rough rendering of a song which had been sung by the rice
planters before the shrine:

This day the beginning of sowing at an auspicious time--
Long life to the rice!
May it be a token of the years of the Reign,
The seed of peace for the world--
May it start from this consecrated field!
One in heart we see to it that our seedlings are well matched.
Mikawa's[83] millennium and the millennium of rice.
Let us pray for an abundant shooting.
Now let us plant the seedlings straight;
Pleasing to the gods are the ways that are not crooked.

After this ceremony, in which the staple crop of the country and the
labour of the farmer in his paddy field had been honoured by the State
and dignified by ancestral blessings, there was luncheon in one of
those deftly contrived reed-covered structures, of the building of
which the Japanese have the knack, and the Governor asked some of us
to say a few words. Then on a raised platform in the open there was
enacted a comic interlude such as might have been seen in England in
the Middle Ages. In the evening I was bidden to a dinner of the
officials responsible for the day's doings. The Governor made a kindly
reference to my labours and the local M.P. presented me with a kimono
length of the cotton material which had been woven for the planters of
the sacred rice.

III[84]

The production of rice has increased more quickly than the growth of
the population. If we consider, along with the advance in population,
the crops of the years 1882 and 1913, which were held to be average,
and, in order to be as up-to-date as possible, the normal annual
yield[85] of the five-years period 1912-18, we find that, as between
1882 and 1913, the population increased 45 per cent. and rice
production increased 63 per cent., while as between 1882 and the
normal annual yield period of 1912-18, the population increased 55 per
cent, and the crop 75 per cent.[86]

This is a noteworthy fact. But equally noteworthy is the fact that in
the 1882-1913 period, in which the production of rice increased 63 per
cent. and the population only 45 per cent., the price of rice did not
fall. On the contrary it rose. This was due largely[87] to the fact
that people had begun to eat rice who had not before been able to
afford it. Many people who grow rice eat, as has been noted, barley or
barley mixed with a little rice. From the 'eighties onwards more and
more rice was eaten.[88]

The reason was that, what with the cash