lay hold is that in recent years the farmers have been led into
the way of spending more money--in taxation as well as in general
expenses of living--and that, when account is taken of every advantage
they have gained from better methods of production, they have pressing
on them the limitations imposed by the size of their farms and their
farming practice. Whatever the prices obtained for the: products of
the soil, climatic facts,[94] the character and social condition of
the people, their attitude towards life and authority and the attitude
of authority towards them remain very much the same. And thus a
narrative of things seen and heard chiefly during the first years of
the War is not at all out of date even if it were not supplemented as
it is by a plentiful supply of notes containing the latest statistical
data.

There is one curious exception only. The reader of these pages will
constantly come on references to the poverty of the tenant farmers.
They are, of course, practically labourers, for they cultivate two or
three acres only, and at the end of the year, as has been shown, have
merely a trifle in hand and sometimes not that. Influenced by the
labour movement, which developed in the industrial centres during and
after the War,[95] this depressed class has of late shown spirit. It
has begun to assert its claims against landowners. At the end of 1920
there were as many as ninety associations of tenant farmers, and sixty
of these had been started for the specific purpose of representing
tenants' interests against landowners. Strikes of tenants began and
continue. The end of this movement of a proverbially conservative
class is not at all certain.[96]

The outstanding facts which are to be borne in mind about agricultural
Japan are that the population is as thick on the ground as the
population of the British Isles (thicker in reality, for so much of
Japan is mountain and waste)--ten times thicker than the population of
the United States[97]--that Japan is primarily an agricultural
country, while Great Britain is largely a manufacturing and trading
country, and that only 151/2 per cent. of Japan proper (including
Hokkaido) is under cultivation against 27 per cent. in Great
Britain.[98] The average area cultivated per farming family in Japan,
counting paddy and upland together, is less than 3 acres. As the total
population of Japan is now (1921) 56 millions (55,960,150 in 1920,
plus the annual increase of 600,000)