in we passed through a village
at the approaches to which thick straw ropes such as are seen at
shrines had been stretched across the road. Charms were attached. The
object was to keep off an epidemic.

The indigo leaves drying on mats in front of some of the cottages were
a delight to the eye. There were also mats covered with cotton which
looked like fluffy cocoons. On the telegraph wires, the poles of which
all over Japan take short cuts through the paddies, swallows clustered
as in England, but it is to the South Seas, not to Africa, that the
Japanese swallow migrates. When the telegraph was a newer feature of
the Japanese landscape than it is now swallows on the wires were a
favourite subject for young painters.

We crossed a dry river bed of considerable width at a place where the
current had made an excavation in the gravel, rocks and earth several
yards deep. It was an impressive illustration of the power of a heavy
flood.

I found in one mountainous county that only about a sixth of the area
was under cultivation. A responsible man said: "This is a county of
the biggest landlords and the smallest tenants. Too many landowners
are thinking of themselves, so there arise sometimes severe conflicts.
Some 4,000 tenants have gone to Hokkaido." The conversation got round
to the young men's societies and I was told a story of how an Eta
village threatened by floods had been saved by the young men of the
neighbouring non-Eta village working all night at a weakened
embankment. Some days later an Eta deputation came to the village and
"with tears in their eyes gave thanks for what had been done." The
comment of a Japanese friend was: "In the present state of Japan
hypocrisy may be valuable. The boys and the Eta were at least
exercising themselves in virtue."

Four villages in this county have among them eight fish nurseries, the
area of salt water enclosed being roughly 120 acres. I looked into
several cottages where paper making was going on.[180]

I also went into two cotton mills. In both there were girls who were
not more than eleven or twelve. "They are exempted from school by
national regulation because of the poverty of their parents,"[181] I
was told.

As we passed the open shop fronts of the village barbers I saw that as
often as not a woman was shaving the customer or using the patent
clippers on him.

We looked at a big dam which an enterprising landowner was
constructing. Three hundred women were cons