was pressed
to turn aside from my studies and attempt the more immediately useful
task: to explain why Western nations, whose manifest interests were
peace, were resolutely squandering their blood and wealth in War.

If what I published had some measure of success,[6] it was because by
this time, unlike some of the critics who sharply upbraided Japan and
made impossible proposals in impossible terms, I had learnt something
at first hand about the Japanese, because I wrote of the difficulties
as well as the faults of Japan, and because I was now a little known
as her well-wisher. One of the two books I published was translated as
a labour of love, as I shall never forget, by a Japanese public man
whose leisure was so scant that he sat up two nights to get his
manuscript finished. Before long I had involved myself in the arduous
task of founding and of editing for two years a monthly review, _The
New East (Shin Toyo)_,[7] with for motto a sentence of my own which
expresses what wisdom I have gained about the Orient, _The real
barrier between East and West is a distrust of each other's morality
and the illusion that the distrust is on one side only._

The excuse for so personal a digression is that, when this period of
literary and journalistic stress began, my rural notebooks and MSS.,
memoranda of conversations on social problems and a heterogeneous
collection of reports and documents had to be stowed into boxes. There
they stayed until a year ago. The entries in a dozen of my little
hurriedly filled notebooks have lost their flavour or are
unintelligible: I have put them all aside. Neither is it possible to
utilise notes which were submarined or lost in over-worked post
offices. This book--I have had to leave out Kyushu entirely--is not
the work I planned, a complete account of rural life and industry in
every part of Japan, with an excursus on Korea and Formosa, and
certain general conclusions: a standard work, no doubt, in, I am
afraid, two volumes, and forgetful at times of the warning that "to
spend too much Time in Studies is Sloth."

What I had transcribed before leaving Japan I have now been able in
the course of a leisured year in England to overhaul and to supplement
by up-to-date statistics in an extensive Appendix. In the changed
circumstances in which the book is completed I have also ruthlessly
transferred to this Appendix all the technical matter in the text, so
that nothing shall obstruct the way of th