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The Foundations of Japan by J.W. Robertson Scott

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I asked a distinguished Japanese who was standing near me--he is a
Christian--how many of the educated people in the assembly believed
that the gods had descended. His answer was, "I may not believe that
the gods of 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 that it is a worthy exercise for us to undertake
and may also be conducive to a good harvest." My friend attempted the
following rough rendering of a song which had been sung by the rice
planters before the shrine:

This day the beginning of sowing at an auspicious time--
Long life to the rice!
May it be a token of the years of the Reign,
The seed of peace for the world--
May it start from this consecrated field!
One in heart we see to it that our seedlings are well matched.
Mikawa's[83] millennium and the millennium of rice.
Let us pray for an abundant shooting.
Now let us plant the seedlings straight;
Pleasing to the gods are the ways that are not crooked.

After this ceremony, in which the staple crop of the country and the
labour of the farmer in his paddy field had been honoured by the State
and dignified by ancestral blessings, there was luncheon in one of
those deftly contrived reed-covered structures, of 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 was bidden to a dinner of the
officials responsible for the day's doings. The Governor made a kindly
reference to my labours and the local M.P. presented me with a kimono
length of the cotton material which had been woven for the planters of
the sacred rice.


III[84]

The production of rice has increased more quickly than the growth of
the population. If we consider, along with the advance in population,
the crops of the years 1882 and 1913, which were held 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 45 per cent. and rice
production increased 63 per cent., while as between 1882 and the
normal annual yield period of 1912-18, the population increased 55 per
cent, and the crop 75 per cent.[86]

This is a noteworthy fact. But equally noteworthy is the fact that in
the 1882-1913 period, in which the production of rice increased 63 per
cent. and the population only 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 able to
afford it. Many people who grow rice eat, as has been noted, barley or
barley mixed with a little rice. From the 'eighties onwards more and
more rice was eaten.[88]

The reason was that, what with the cash obtained from cocoons through
the enormous development of sericulture,[89] what with the money
received by the girls who had gone to the factories, what with the
growth of big cities causing an increased demand for vegetables, eggs
and especially fruit at good prices, what with the use of better seed
and more artificial manure, what with agricultural co-operation,
paddy-field 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! of the ways in which his expenditure has increased.
He is indeed in a trying situation. Everything depends on his
character and education and on the influences, social and political,
moral and religious, under which he lives. That is why this book, in
devoting itself to an examination of the foundations of an
agricultural country, is concerned with rural sociology rather than
with the technique of crops and cropping.

The outstanding problem of the rice grower is fluctuations in
price.[91] It is also the problem of the landlord, for rents are fixed
not at so much money but at so many _koku_ of rice. This means that
on rent day the farmer must pay the same amount of rice whether his
crop has been good or bad. It also means that when the price of rice
rises the amount of rent is automatically raised. If rent were paid,
not in so many _koku_ of rice but in money at a fixed amount, the
landlord would know 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 million _koku_ of unpolished rice
being bought in five grades at from 27 yen to 33 yen. In the year
before the War rice was selling at 20 yen per _koku_ (5 bushels). The
previous year (1912) it had been 21 yen--had risen at times to 23
yen--an unheard-of price. Between 1894 and 1912 it had climbed merely
from about 7 yen to a maximum of 16 yen.[92] In the year in which the
War broke out, it dropped as low as 12 yen, and in 1915 it was only 11
yen. By 1916 it had not risen beyond 14 yen.

The fall in prices was due to exceptional harvests in 1914 and 1915
(that is, 57,006,541 _koku_ and 55,924,590 _koku_ as compared with the
50,255,000 _koku_ of the year before the War, or the 51,312,000 which
may be taken as the average of the seven-years period 1907-13). Such
exceptional harvests as those of 1914 and 1915 showed a surplus of
from 41/2 to 6 million _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 exported is shown in Appendix XXIV. This
Chapter would become much more technical than is necessary if I
entered into the question of the correctness of rice statistics.
Roughly, the statistics show a production 15 per cent. less than the
actual crops. Formerly the under-estimation was 20 per cent. The
practice has its origin in the old taxation system.

The notes for the account of rural life in Japan which will be found
in this book were chiefly made in the second and third years of the
War. Since that time there 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 high prices of all grain
as well as the fabulous price of raw silk (due to increased export to
America and to increased home consumption) were a great advantage.

[Illustration: MINISTER OF AGRICULTURE'S EFFORTS TO KEEP THE PRICE OF RICE
FROM RISING]

Then came the rice riots of the city workers, the general slump and
finally the commercial and industrial crash. Raw silk fell nearly to
one-third of its top price, and farmers had to sell cocoons under the
cost of production. Everywhere countrymen and countrywomen employed in
the factories were discharged in droves. A large proportion of these
unfortunates returned to their villages to dispel some rural dreams of
urban Eldorado.

But this matter of the going up and coming down of prices has but a
passing 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 attitude towards life and authority and the attitude
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 class has of late shown spirit. It
has begun to assert its claims against landowners. At the end of 1920
there were as many as ninety associations 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
class is not at all certain.[96]

The outstanding facts which are to be borne in mind about agricultural
Japan are that the population is as thick on the ground as the
population of the British Isles (thicker in reality, for so much of
Japan is mountain and waste)--ten times thicker than the population of
the United States[97]--that Japan is primarily an agricultural
country, while Great Britain is largely a manufacturing and trading
country, and that only 151/2 per cent. of Japan proper (including
Hokkaido) is under cultivation against 27 per cent. 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 71/2 acres.") Happily the number of families
cultivating less than 11/4 acres is decreasing and the number
cultivating from 11/4 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 Japanese, see
Appendix XXIII.

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

[82] Japanese. 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' associations, of which a third
are militant.

[97] See Appendix XXX and page 97.

[98] See Chapter XX.

[99] See Appendix XXXI.




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 Japan the countryman Kanzo Uchimura is "the Japanese
Carlyle." To others he is a religious enthusiast and the Japanese
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
Japanese 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 Japan and
China.

[Illustration: _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 Japan. 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
Japanese 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
Japan_. 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 Japan, 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 Japan 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 Japanese 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 space 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 Japan[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 101/2 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 Japan 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 class, 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 classes 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.

[Illustration: "THE JAPANESE CARLYLE." p. 90]

[Illustration: 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."

[Illustration: CHILDREN CATCHING INSECTS ON RICE-SEED BEDS]

[Illustration: MASTERS OF A COUNTRY SCHOOL AND SOME OF THE CHILDREN.
p. 112]

"So you see," said Uchimura, as we walked to the station in the
morning, "in an antiquated book, which, I suppose, stands dusty on the
shelves of some of your reformers, there is power to achieve the very
things they aim at." He went on to explain that he looked "in the
lives of hearers, not in what they say," for results from his
teaching. He believed in liberty and freedom, in sowing the seed of
change and reform and allowing people to develop as they would. "Let
men and women believe as they have light."

He spoke in his kindly way of how "the bond of a common faith enables
Japanese to get closer to the foreigner and the foreigner closer to
the Japanese." There were many things we foreigners did not
understand. We did not understand, for example, that "A man's a man
for a' that" was an unfamiliar conception to a Japanese. I was to
remember, when I interrogated Japanese about the problems of rural
life, that they had had to coin a word for "problems." Above all, I
must be careful not to "exaggerate the quality of Eastern morality."
Uchimura asserted sweepingly that "morality in the Anglo-Saxon sense
is not found in Japan." We of the West underrated the value of the
part played by the Puritans in our development. Our moral life had
been evolved by the soul-stirring power of the Hebrew prophets and of
Christ. To deny this was "kicking your own mother." Just as it was not
possible for the Briton or American to get his present morality from
Greece and Rome exclusively, it was not possible for the Japanese to
obtain it from the sources at his disposal.

The faults of the Eastern were that he thought too much of outward
conduct. Good political and neighbourly-relations, kindliness, honesty
and thrift were his idea of morality. "To love goodness and to hate
evil with one's whole soul is a Christian conception for which you may
search in vain through heathendom." The horror which the Western man
of high character felt when he thought of the future of the little
girls in attendance on geisha was not a horror generated by Plato.
"Heathen life looks nice on the outside to foreigners," but
Confucianism, Buddhism and Shintoism had all been weak in their
attitude towards immorality. It was Christianity alone which
controlled sexual life. Without deep-seated love of and joy in
goodness and deep-seated horror of evil it was impossible to reform
society.

Uchimura said that it had taken him thirty years to reach the
conviction that the best way of raising his countrymen was by
preaching the religion of "a despised foreign peasant." Many things he
had been told by exponents of Christianity now seemed "very strange,"
but there remained in the first four books of the New Testament, in
the essence of Christianity, principles "which would give new life to
all men." Moved by this belief, Uchimura and his friends gave their
lives to the work of the Gospel, to a work attended by humiliations;
"but this is our glory."

Japanese civilisation, he reiterated, was "only good in the sense that
Greek and Roman civilisations were good." Modern Japan represented
"the best of Europe minus Christianity; the moral backbone of
Christianity is lacking." "Probe a dozen Buddhist priests in turn," he
said, "and you find something lacking; you don't find the Buddhist or
Confucian really to be your brother[106]."

"The greatness of England," he went on, "is not due to the inherent
greatness of the English people, but to the greatness of the truths
which they have received." In considering the sources of national
greatness, it was idle to believe that some peoples were original and
some not original in their ideas and methods. Where were the people to
be found who were without extraneous influence? Where would England be
without Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christianity?

Our talk broke off as several peasant women passed us on the narrow
way by the rice fields. The mattocks they carried were the same weight
as their husbands' mattocks and the women were going to do the same
work as the men. But the women were nearly all handicapped by having a
child tied on their backs. Uchimura, returning to his objection to
foreign political adventure, said that Japan, properly cultivated,
could support twice its present population. There were many marshy
districts which could be brought into cultivation by drainage. Then
what might not forestry do? But the progress could not be made because
of lack of money. The money was needed for "national defence."

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