the moths have been induced to lay within bottomless round tins placed on the circles on the cards.

The eggs are sticky when laid and therefore adhere. In a year 35,000,000 cards, containing about a billion eggs, are produced on some 10,000 egg-raising farms.

The eggs--they are called "seed"--are hatched in the spring (end of April--as soon as the first leaves of the mulberry are available--to the middle of May), summer (June and July) and autumn (August and October). It takes from three to seven days--according to temperature--for the "seed" to hatch, and from twenty to thirty-two days--according to temperature--for the silk-worms to reach maturity.

Half the hatching is done in spring. In one farmer's house I visited in the spring season I found that he had hatched fifty cards of "seed." From the birth of the caterpillars to the formation of coc.o.o.ns the casualties must be reckoned at ten per cent. daily. Not more than eighty-five per cent. of the coc.o.o.ns which are produced are of good quality. The remainder are misshapen or contain dead chrysalises. As there are more than a thousand breeds of silk-worm, all coc.o.o.ns are not of the same shape and colour. Some are oval; some are shaped like a monkey nut. Most are white but some are yellow and others yellow tinted.

In the whole world of stock raising there is nothing more remarkable than the birth of silk-worm moths. The coc.o.o.ns on the racks in the farmer's loft are covered by sheets of newspaper in which a number of round holes about three-quarters of an inch in diameter have been cut.

When the moths emerge from their coc.o.o.ns they seek these openings towards the light and creep through to the upper side of the newspaper. For newly born things they come up through these openings with astonis.h.i.+ng ardour. In body and wings the moths are flour white.

White garments are suitable for the babe, the bride and the dead, and the moth perfected in the coc.o.o.n is arrayed not only for its birth but for bridal and death, which come upon it in swift succession. The male as well as the female is in white and is distinguishable by being somewhat smaller in size. On the newspaper the few males who have not found partners are executing wild dances, their wings whirring the while at a mad pace. When from time to time they cease dancing they haunt the holes in the paper through which the newly born moths emerge. When a female appears a male instantly rushes towards her, or rather the two creatures rush towards one another, and they are at once locked in a fast embrace. Immediately their wings cease to flutter, the only commotion on the newspaper being made by the unmated males. In a hatching-room these males on the stacks of trays are so numerous that the place is filled with the sound of the whirring of their wings. The down flies from their wings to such an extent that one continually sneezes. The spectacle of the stacks of trays covered by these ecstatic moths is remarkable, but still more remarkable is the thrilling sense of the power of the life-force in a supposedly low form of consciousness.

The wonder of the scene is missed, no doubt, by most of those who are habituated to it. From time to time weary, stolid-looking girls or old women lift down the trays and run their hands over them in order to pick up superfluous male moths. Sometimes the male moths are walking about the newspaper, sometimes they are torn callously from the embrace of their mates. The fate of the male moths is to be flung into a basket where they stay until the next day, when perhaps some of them may be mated again. The novice is impressed not only by the ruthlessness of this treatment but by the way in which the whole loft is littered by male moths which have fallen or have been flung on the floor and are being trampled on.

The female moths, when their partners have been removed, are taken downstairs in newspapers in order to be put into the little tin receptacles where the eggs are to be laid. On a tray there are spread out a number of egg cards with, as before mentioned, twenty-eight printed circles on each of them. On these circles are placed the twenty-eight half-inch-high bottomless enclosures of tin. Some one takes up a handful of moths and scatters them over the tins. Some of the moths fall neatly into a tin apiece. Others are helped into the little enclosures in which, to do them credit, they are only too willing to take up their quarters. The curious thing is the way in which each moth settles down within her ring. Indeed from the moment of her emergence from the coc.o.o.n until now she has never used her wings to fly. Nor did the male moth seem to wish to fly. The s.e.xes concentrate their whole attention on mating. After that the female thinks of nothing but laying eggs. Almost immediately after she is placed within her little tin she begins to deposit eggs, and within a few hours the circle of the card is covered.

Food is given neither to the females nor to the males. Those which are not kept in reserve for possible use on the second day are flung out of doors. When the female moth has deposited her eggs she also is destroyed.[140] The _shoji_ of the breeding and egg-laying rooms permit only of a diffused light. The discarded moths are cast out into the brilliant suns.h.i.+ne where they are eaten by poultry or are left to die and serve as manure.

Sericulture is always a risky business. There is first the risk of a fall in prices. Just before I reached j.a.pan prices were so low that many people despaired of being able to continue the business, and shortly after I left there was a crisis in the silk trade in which numbers of silk factories failed. At the time I was last in a silk-worm farmer's house coc.o.o.ns were worth from 5 to 6 yen per _kwan_ of 8-1/4 lbs. From 8 to 10 _kwan_ of coc.o.o.ns could be expected from a single egg card. Eggs were considered to be at a high price when they were more than 2 yen per card. The risks of the farmer are increased when he launches out and buys mulberry leaves to supplement those produced on his own land. Sometimes the price of leaves is so high that farmers throw away some of their silk-worms. The risks run by the man who grows mulberries beyond his own leaf requirements on the chance of selling are also considerable.

Beyond the risk of falling prices or of a short mulberry crop there is in sericulture the risk of disease. One advantage of the system in which the eggs are laid in circles on the cards instead of all over them is that if any disease should be detected the affected areas can be easily cut out with a knife and destroyed. Disease is so serious a matter that silk-worm breeding, as contrasted with silk-worm raising, is restricted to those who have obtained licences. The silk-worm breeder is not only licensed. His silkworms, coc.o.o.ns and mother moths are all in turn officially examined. Breeding "seeds" were laid one year by about 33,000,000 odd moths; common "seeds" by about 948,000,000.

Of recent years enormous progress has been made in combating disease.

I have spoken of how a silk-worm district may be recognised by the structure of the farmhouses and the prosperity of the farmers, but another striking sign of sericulture is the trays and mats lying in the sun in front of farmers' dwellings or on the hot stones of the river banks in order to get thoroughly purified from germs. It is ill.u.s.trative of the progress that has been made under scientific influence, that whereas twenty years ago a sericulturist would reckon on losing his silk-worm harvest completely once in five years, such a loss is now rare. Scientific instructors have their difficulties in j.a.pan as in the rural districts of other countries, but the people respect authority, and they are accustomed to accept instruction given in the form of directions. Also the j.a.panese have an unending interest in the new thing. Further, there is a continual desire to excel for the national advantage and in emulation of the foreigner. The advance in scientific knowledge in the rural districts is remarkable, because it is in such contrast with the primitive lives of the country people.

Picture the surprise of British or American farmers were they brought face to face with thermometers, electric light and a working knowledge of bacteriology in the houses of peasants in breech clouts.

It was while I was trying to learn something of the sericultural industry that I had the opportunity of visiting a noteworthy inst.i.tution. It is noteworthy, among other reasons, because I seldom met a foreigner in j.a.pan who knew of its existence. It is the great Ueda Sericultural College in the prefecture of Nagano. I was struck not only by its extent but by its systematised efficiency. On a level with the director's eyes was a motto in large lettering, "Be diligent.

Develop your virtues."