ay become religious because he feels deeply the
misfortunes or miseries of a neighbour or the miseries of war. Or his
religion may come by meditation. A man who begins to be religious is
not, however, at once noticed. On the contrary, if he is a true
believer his daily life will be most ordinary."

One day I passed a primary school playground. The girls had just
finished and the boys were beginning Swedish drill. Everyone engaged
in the drill, including the master, was barefoot.

I saw that some of the cottages were built in an Essex fashion, of
puddled clay and chopped straw faced with tarred boards. Some
dwellings, however, were faced with straw instead of boards. They had
just had their wall thatch renewed for the winter.

In one spot there was a quarter of a mile of wooden aqueduct for the
service of the paddy fields. Much agricultural pumping is done in
Aichi. I visited an irrigation installation where pumps (from London)
were turning barren hill tops into paddy fields.[56] The work was
being done by a co-operative society of 550 members who had borrowed
the 40,000 yen they needed from a bank on an undertaking to repay in
fifteen years.

It was stated that common paddy near Anjo had been bought at 5,000 yen
per _cho_ and not for building purposes. When one member of our
company said, "The farmers here are rivalling each other in hard
work," the weightiest authority among us replied: "What the farmer
must do is to work not harder but better. At present he is not working
on scientific principles. The hours he is spending on really
profitable labour are not many. He must work more rationally. In 26
villages in the south-west of Japan, where farming calls for much
labour, it was found that the number of days' work in the year was
only 192. Statistics for Eastern Japan give 186 days.[57] As to a
secondary industry, one or two hours' work a night at straw rope
making for a month may bring in a yen because the market for rope is
confined to Japan. The same with _zori_, a coarse sort being
purchasable for 2 sen a pair. But supplementary work like silk-worm
culture produces an article of luxury for which there is a world
market."

When we returned home my host was kind enough to summarise for me--the
general reader may skip here--some of the reasons set forth by a
professor of agricultural politics for the farmer's position being
what it is:

1. The average area cultivated per family is very small.

2. The law of