, every acre has to feed close on
four persons. ("Even in Hokkaido," Dr. Sato notes, "the average area
per family is only 71/2 acres.") Happily the number of families
cultivating less than 11/4 acres is decreasing and the number
cultivating from 11/4 up to 5 acres is increasing.[99] In other words,
the favourite size of farm is one which finds work for all the members
of the farmer's family. As on small holdings all over the world, it is
found that profits are difficult to make when help has to be paid for.
The facts that in the last four years for which figures are available
the number of farming families keeping silk-worms has risen by half a
million and that every year the area of land under cultivation
increases show that new ways of increasing income are eagerly seized
on.

FOOTNOTES:

[80] For estimate of daily consumption of rice by Japanese, see
Appendix XXIII.

[81] For statistics of imported and exported rice, see Appendix XXIV.

[82] Japanese. I was the only foreigner present.

[83] The old name for a considerable part of Aichi

[84] This section of the chapter was written in 1921.

[85] For the way in which "normal yield" is arrived at, see p. 70.

[86] See Appendix XXV.

[87] War with China, 1894; with Russia, 1904.

[88] For farmers' diet, see Appendix XXVI.

[89] Farmers in sericultural districts live better than the ordinary
rice farmers.

[90] See Appendix XXVII.

[91] See Appendix XXVIII.

[92] For prices, see Appendix XVII.

[93] The rise in prices towards the close of the War, with the rise in
the cost of living throughout the world, has been discussed on page
xxv.

[94] See Appendix XXIX.

[95] See Chapter XX.

[96] Recent figures show 400 tenants' associations, of which a third
are militant.

[97] See Appendix XXX and page 97.

[98] See Chapter XX.

[99] See Appendix XXXI.

BACK TO FIRST PRINCIPLES: THE APOSTLE
AND THE ARTIST

CHAPTER X

A TROUBLER OF ISRAEL

The signification of this gift of life, that we should leave a better
world for our successors, is being understood.--MEREDITH

To some people in Japan the countryman Kanzo Uchimura is "the Japanese
Carlyle." To others he is a religious enthusiast and the Japanese
equivalent of a troubler of Israel. He appeared to me in the guise of
a student of rural sociology.

Uchimura is the man who as a school teacher "refused to bow before the
Emperor's portrait."[100] He endured, as was to be expected, soc