t approve of the condition of things in the
north where women worked as much in the fields as their husbands and
brothers. Women were "so backward and conservative." The biggest
obstacles to agricultural progress were old women. To introduce a
secondary industry was to take women from the fields.

I spoke with an agricultural expert, one of whose dicta was that
"students at normal schools who come from town families are not so
clever as students from farmers' families." He told me that 10,000
young men in his county had sworn "to act in the way most fitting to
youths of a military state [sic], to buy and use national products as
far as possible and so to promote national industry."

What was wrong with some farming, according to an official of a county
agricultural association whom I met later, was that the farmers
cultivated too intensively. They used too much "artificial." A
prefectural official, speaking of the possibility of extending the
cultivated area in Japan, said that in Ehime there were 6,000 _cho_
which might be made into paddies if money were available. As to
afforestation, 100,000 yen a year, exclusive of salaries, was spent in
the prefecture. As a final piece of statistics he mentioned that
whereas ten years before pears were grown only in a certain island of
the prefecture, the production of a single county was now valued at
half a million yen yearly.

I spent a night at a hot spring. It is said that the volume of water
is decreasing. What a situation for a town which lives on a hot spring
if the hot-water supply should suddenly stop! I heard of another
hot-spring resort at which the water is gradually cooling: it is
warmed up by secret piping.

I have not troubled my readers with many stories of the jostling of
past and present, but I noticed in an electric street car at Matsuyama
a peasant trying to light his pipe with flint and tinder. As he did
not succeed a fellow-passenger offered him a match. He was so inexpert
with it that he still failed to get a light and he had to be handed a
cigarette stump.

In riding down to the port in the street car I borrowed for a few
moments a schoolboy's English reader. It seemed rather mawkish. A book
of Japanese history which I was also allowed to look at was full of
reproductions of autographs of distinguished men. "They make the
impression very strong," I was told.

FOOTNOTES:

[182] See Appendix XXXVIII.

[183] That is, not only his household but his r