J. W. Robertson Scott

“ More pleasing was the sight of matting spread right round the temple below its eaves, in order that weary pilgrims might sleep there, and the spectacle of travel-stained women tranquilly sleeping or suckling their infants before the shrine itself. There is a pitch dark underground passage below the floor round the foundations of the great Buddha, and if the circuit be made and the lock communicating with the entrance door to the sacred figure be fortunately touched on the way, paradise, peasants believe, is assured. ”

“ More ancient music, more ceremonial, and the gods having been called upon to return to high heaven, the laden platters were gravely removed, and the rice planting in the adjoining field began. To the sound of drum the young men and women in special costumes strode through the wicket into the mud of the paddies, and, under the supervision of the director of the prefectural agricultural experiment station in a silk hat, planted out the tufts of rice seedlings in scrupulously measured rows. ”

“ In some ways it is no doubt a source of strength for Japan that her men can spend from their earliest years to the age of twenty-six on the acquirement of knowledge and self-discipline—the privileges of the student class and the generosity of their families and friends and the public at large are remarkable—but the disadvantages are plain. No sight seems stranger to a new arrival in Japan than that of so many men in their middle or late twenties still wearing the conspicuous kimono and German bandsman cap of the student. ”

“ The teacher must be more advanced than his pupils. There must be a source from which the energy of the rural teacher must be again and again renewed. There must be a well from which he must be continually refreshed and stimulated. Some called that well by the name of religion, unity with God. Some called it faith in mankind, faith in the destiny of the world, that faith in man which is faith in God. But it must be a real belief, not a half-hearted, shivering faith.
Agriculture was not only the oldest and the most serviceable calling, it was the foundation of everything. ”

“ In nothing does this Japanese countryside differ more noticeably from our own than in the fact that joyous young couples are never seen Page 313 arming each other along the road of an evening. Thousands of allusions in our rural songs and poetry, innumerable scenes in our genre pictures, speak of blissful hours of which Japan gives no sign. There is no courting; there are in the public view no "random fits of Daffi'." An unmarried young man and young woman do not walk and talk together. A young man and woman who were together of an evening would be suspected of immorality. ”

“ In the garden of his house two gardeners were stretched along the branches of a pine tree, nimbly and industriously picking out the shoots in order to get that bare appearance which has no doubt puzzled many a Western student of Japanese tree pictures. Each man's ladder—two lengths of bamboo with rungs tied on with string—was carefully leant against a pole laid from the ground through the branches. Many of the well-cared-for trees in the gardens and public places of Japan pass the winter in neat wrappings of straw. ”

“ The stranger to a Japanese house, in which there is not only a Shinto shelf but a Buddhist shrine—where the name plates of the dead for several generations are treasured—cannot but feel that, when all allowances are made for the dulling influences of use and wont, the plan is a means of taking the minds of the household beyond the daily round. The fact that there is a certain familiarity with the things of the shrine and of the Shinto shelf, just as there is a certain freedom at the public shrines and in the temple, does not destroy the impression. ”

“ It is possible that when Hokkaido shall have worked out her destiny she may not be without her influence on the development of Old Japan. Those of the settlers who are reasonably well equipped in character, wits and health are not only making the living which they failed to obtain at home; they are testing some national canons of agriculture. Face to face with strangers and with new conditions, these immigrants are also examining some ideals of social life and conduct which, old though they are, may not be perfectly adapted to the new age into which Japan has forced herself. ”

“ The foreigner is too apt to confuse working hard with working continuously. Whether outdoors or indoors, whether at a handicraft or at business, an Oriental gives the impression of having no notion of getting his work done and being finished with it. The working day lasts all day and part of the night. Whether much more is done in the time than in the shorter Western day may be doubted. During the brief silk-worm season many of the women of the village in which I stayed are afoot for a long day and for part of the night, but the winter brings relief from the strain of all sorts of work. ”

“ One book about Japan may well be written in the perspective of the village and the hamlet. There it is possible to find the way beneath that surface of things visible to the tourist. There it is possible to discover the foundations of the Japan which is intent on cutting such a figure in the East and in the West. There it is possible to learn not only what Japan is but what she may have it in her to become. ”

“ There can be one basis only for the enlightened judgment of the world on the Japanese people: the degree to which they are able to distinguish the true from the mediocre and the resolution and common-sense with which they take their own way."
"Our rural problems," a sober-minded young professor added, after one of those pauses which are usual in conversations in Japan, "is not a technical problem, not even an economic problem. It is, as you have realised, a sociological problem. It is bound up with the mental attitude of our people—and with the mental attitude of the whole world." ”

“ One day some weeks later I walked with Yanagi on the hills. He said: "The weakest point in the Japanese character is the lack of the power of questioning. We are repressed by our educational system. And so many things come here at one time that it makes confusion. What is so often taken for a lack of originality in us is a state resulting from an immense importation of foreign ideas. They have been overpowering. Many of us have no clear ideas on life, society, sex and so on, and you will find it difficult to get satisfactory answers to many questions which you will want to ask." ”

“ In my own hamlet at home in England I have seen the Page 317 shoemaker, tailor and carpenter successively pass away; the only craftsman left is the smith. In Japan the hereditary craftsman survives for a while. I watched in my house one day the labours of such a worker. He was not arrayed in a Sunday suit fallen to the greasy bagginess of everyday wear, topped by a soiled collar. He appeared in a blue cotton jacket-length kimono and tight-fitting trousers of the same stuff, and both garments, which were washed at least once a week, were admirably fitted to their wearer's work. ”

“ It was at the inn in the evening that someone told me that in the town which is dependent on the shrine there were "a hundred prostitutes, thirty geisha and some waitresses." Late at night I had a visit from a man in a position of great responsibility in the prefecture. He was at a loss to know what could be done for morality. "Religion is not powerful," he said, "the schools do not reach grown-up people, the young men's societies are weak, many sects and new moralities are attacking our people, and there are many cheap books of a low class." ”

“ Although, for economy's sake, a considerable amount of barley is eaten with or instead of rice, it may be said in a general way that the Japanese people, like so many millions of other Asiatics, have rice for breakfast, rice 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 tepid underdone muffin. ”

“ Forced to dwell in a crowded alley, occupying at night a house constructed in neglect of every known sanitary law, employed in the daytime in an unhealthy atmosphere and frequently on a dangerous occupation, with no education available for his children, with no reasonable recreation, with the sky shrouded by the smoke of an adjoining capital, with the face of nature hidden by a brick wall, neglected by an overworked clergyman, regarded as a mere machine by an avaricious employer, the factory operative turned to the public house, the prize ring or the cockpit. ”

“ They built their monument in the hearts of the people. Therefore we can never judge from the size of the monument the kind of work which was accomplished by the man who sleeps under it. Monuments are not only for ministers and warriors. We peasants can also erect monuments in our own way. To open a new paddy field, to plant the bare hillside with trees, these are our monuments. How lonely it would be for me if there were no monument left after my death. However small this paddy field may be, it will not be forgotten so long as it yields for your posterity the blessing of its rice crop. ”

“ All the world over, land workers do better for themselves than for others. Proposals further to capitalise farming which, with a rural exodus already going on, would have the effect of driving people off the land who are employed on it healthily Page 369 and with benefit to the social organism, do not seem to offer a more satisfactory situation for Japan. No country has shown itself less afraid of business combination than Japan, and the world owes as much to industry as to agriculture, and I am not in the least afraid of machinery and capital; but production is not our final aim. ”

“ But the rural problem was not only a problem of better crops and of greater production. Man did not live by food alone. Tolstoy wrote a book called What Men Live By, and there was nothing in it about food. Men lived not by the number of bales of rice they raised, but by the development of their minds and hearts. It might be asked if it was not the business of rural experts to teach agriculture. But a poet of my country had said that it took a soul to move a pig into a cleaner sty. It was necessary for a man who was to teach agriculture well to know something higher than agriculture. ”

“ 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 Japanese 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. ”

“ I visited a well-known rural reformer in the village which he and his father had improved under the precepts of Ninomiya. The hillside had been covered with tea, orange trees and mulberry; the community had not only got out of debt but had come to own land beyond its boundaries; gambling, drunkenness and immorality, it was averred, had "disappeared"; there were larger and better crops; and "the habit of enjoying nature" had increased. The amusements of the village were wrestling, fencing, jūjitsu, and the festivals. ”

“ This world where stars move, flowers blossom and decay, spring and autumn come, and people are born and die is too full of mystery, but I can feel some intelligence working through it though incomprehensible. ”

“ About half-past four in the morning I was awakened by the booming of the temple bell. It is the sound which of all delights in the Far East is most memorable. I got up, and, following the example of my host, had a bath in the open, and dressed.
Then I was lighted along passages into the public part of the temple. The priest with an acolyte began service at the middle altar. Afterwards he proceeded to a side altar. At one stage of the service he chanted a hymn which ran something like this:
From the virtues and the mercies of divine providence we get faith, the worth of which is boundless. ”

“ When the culpable destruction of timber in Hokkaido is added to what has been lost by forest fires, due to lightning or to accident—one conflagration was more than 200 acres in extent—it is easy to realise that the rivers are bringing far more water and detritus from the hills than they ought to do and are preparing flood problems with which it will cost millions to cope when the country gets more closely settled. It is deplorable that, apart from needless burning on the hillsides, the farmers have not been dissuaded from completely clearing their arable land of trees. ”

“ It has never been demonstrated that the Japanese farmer prefers arduous amphibious labour to the dry-land farming in which most of the world's land workers are engaged; but the cultivation of paddy or a large proportion of paddy is his traditional way of farming. Rice culture also means to him the production of the crop which, when weather conditions favour, is more profitable than any other. In Hokkaido, as we have seen, the remunerative kind of agriculture is mixed farming, and, in a large part of the country, rice cannot be grown at all. ”

“ Many so-called representative farmers have been able to add field to field until they have secured a substantial property and have ceased to be farmers. An extension of tenancy is to be deplored, not only because it takes away from the farmer a feeling of independence and of incentive, but because it creates a parasitic class which in Japan is perhaps even more parasitic than in the West. A landowner in the West almost invariably realises that he has certain duties. In Japan a landowner's duties to his neighbourhood and to the State are often imperfectly understood. ”

“ But it is wisdom to realise that we cannot do to-day what might have been done centuries ago or make history repeat itself for our benefit. It is wiser to seek to reduce the amount of misapprehension, prejudice and—shall I say?—national feeling in Japan and America and Australasia, and try to procure ultimate accommodation for us all in that way. But not too much reduce, perhaps, for, in the present posture of the world, nationalist Page 364 feeling and—we do not want premature inter-marriage—racial feeling are still valuable to mankind. ”