unkempt village which had
hardly recovered from its surprise at finding that it had a railway
station. We paid our _kurumaya_ the sum contracted for and something
over for their faithful service and for their long return run, and
having exchanged bows and cordial greetings, we left for a time the
glorified perambulators which a foreign missionary is supposed to have
introduced half a century ago. (The Japanese claim the honour of
"inventing" the jinrikisha.)

FOOTNOTES:

[123] See Appendix XXXVII.

[124] See Appendix XXXVIII.

[125] In Tokyo one may sleep night after night in summer with no
covering but the thinnest loose cotton kimono and have an electric fan
going within the mosquito curtain, and still feel the heat.

[126] The kimono has no button, hook, tie, or fastening of any kind,
and is kept in place by the waist string and _obi_.

[127] It is an illustration of the difficulty of using a foreign
symbolism that it is unlikely that a single child in the school had
ever seen a shepherd or a sheep.

[128] In 1918 the value of seaweed was returned at 13,600,000 yen.

[129] In fifteen years a _kiri_ tree may be about 20 ft. high and 3
ft. in circumference and be worth 30 yen. _Kiri_ trees to the value of
3 million yen were felled in 1918.

CHAPTER XIV

SHRINES AND POETRY

(NIIGATA AND TOYAMA)

Sir, I am talking of the mass of the people.--JOHNSON

The railway made its way through snow stockades and through many
tunnels which pierced cryptomeria-clad hills. Eventually we descended
to the wonderful Kambara plains, a sea of emerald rice. Fourteen
million bushels of rice are produced on the flats of Niigata
prefecture, which grows more rice than any other. The rice, grown
under 800 different names, is officially graded into half a dozen
qualities. The problem of the high country we had come from was how to
keep its paddy fields from drying up; the problem of Niigata is
chiefly to keep the water in its fields at a sufficiently low level.
Almost every available square yard of the prefecture is paddy.

At Gosen there were depressing-looking weaving sheds, but the Black
Country created by the oil fields farther on was in even more striking
contrast with the beautiful region we had left. The petroleum yield
was 65 million gallons, and the smell of the oil went with us to the
capital city.

Niigata has a dark reputation for exporting farmers' daughters to
other parts of Japan, but I have also heard