n
was maintained, and a campaign against a rice borer had been of
benefit to the amount of about 10,000 yen. I found the company's
winnowing machine discharging its chaff into the furnace of the
rice-drying apparatus.

One of the experts of the company came with me for some distance in
the train in order to discuss some of his problems. He thought
agricultural work could be done in less back-breaking ways. He wanted
a small threshing machine which would be suitable not only for
threshing small quantities of rice or corn but for easy conveyance
along the narrow and easily damaged paths between the rice fields. If
he had such a machine he would like to improve it so that it would lay
out the threshed straw evenly, so making the straw more valuable for
the many uses to which it is put. He wished to see a machine invented
for planting out rice seedlings and another contrivance devised for
drying wheat. The company's rice-drying machine handled 200 _koku_ of
rice a day, but there were difficulties in drying wheat. (In many
places I noticed the farmers drying their corn by the primitive method
of singeing it and thus spoiling it.)[173]

On the Inland Sea, aboard the smart little steamer of the Government
Railways, my companion spoke of the extent to which sea-faring men, a
conservative class, had abandoned the use of the single square sail
which one sees in Japanese prints; the little vessels had been
re-rigged in Western fashion. But many superstitions had survived the
abolished square sails. The mother of my fellow-traveller once told
him that, when she crossed the Inland Sea in an old-style ship and a
storm arose, the shipmaster earnestly addressed the passengers in
these words, "Somebody here must be unclean; if so, please tell me
openly." The title of the book my companion was reading was _The
History of the Southern Savage_. Who was the "Southern Savage"? The
word is _namban_, the name given to the early Portuguese and Spanish
voyagers to Japan. (The Dutch were called _komojin_, red-haired men.)
In looking through the official railway guide on the boat I saw that
there was a list of specially favourable places for viewing the moon.
An M.P. passenger told me that the average cost of getting returned to
the Diet was 10,000 yen[174].

The difficulties of communication in Shikoku are so considerable that
I was compelled to leave the two prefectures of Tokushima and Kochi
unvisited. Kochi is without a yard of railway lin