The Foundations of Japan - Notes Made During Journeys Of 6,000 Miles In The Rural Districts As - A Basis For A Sounder Knowledge Of The Japanese People

J.W. Robertson Scott

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Title: The Foundations of Japan  Notes Made During Journeys Of 6,000 Miles In The Rural Districts As  A Basis For A Sounder Knowledge Of The Japanese People

Author: J.W. Robertson Scott

Release Date: January 6, 2005 [EBook #14613]

Language: English

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THE FOUNDATIONS OF JAPAN

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

FAR EASTERN THE PEOPLE OF CHINA JAPAN, GREAT BRITAIN AND THE WORLD. (Nippon Eikoku oyobi Sekai.) THE IGNOBLE WARRIOR. (Koredemo Bushika.) THE NEW EAST. (Tokyo.) Vols. I, II & III. (Edited.)

AGRICULTURAL

A FREE FARMER IN A FREE STATE. (Holland.) WAR TIME AND PEACE IN HOLLAND. (With an Introduction by the late LORD REAY.) THE LAND PROBLEM: AN IMPARTIAL SURVEY SUGAR BEET: SOME FACTS AND SOME CONCLUSIONS. A Study in Rural Therapeutics. THE TOWNSMAN'S FARM

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THE SMALL FARM  POULTRY FARMING: SOME FACTS AND SOME ILLUSIONS THE CASE FOR THE GOAT. (With Introductions by the DUCHESS OF HAMILTON and SIR H. RIDER HAGGARD.) COUNTRY COTTAGES THE STORY OF THE DUNMOW FLITCH IN SEARCH OF AN £150 COTTAGE. (Edited.) THE JOURNAL OF A JOURNEYMAN FARMER. (Edited.)

THE FOUNDATIONS

OF JAPAN

NOTES MADE DURING JOURNEYS OF

6,000 MILES IN THE RURAL DISTRICTS AS

A BASIS FOR A SOUNDER KNOWLEDGE

OF THE JAPANESE PEOPLE

BY J.W. ROBERTSON SCOTT

("HOME COUNTIES")

WITH 85 ILLUSTRATIONS

"In good sooth, my masters, this is no door, yet it is a little window"

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LONDON

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.

1922

TO

SCOTT SAN NO OKUSAN

FOR WHOLESOME CRITICISM

TO TABLE OF CONTENTS

A concern arose to spend some time with them that I might feel and understand their life and the spirit they live in, if haply I might receive some instruction from them, or they might be in any degree helped forward by my following the leadings of truth among them when the troubles of War were increasing and when travelling was more difficult than usual. I looked upon it as a more favourable opportunity to season my mind and to bring me into a nearer sympathy with them.—Journal of John Woolman, 1762.

I determined to commence my researches at some distance from the capital, being well aware of the erroneous ideas I must form should I judge from what I heard in a city so much subjected to foreign intercourse.—B ORROW .

INTRODUCTION

The hope with which these pages are written is that their readers may be enabled to see a little deeper into thatproblem of the relation of the West with Asia which

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toseealittledeeperintothatproblemoftherelationoftheWestwithAsiawhich the historian of the future will unquestionably regard as the greatest of our time.

I lived for four and a half years in Japan. This book is a record of many of the things I saw and experienced and some of the things I was told chiefly during rural journeys—more than half the population is rural—extending to twice the distance across the United States or nearly eight times the distance between the English Channel and John o' Groats.

These pages deal with a field of investigation in Japan which no other volume has explored. Because they fall short of what was planned, and in happier conditions might have been accomplished, a word or two may be pardoned on the beginnings of the book—one of the many literary victims of the War.

The first book I ever bought was about the Far East. The first leading article of my journalistic apprenticeship in London was about Korea. When I left daily journalism, at the time of the siege of the Peking Legations, the first thing I published was a book pleading for a better understanding of the Chinese.

After that, as a cottager in Essex, I wrote—above anom de guerrewhich is better known than I am—a dozen volumes on rural subjects. During a visit to the late David Lubin in Rome I noticed in the big library of his International Institute of Agriculture that there was no took in English dealing with the agriculture of Japan. [1] Just before the War the thoughts of forward-looking students of our home affairs ran strongly on the relation of intelligently managed small holdings to skilled [2] capitalist farming. During the early "business as usual" period of the War, when no tasks had been found for men over military age—Mr. Wells's protest will be remembered—it occurred to me that it might be serviceable if I could have ready, for the period of rural reconstruction and readjustment of our international ideas when the War was over, two books of a new sort. One should be a stimulating volume on Japan, based on a study, more sociological than technically agricultural, of its remarkable small-farming system and rural life, and the other a complementary American volume based on a study of the enterprising large farming of the Middle West. I proposed to write the second book in co-operation with a veteran rural reformer who had often invited me to visit him in Iowa, the father of the present American Minister of Agriculture. Early in 1915 I set out for Japan to enter upon the first part of my task. Mr. Wallace died while I was still in Japan, and the Middle West book remains to be undertaken by someone else.

The Land of the Rising Sun has been fortunate in the quality of the books which [3] many foreigners have written. But for every work at the standard of what might be called the seven "M's"—Mitford, Murdoch, Munro, Morse, Maclaren, "Murray" and McGovern—there are many volumes of fervid "pro-Japanese" or determined "anti- Japanese" romanticism. The pictures of Japan which such easily perused books present are incredible to readers of ordinary insight or historical imagination, but they have had their part in forming public opinion.

The basic fact about Japan is that it is an agricultural country. Japanese æstheticism, the victorious Japanese army and navy, the smoking chimneys of Osaka, the pushing mercantile marine, the Parliamentary and administrative developments of Tokyo and a costly worldwide diplomacy are all borne on the bent [4] backs ofOhyakusho no Fufu,the Japanese peasant farmer and his wife. The depositories of the authenticYamato damashiispirit) are to be found (Japanese knee deep in the sludge of their paddy fields.

One book about Japan maywell be written in theperspective of the village and the

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OnebookaboutJapanmaywellbewrittenintheperspectiveofthevillageandthe hamlet. There it is possible to find the way beneath that surface of things visible to the tourist. There it is possible to discover thefoundations of the Japan which is intent on cutting such a figure in the East and in the West. There it is possible to learn not only what Japan is but what she may have it in her to become.

A rural sociologist is not primarily interested in the technique of agriculture. He conceives agriculture and country life as Arthur Young and Cobbett did, as a means to an end, the sound basis, the touchstone of a healthy State. I was helped in Japan not only by my close acquaintance with the rural civilisation of two pre- eminently small-holdings countries, Holland and Denmark, but by what I knew to be precious in the rural life of my own land.

An interest in rural problems cannot be simulated. As I journeyed about the country the sincerity of my purpose—there are few words in commoner use in the Far East than sincerity—was recognised and appreciated. I enjoyed conversations in which customary barriers had been broken down and those who spoke said what they felt. We inevitably discussed not only agricultural economy but life, religion and morality, and the way Japan was taking.

I spoke and slept in Buddhist temples. I was received at Shinto shrines. I was led before domestic altars. I was taken to gatherings of native Christians. I planted commemorative trees until more persimmons than I can ever gather await my return [5] to Japan. I wrote so manygakufor school walls and for my kind hosts that my memory was drained of maxims. I attended guileless horse-races. I was present at agricultural shows, fairs, wrestling matches,Bon dances, village and county councils and the strangest of public meetings. I talked not only with farmers and their families but with all kinds of landlords, with schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, policemen, shopkeepers, priests, co-operative society enthusiasts, village officials, county officials, prefectural officials, a score of Governors and an Ainu chief. I sought wisdom from Ministers of State and nobles of every rank, from the Prince who is the heir of the last of the Shoguns down to democratic Barons who prefer to be called "Mr.", I chatted with farmers' wives and daughters, I interrogated landladies and mill girls, and I paid a memorable visit to a Buddhist nunnery. I walked, talked, rode, ate and bathed with common folk and with dignitaries. I discussed the situation of Japan with the new countryman in college agricultural laboratories and classrooms, and, in a remote region, beheld what is rare nowadays, the old countryman kneeling before his cottage with his head to the ground as the stranger rode past.

I made notes as I traversed paddy-field paths, by mountain ways, in colleges, schools, houses and inns. It can only have been when crossing water on men's backs that I did not make notes. I jotted things down as I walked, as I sat, as I knelt, as I lay on myfuton, as I journeyed inkuruma, on horseback, in joltingbasha, in automobiles, in shaking cross-country trains and in boats; in brilliant sunshine and sweltering heat, in the shade and in dust; in the early morning with chilled fingers or more or less furtively as I crouched at protracted private or official repasts, or late at night endeavoured to gather crumbs from the wearing conversation of polite callers who, though set on helping me, did not always find it easy to understand the kind of information of which I was in search. One of these asked my travelling companion sotto voce, "Is he after metal mines?"

I went on my own trips and on routes planned out for me by agricultural and social zealots, and from time to time I returned physically and mentally fatigued to my little Japanese house near Tokyo to rest and to write out from my memoranda, to seek data for new districts from the obliging Department of Agriculture and the

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datafornewdistrictsfromtheobligingDepartmentofAgricultureandthe Agricultural College people at the Imperial University, and to eat and drink with rural authorities who chanced to be visiting the capital from distant prefectures. I had many setbacks. I was misinformed, now and then intentionally and often unintentionally. There were many days which were not only harassing but seemingly wasted. I often despaired of achieving results worth all the exertion I was making and the money I was spending. I must have worn to shreds the patience of some English-speaking Japanese friends, but they never owned defeat. In the end I found that I made progress.

But so did the War, which when I set out from London few believed would last long. I was troubled by continually meeting with incredible ignorance about the War, the issues at stake and the certain end. The Japanese who talked with me were 10,000 miles away from the fighting. Japan had nothing to lose, everything indeed to gain from the abatement of Europe's activities in Asia. Not only Japanese soldiers but many administrative, educational, agricultural and commercial experts had been to school in Germany. There was much in common in the German and Japanese mentalities, much alike in Central European and Farthest East regard for the army and for order, devotion to regulations, habit of subordination and deification of the State. Eventually the well-known anti-Ally campaign broke out in Tokyo, a thing which has never been sufficiently explained. Soon I was pressed to turn aside from my studies and attempt the more immediately useful task: to explain why Western nations, whose manifest interests were peace, were resolutely squandering their blood and wealth in War.

[6] If what I published had some measure of success, it was because by this time, unlike some of the critics who sharply upbraided Japan and made impossible proposals in impossible terms, I had learnt something at first hand about the Japanese, because I wrote of the difficulties as well as the faults of Japan, and because I was now a little known as her well-wisher. One of the two books I published was translated as a labour of love, as I shall never forget, by a Japanese public man whose leisure was so scant that he sat up two nights to get his manuscript finished. Before long I had involved myself in the arduous task of founding and of editing for two years a monthly review,The New East (Shin Toyo), [7]  with for motto a sentence of my own which expresses what wisdom I have gained about the Orient,The real barrier between East and West is a distrust of each other's morality and the illusion that the distrust is on one side only.

The excuse for so personal a digression is that, when this period of literary and journalistic stress began, my rural notebooks and MSS., memoranda of conversations on social problems and a heterogeneous collection of reports and documents had to be stowed into boxes. There they stayed until a year ago. The entries in a dozen of my little hurriedly filled notebooks have lost their flavour or are unintelligible: I have put them all aside. Neither is it possible to utilise notes which were submarined or lost in over-worked post offices. This book—I have had to leave out Kyushu entirely—is not the work I planned, a complete account of rural life and industry in every part of Japan, with an excursus on Korea and Formosa, and certain general conclusions: a standard work, no doubt, in, I am afraid, two volumes, and forgetful at times of the warning that "to spend too much Time in Studies is Sloth."

What I had transcribed before leaving Japan I have now been able in the course of a leisured year in England to overhaul and to supplement by up-to-date statistics in an extensive Appendix. In the changed circumstances in which the book is completed I have also ruthlessly transferred to this Appendix all the technical matter in the text, so that nothing shall obstruct the way of thegeneral reader. At some

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inthetext,sothatnothingshallobstructthewayofthegeneralreader.Atsome 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.

"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 æsthetic 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 [8] govern." But I have laboriously taken all the precautions I could and I have obeyed as far as possible a recent request that "visitors to the Far East should confine themselves to what they have seen with their own eyes." As Huxley wrote, "all that I have proposed to myself is to say, This and this have I learned."

I take pleasure in recalling that some years ago I was approached with a view to undertaking for the United States Government a socio-agricultural investigation in a foreign country. Reared as I have been in the whole faith of a citizen of the English- speaking world, I am glad to think that the present volume may be of some service to American readers. The United States is within ten days—Canada is within nine —of Japan against Great Britain's month by the Atlantic-C.P.R.-Pacific route and eight weeks by Suez. There are more American visitors than British to Japan. It was America that first opened Japan to the West, and the debt of Japan to American training and stimulus is immense. But British services to Japan have also been substantial. Great Britain was the first to welcome her within the circle of the Great Powers, and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance did more for Japan than some Japanese have been willing to admit. The problem of Japan is the problem of the whole English-speaking world. Rightly conceived, the interests of the British Empire and the United States in the Far East are one and indivisible.

The Japanese version of the title of this book (kindly suggested by Mr. Seichi Narusé) isNihon no Shinzui, literally, "The Marrow" or "The Core of Japan." His ExcellencyJa the panese Ambassador, the beauty of whose calligraphywell is

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ExcellencytheJapaneseAmbassador,thebeautyofwhosecalligraphyiswell known, was so very kind as to allow me to requisition his clever brush for the script for the engraver; but it must be understood that Baron Hayashi has seen nothing of the volume but the cover.

I greatly regret that the present conditions of book production make it impossible to reproduce more than one in thirty of my photographs.

It is in no spirit of ingratitude to my hosts and many other kind people in Japan that I have taken the decision resolutely to strike out of the text all those names of places and persons which give such a forbidding air to a traveller's page. I have pleasure in acknowledging here the particular obligations I am under to Kunio Yanaghita, formerly Secretary of the Japanese House of Peers and a distinguished and disinterested student of rural conditions, Dr. Nitobe, assistant secretary of the League of Nations, and his wife, Professor Nasu, Imperial University, Mr. Yamasaki, Mr. M. Yanagi, Mr. Kanzō Uchimura, Mr. Bernard Leach, Mr. M. Tajima, Mr. Ono and two young officials in Hokkaido, who each in turn found time to join me on my journeys and showed me innumerable kindnesses. It was a piece of good fortune that while these pages were in preparation Mr. Yanaghita, Professor Nasu and other fellow-travellers were in Europe and available for consultation. Professor Nasu unweariedly furnished painstaking answers to many questions, and was kind enough to read all of the book in proof; but he has no responsibility, of course, for the views which I express. I am also specially indebted to Dr. Kozai, President of the Imperial University, to Mr. Ito and other officials of the Ministry of Agriculture, to Mr. Tsurimi, one of the most understanding of travelled Japanese, to Mr. Iwanaga, formerly of the Imperial Railway Board, to Dr. Sato, President of Hokkaido University, and his obliging colleagues, to the Imperial Agricultural Society, to Professors Yahagi and Yokoi, and to Viscount Kano, Dr. Kuwada, Mr. I. Yoshida, Mr. K. Ohta, Mr. H. Saito, Mr. S. Hoshijima, and many provincial agricultural and sociological experts.

Portions of drafts for this book have appeared in theDaily Telegraph, World's Work, Manchester Guardian, New East, Asia, Japan Chronicle andChristian World. I am indebted to theWorld's WorkandAsiafor some additional illustrations from blocks made from my photographs, and to theNew Eastfor some sketches by Miss Elizabeth Keith.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] There is a small book by an able American soil specialist, the late Professor King, which describes through rose-tinted glasses the farming of Japan, and of China and Korea as well, on the basis of a flying trip to countries the population of which is thrice that of Great Britain and the United States together. The author of another book, published last year, delivers himself of this astonishing opinion: "The Japanese is no better fitted to direct his own agriculture than I am to steer a rudderless ship across the Atlantic."

[2]VideSir Daniel Hall'sPilgrimage of English Farmingand articles of mine in the Nineteenth CenturyandTimes, and myLand Problem.

[3] The Japanese have only lately, however, made some acknowledgment of their debt to Hearn, and in an eight-page bibliography of the best books about Japan in theJapan Year Bookas yet unrivalled Murdoch's History is not even mentioned.

[4]Ohyakushonot be confused with must Oo-hyakusho orOo-byakusho, which means a large farmer.Ois a polite prefix;OoorOmeans large.

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[5] Horizontal wall writings.

[6] About 35,000 copies of my two bilingual books were circulated.

[7] With the backing of a London Committee composed of Lord Burnham, Sir G.W. Prothero, Mr. J. St. Loe Strachey and Mr. C.V. Sale.

[8] Tenison, 1684.

CHAPTER

CONTENTS

STUDIES IN A SINGLE PREFECTURE (AICHI)

I. THE MERCY OF BUDDHA

II. "GOOD PEOPLE ARE NOT SUFFICIENTLY PRECAUTIOUS"

III. EARLY-RISING SOCIETIES AND OTHER INGENUOUS ACTIVITIES

IV. "THE SIGHT OF A GOOD MAN IS ENOUGH"

V. COUNTRY-HOUSE LIFE

VI. BEFORE OKUNITAMA-NO-MIKO-KAMI

VII. OF "DEVIL-GON" AND YOSOGI

CHAPTER

THE MOST EXACTING CROP IN THE WORLD

VIII. THE HARVEST FROM THE MUD

IX. THE RICE BOWL, THE GODS AND THE NATION

BACK TO FIRST PRINCIPLES: THE APOSTLE AND THE ARTIST

CHAPTER

X. A TROUBLER OF ISRAEL

XI. THE IDEA OF A GAP

ACROSS JAPAN (TOKYO TO NIIGATA AND BACK)

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CHAPTER

XII. TO THE HILLS (TOKYO, SAITAMA, TOCHIGI AND FUKUSHIMA)

XIII. THE DWELLERS IN THE HILLS (FUKUSHIMA)

XIV. SHRINES AND POETRY (NIIGATA AND TOYAMA)

XV. THE NUN'S CELL (NAGANO)

CHAPTER

IN AND OUT OF THE SILK PREFECTURE

XVI. PROBLEMS BEHIND THE PICTURESQUE (SAITAMA, GUMMA, NAGANO AND YAMANASHI)

XVII. THE BIRTH, BRIDAL AND DEATH OF THE SILK-WORM (NAGANO)

XVIII. "GIRL COLLECTORS" AND FACTORIES (NAGANO AND YAMANASHI)

XIX. "FRIEND-LOVE-SOCIETY'S" GRIM TALE

FROM TOKYO TO THE NORTH BY THE WEST COAST

CHAPTER

XX. "THE GARDEN WHERE VIRTUES ARE CULTIVATED" (FUKUSHIMA AND YAMAGATA)

XXI. THE "TANOMOSHI" (YAMAGATA)

CHAPTER

BACK AGAIN BY THE EAST COAST

XXII. "BON" SONGS AND THE SILENT PRIEST (YAMAGATA, AKITA, AOMORI, IWATE, MIYAGI, FUKUSHIMA AND IBARAKI)

XXIII. A MIDNIGHT TALK

CHAPTER

THE ISLAND OF SHIKOKU

XXIV. LANDLORDS, PRIESTS AND "BASHA" (TOKUSHIMA, KOCHI AND KAGAWA)

XXV. "SPECIAL TRIBES" (EHIME)

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XXVI. THE STORY OF THE BLIND HEADMAN (EHIME)

CHAPTER

THE SOUTH-WEST OF JAPAN

XXVII. UP-COUNTRY ORATORY (YAMAGUCHI)

XXVIII. MEN, DOGS AND SWEET POTATOES (SHIMANE)

XXIX. FRIENDS OF LAFCADIO HEARN (SHIMANE, TOTTORI AND HYOGO)

CHAPTER

TWO MONTHS IN TEMPLE (NAGANO)

XXX. THE LIFE OF THE PEASANTS AND THEIR PRIESTS

XXXI. "BON" SEASON SCENES

CHAPTER

IN AND OUT OF THE TEA PREFECTURE

XXXII. PROGRESS OF SORTS (SHIDZUOKA AND KANAGAWA)

XXXIII. GREEN TEA AND BLACK (SHIDZUOKA)

CHAPTER

EXCURSIONS FROM TOKYO

XXXIV. A COUNTRY DOCTOR AND HIS NEIGHBOURS (CHIBA)

XXXV. THE HUSBANDMAN, THE (SAITAMA, GUMMA AND TOKYO)

WRESTLER AND THE CARPENTER

XXXVI. "THEY FEEL THE MERCY OF THE SUN" (GUMMA, KANAGAWA AND CHIBA)

CHAPTER

REFLECTIONS IN HOKKAIDO

XXXVII. COLONIAL JAPAN AND ITS UN-JAPANESE WAYS

XXXVIII. SHALL THE JAPANESE EAT BREAD AND MEAT?

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