e general reader. At some
future date there may be by another hand a book about Japan in terms
of soils, manures and crops. That is the book the War saved me from
writing. In the present work I have the opportunity which so few
authors have enjoyed of jettisoning all technics into an Appendix.

[Illustration: _Shin Koron_
"BYGONE DAYS IN JAPAN" IS THE TITLE OF THIS CARTOON]

"It is necessary," says a wise modern author, "to meditate over one's
impressions at leisure, to start afresh again and again with a clearer
vision of the essential facts." And a Japanese companion of my
journeys writes, "Never can you be sorry that this book is coming
late. This time of delay has been the best time; we have had enough
of first impressions." The justification for this volume is that, in
spite of the difficulties attending the composition of it, it may be
held to offer a picture of some aspects of modern Japan to be found
nowhere else. Politics is not for these pages, nor, because there are
so many charming books on aesthetic and scenic Japan, do I write on Art
or about Fuji, Kyoto, Nara, Miyanoshita and Nikko. I went to Japan to
see the countryman. The Japanese whom most of the world knows are
townified, sometimes Americanised or Europeanised, and, as often as
not, elaborately educated. They are frequently remarkable men. They
stand for a great deal in modern Japan. But their untownified
fellow-countrymen, with the training of tradition and experience, of
rural schoolmasters and village elders, and, as frequently, of the
carefully shielded army, are more than half of the nation.

What is their health of mind and body? By what social and moral
principles and prejudices are they swayed? To what extent are they
adequate to the demand that is made and is likely to be made upon
them? In what respects are they the masters of their lives or are
mastered? In what ways are they still open to Western influences? And
in what directions are they now inclined to trust to "themselves
alone"?

If the masters of the rural journal were sometimes mistaken in the
observations they made from horseback, I cannot have escaped
blundering in passing through more dimly lit scenes than they visited.
"If there appears here and there any uncorrectness, I do not hold
myself obliged to answer for what I could not perfectly govern."[8]
But I have laboriously taken all the precautions I could and I have
obeyed as far as possible a recent request that "visitor