der's difficulties in getting a living in spots where quiet
streams may become in a few hours ungovernable torrents. I remember
glimpses of grapes and persimmons, of parties of middle-school boys
tramping out their holiday--every inn reduces its terms for them--and
of half a dozen peasant girls bathing in a shaded stream. But there
were less pleasing scenes: hills deforested and paddies wrecked by a
waste of stones and gravel flung over them in time of flood. Here and
there the indomitable farmers, counting on the good behaviour of the
river for a season or two, were endeavouring, with enormous labour, to
resume possession of what had been their own. The spectacle
illustrated at once their spirit and their industry and their need of
land. At night we slept at Kofu at "the inn of greeting peaks." In the
morning a Governor with imagination told me of the prefecture's
gallant enterprises in afforestation and river embanking at
expenditures which were almost crippling.

FOOTNOTES:

[135] The three leading silk prefectures are in order: Nagano,
Fukushima and Gumma.

[136] At this time of the year, when the rice plants are small, the
water in the paddies is still conspicuous.

[137] An old Japan hand once counselled me that "the thing to find out
in sociological enquiries is not people's religions but their
superstitions."

[138] See Appendix IV.

CHAPTER XVII

THE BIRTH, BRIDAL AND DEATH OF THE SILK-WORM

(NAGANO)

The mulberry leaf knoweth not that it shall be silk.--_Arab proverb_

One acre in every dozen in Japan produces mulberry leaves for feeding
the silk-worms which two million farming families--more than a third
of the farming families of the country--painstakingly rear.

But the mulberry is not the only mark of a sericultural district. Its
mark may be seen in the tall chimneys of the factories and in the
structure of the farmers' houses. Breeders of silk-worms are often
well enough off to have tiled instead of thatched roofs; they have
frequently two storeys to their dwellings; and they have almost always
a roof ventilator so that the vitiated air from the _hibachi_-heated
silk-worm chambers may be carried off. Yet another sign of sericulture
being a part of the agricultural activities of a district is its
prosperity. Silk-worms produce the most valuable of all Japanese
exports. Japan sends abroad more raw silk than any other country.[139]

It is in the middle of the country that sericulture