d of the year recalling either the red or the black according
to the degree to which the publicly announced good resolutions have
been kept. Among the good resolutions are: to worship at the Shinto
shrine or the Buddhist temple regularly, to be tidier, to be more
efficient in cropping the land, to undertake work for the common good,
to have a secondary occupation in addition to farming, to sit with
more decorum at meals, to rise earlier, to visit the graves of
ancestors monthly, to be more considerate to parents or elder
brothers, and "not to remain idly at people's houses."

One Y.M.A. decrees that a member found in a tea-house in conversation
with a geisha shall be fined 20 yen. There is even a village in which
the young men's association and the young women's association have
united to issue a regulation providing that at night time members, in
order that their doings shall be public, shall carry lanterns painted
with the ideographs of their societies.[20]

With regard to the young women's associations, I found that one of
them studied domestic matters and good manners, "asking questions and
receiving answers." The motto of the organisation was "Good Wives and
Good Mothers." A member, this Society believes, should be "polite,
gentle and warm-hearted, but with a strong will inside and able to
meet difficulties." Her hairdressing and clothes "should not be
luxurious," and she "must not run after fashions." She must "respect
Buddha and abandon sweet-eating," for "taking food between meals is
bad for your health, for economy and for your posterity."

Let us now hear something of Societies for the Cultivation of Rice by
Schoolboys. The lads become responsible for the cultivation of a _tan_
of their family land, or of a small paddy, and they work it themselves
with the help of such advice as the schoolmaster may give them. (The
cultivation of a _tan_ of a paddy, a quarter of an acre, is supposed
to need in a year about twenty-one days' labour of a man working from
sunrise to sunset.) The report of one boy to which I turned in a
collection of reports by members of a rice-cultivation society showed
that he was between fourteen and fifteen. His diary of work and
observations was as follows:

_June_ 5.--4 _to_ of herring applied.

_June_ 7.--Locusts and other insects arrive.[21]

_June_ 20.--153 clumps of rice transplanted from the seed bed.[22]

_July_ 11.--Rice cultivated and 4 _to_ of herring applied.

_J