was that the farmer had not enough land on which
to make a living. If the farmer could have 5 acres or thereabouts he
would be well off. But the average area per farmer in the prefecture
in which we were travelling was a little less than 2-1/2 acres. High
taxes were another cause of the farmer's present condition. Then a
year's living would be mortgaged for the expenses of a marriage
ceremony. At a funeral, too, the neighbours came to eat and drink.
They took charge of the kitchen and even ordered in food. (After a
Japanese feast the guests are given at their departure the food that
is left over.) Further, some farmers wasted their substance on the
ambitions of local politics. Again, conscripts who had gone off to the
army hatless and wearing straw shoes came home hatted and sometimes
booted. Military service deprived farmers of labour, and their boys
while away asked their parents for money. Conscription pressed more
heavily on the poor because the sons of well-to-do people continued
their education to the middle school, and attendance at a middle
school entitled a young man to reduction of military service to one
year only.[198]

The countryside was suffering from the way in which importance was
increasingly attached to industry and commerce. Many M.P.s were of the
agricultural class, but they were chiefly landlords, and they were
often shareholders and directors of industrial companies. There was
very little real Parliamentary representation of the farming class and
it had not yet found literary expression. There were signs, however,
that some landlords were realising that industry and agriculture were
not of equal importance. But the farmers were slow to move. The
traditions of the Tokugawa epoch survived, making action difficult.
Finally, there was the drawback to rural development which exists in
the family system. But that, as Mr. Pickwick said, comprises by itself
a difficult study of no inconsiderable magnitude, and we must return
to it on another occasion.

In one of my excursions I went over a large agricultural school, the
boast of which was that of all the youths who had passed through it,
twenty only had deserted the land. I met the present scholars marching
with military tread, mattocks on shoulders, to the school paddies.

I noticed schoolgirls wearing a wooden tablet. It was a good-conduct
badge. If a girl was not wearing it on reaching home her parents knew
that her teacher had retained it because