d gone on some distance I stopped to watch a farmer's wife
and daughter threshing in a barn by pulling the rice through a row of
steel teeth, the simple form of threshing implement which is seen in
slightly different patterns all over Japan. (It is the successor of a
contrivance of bamboo stakes.) The women told me that one person could
thresh fourteen bushels a day. The implement cost 2-1/2 yen from
travelling vendors but only 1-1/2 yen from the co-operative society.
While we talked the farmer appeared. I apologised to him for
unwittingly stepping on the threshold of the barn--that is, the
grooved timber in which the sliding doors run. It is considered to be
an insult to the head of the house to tread on the threshold as in
some way "standing on the householder's head."

This man had a bamboo plantation, and he told me, in reply to a
question, that the bamboo would shoot up at the rate of more than a
foot in twenty-four hours. (During the month in which this is dictated
I have measured the growth of a shoot of a Dorothy Perkins climber and
find that it averages about quarter of an inch in twenty-four hours.)

FOOTNOTES:

[185] See Appendix XII.

CHAPTER XXVIII

MEN, DOGS AND SWEET POTATOES

(SHIMANE)

Nothing but omniscience could suffice to answer all the questions
implicitly raised.--J.G. FRAZER

When we descended from the hills we were in Shimane, a long, narrow,
coastwise prefecture through which one travels over a succession of
heights to the capital, Matsue, situated at the far end. Two-thirds of
the journey must be made on foot and by _kuruma_.[186] Some talk by
the way was about the farmers going five or six miles daily to the
hills to cut grass for their "cattle," the average number of cattle
per farmer being 1.3 hereabouts. It seemed strange to see buckwheat at
the flowering stage reached by the crops seen in Fukushima several
months before. The explanation was that buckwheat is sown both in
spring and autumn.

In the old days notable samurai, fugitives from Tokyo, had kept
themselves secluded in the rooms we occupied at Yamaguchi. In Shimane
we had small plain low-ceiled rooms in which daimyos had been
accommodated. Not here alone had I evidences of the simplicity of the
life of Old Japan.

I was wakened in the morning by the voice of a woman earnestly
praying. She stood in the yard of the house opposite and faced first
in one direction and then in another. A friend of mine once stayed