rative society which paid the municipality the
large sum of 70,000 yen a year. The removal of night soil, its storage
in the fields in sunken butts and concrete cisterns--carefully
protected by thatched, wooden or concrete roofs--and its constant
application to paddy fields or upland plots cause an odour to prevail
which the visitor to Japan never forgets.[41]

It must not be supposed that, because the Japanese are careful to
utilise human waste products, no other manure is employed. There is an
enormous consumption of chemical fertilisers. Then there are brought
into service all sorts of crop-feeding materials, such as straw,
grass, compost, silkworm waste, fish waste, and of course the manure
produced by such stock as is kept.[42] In Aichi the value of human
waste products used on the land is only a quarter of the value of the
bean cake and fish waste similarly employed.

At Mr. Yamasaki's excellent agricultural school (prefectural), which
I visited more than once,[43] I was struck by the grave bearing of the
students. I saw them not only in their classrooms but in their large
hall, where I was invited to speak from a platform between the busts
of two rural worthies, Ninomiya, of whom we have heard before, and
another who was "distinguished by the righteousness of his public
career." As in the Danish rural high schools, store is set on hard
physical exercise. An hour of exercise--_judo_ (jujitsu), sword play
or military drill--is taken from six to seven in the morning and
another at midday with the object of "strengthening the spirit" and
"developing the character," for "our farmers must not only be honest
and determined but courageous." Severe physical labour, shared by the
teacher, is also given out of doors, for example, in heaping manure.
"We believe," said one of the instructors, "in moral virtue taught by
the hands."

For an hour a day "the main points of moral virtue" are put before the
different grades of students, according to their ages and development.
The school has a guild to which the twenty teachers and all the
students belong. It is a kind of co-operative society for the
"purchase and distribution of daily necessities," but one of its
objects is "the maintenance of public morality." Then there is the
students' association which has literary and gymnastic sides, the one
side "to refine wisdom and virtue," the other "for the rousing of
spirit." Mention may also be made of a "discipline calendar" of fi