ins of the fighters swelled and their
faces flamed with mock defiance. Their agility in escaping descending
blades was amazing. But the _ki-ai_ player's dexterity is famous. It
is his boast that with his sword he could cut a straw on a friend's
head. I noticed that no women were present at the "spirit meeting."

More than once I found that my landlord host was accustomed to make a
circuit of his village once or twice a week in order to see how things
were going with his tenants. Public-spirited landlords were working
for their people by means of co-operation, lectures and prizes, the
distribution of leaflets and the giving of from 2-1/2 to 7-1/2 per
cent. discount in rent when good rice was produced. The rural
philanthropist in Japan sees himself as the father of his village.[32]
The Japanese word for landlord is "land master" and for tenant "son
tiller." The old idea was patronage on the one side and respect on the
other. This idea is disappearing. "We wish," said one landlord to me,
"to pass through the transition stage gradually. We do not feel the
same responsibility to our people, perhaps, now that they do not show
the same reverence for us, but we do not say to them that they may go
to the factory and we will invest our money for our children. We check
ourselves. We know well, however, that things will change in our
grandsons' time. We therefore try to mix our grandfathers' ideas and
modern ideas. We are believers in co-operation and we try to be
counsellors and to work behind the curtain."

From time to time there are such things as tenants' strikes. Mr.
Yamasaki assured me that the problem of the rural districts can be
solved only by appealing to the feelings of the people in the right
way. He said that "the Japanese are largely moved by feelings, not by
convictions." In some coastwise counties, someone told me, a hurricane
destroyed the crops to such an extent that the tenants could not pay
rent, and the landlords who depended on their rents were impoverished.
Things reached such a pass that a hundred thousand peasants signed a
paper swearing fidelity to an anti-landlord propaganda. Officials and
lawyers achieved nothing. Then Mr. Yamasaki went, and, sitting in the
local temple, talked things over with both sides for days. He got the
landlords to say that they were sorry for their tenants and the
tenants to say that they were sorry for the landlords, and eventually
he was allowed to burn the oath-attested docu