here had never been a
paddy field before. To make a paddy field on such a slope is a
difficult task. The land must be embanked with stones and then
levelled. The building of the strong embankment alone calls for much
labour. The old man toiled very hard at his job and sometimes his son
in despair sent his labourers to help him. At length the paddy field
was finished. But it was only a tenth of a _tan_ in area. When the son
saw the small result of so much labour he said to his father, "I
grieve for the way you have toiled. You have laboured hard for many
days and my labourers have helped you, but all that has been
accomplished is the making of a paddy field so small and distant that
it is uneconomical."

To this the old man replied: "When you go to Tokyo and see the
graveyard at Aoyama you will behold there many monuments of generals
and ministers of State. Their merits and their works in this world are
described on those monuments. But do you know where the monument of
the famous hero Kusunoki Masashige is? It is near Kobe, and it is not
more than half as big as those monuments at Tokyo. Do you know where
the monument of the great Taiko is? It is in Kyoto, but it is only
recently that this monument was put up. Thus the monuments of our
greatest heroes are small or have been erected recently. The reason is
that it is unnecessary to raise big monuments for them because what
they did in their lives was in itself their monument. They built their
monument in the hearts of the people. Therefore we can never judge
from the size of the monument the kind of work which was accomplished
by the man who sleeps under it. Monuments are not only for ministers
and warriors. We peasants can also erect monuments in our own way. To
open a new paddy field, to plant the bare hillside with trees, these
are our monuments. How lonely it would be for me if there were no
monument left after my death. However small this paddy field may be,
it will not be forgotten so long as it yields for your posterity the
blessing of its rice crop." "Happily," the interpreter added, "the old
man did not die so soon as he thought he would do. He lived for
several years and planted the bare hillside with trees. Now the wood
which grows there is worth 10,000 yen."

A peasant proprietor expressed the conviction that goodness in a
family was "not the result of its own efforts but of the accumulation
of ancestral effort." The "ancestral merits and good spirit remain