was told of other "peculiar
people" called Hachia, also of a hawker-beggar class which sells small
things of brass or bamboo or travels with performing monkeys.

Water from hot springs is piped long distances in water pipes made of
bamboo trunks, the ends of which are pushed into one another. A turn
is secured by running two pipes at the angle required into a block of
wood which has been bored to fit.

When we got down to the sand dunes there were windbreaks, 10 or 15 ft.
high, made of closely planted pines cut flat at the top. Elsewhere I
saw such windbreaks 30 ft. high. On the telegraph wires there were big
spiders' webs about 4 ft. in diameter.

As we sped through a village my attention was attracted by a funeral
feast. The pushed-back _shoji_ showed about a dozen men sitting in a
circle eating and drinking. Women were waiting on them. At the back of
the room, making part of the circle, was the square coffin covered by
a white canopy.

While passing a Buddhist temple I heard the sound of preaching. It
might have been a voice from a church or chapel at home.

Shortly afterwards I came on a memorial to the man who introduced the
sweet potato into the locality 150 years before. This was the first of
many sweet-potato memorials which I encountered in the prefecture and
elsewhere. Sometimes there were offerings before the monuments.
Occasionally the memorial took the form of a stone cut in the shape of
a potato. There is a great exportation of sweet potatoes--sliced and
dried until they are brittle--to the north of Japan where the tuber
cannot be cultivated.[189]

While we rested at the house of a friend of my companion we spoke of
emigration. There are four or five emigration companies, and it is an
interesting question just how much emigration is due to the initiative
of the emigrants themselves and how much to the activity of the
companies. The chief reason which induces emigrants to go to South
America is that, under the contract system, they get twice as much
money as they would obtain, say, in Formosa.[190]

Our host did not remember any foreigner visiting his village since his
boyhood, though it is on the main road. It took nearly four days for a
Tokyo newspaper to arrive. This region is so little known that when a
resident mentioned it in Tokyo he was sometimes asked if it was in
Hokkaido.

I was interested to see how many villages had erected monuments to
young men who had won distinction away from hom