ughly 8-1/4 lbs.) = 8.267 lbs. av. or 10.047 lbs.
troy = 1,000 momme.

_Kin_ (catty) = 1.322 lbs. av. or 1.607 troy = 160 momme.

_Momme_ = 2.116 drams or 2.411 dwts. According to American measurements
a momme is 0.132 oz. av. and 0.120 oz. troy.

_Hyakkin_ (_picul_) = 100 kin = 132.277 lbs.

A stone is 1.693, a cwt. is 13.547, and a ton 270.950 kwamme.

LOCAL ADMINISTRATIVE TERMS

_Ken_.--Prefecture. There are forty-three ken and Hokkaido. Ken
and fu are made up of the former sixty-six provinces. Sometimes the name
of the ken and the name of the capital of the ken are the same: example,
Shidzuoka-ken, capital Shidzuoka.

_Fu_.--Three prefectures are municipal prefectures and are called not
ken but fu. They are Tokyo-fu, Kyoto-fu and Osaka-fu.

_Gun_ (_kori_).--Division of a prefecture, a county or rural district.
There are 636 gun. Gun are now being done away with.

_Shi_.--City. There are seventy-nine cities.

_Cho_.--A town or rather a district preponderatingly urban. There are
1,333 cho.

_Machi_.--Japanese name for the Chinese character cho.

_Son_.--A village or rather a district preponderatingly rural. There are
10,839 son.

_Mura_.--Japanese name for a Chinese character son.

A true idea of the Japanese village is obtained as soon as one mentally
defines it as a commune. There may be a rural community called son
or a municipal community called cho. The cho or son consists of a number of
oaza, that is, big aza, which in turn consists of a number of ko-aza or
small aza. A ko-aza may consist of twenty or thirty dwellings, that is,
a hamlet, or it may be only one dwelling. It may be ten acres in extent
or fifty. I found that the population of a particular municipality was
10,000 in seven big oaza comprising twenty-two ko-aza.

[Illustration: THE ROOM, OVERLOOKING THE PACIFIC, IN WHICH MUCH OF
THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN
The feet of the chair and table are fitted with wooden slats so as not
to injure the _tatami_. Electricity as a matter of course!]

[Illustration: THE MERCY OF BUDDHA
The worshippers in the front row lost relatives by a flood.
This is not the priest referred to in Chapter I.]

THE
FOUNDATIONS OF JAPAN

STUDIES IN A SINGLE PREFECTURE
(AICHI)[10]

CHAPTER I

THE MERCY OF BUDDHA

The only hard facts, one learns to see as one gets older, are the
facts of feeling. Emotion and sentiment are, after all, incomparably
more solid than any statistics. So that when one wanders bac