gs there was hung
on the headstone a peasant's wide straw hat. A large beehive-shaped
bamboo basket over another grave was a reminder of the time when a
grave needed such protection in order to save the body from wild
animals.

I saw at a distance in the midst of paddies two tree-covered mounds, a
large one and a small one. They looked like the grave mounds I had
seen in China, but it was suggested that they were probably on an old
frontier line and marked spots at which ceremonies for scaring off
disease were performed.

In one place I found the people planting plum trees in order to meet
their communal taxation. It was reckoned that the yield of one tree
when it came into full bearing would defray the taxes of a
moderate-sized family.

An open space in a wood was pointed out to me as the spot on which
dead horses were formerly thrown to the dogs and birds. Nowadays
notice was given to the Eta that a dead horse was to be cast away, and
they came and, after skinning the animal, buried the body. Farther
off, on the high road, I saw an 8 ft. high monument to a local steed
that had died in Manchuria.

One of my further visits to Chiba was in the spring. The paddies,
which had been fallow since November, were under water; but much of
the stubble had been turned over with the long-bladed mattock. The
seed beds from which the rice is transplanted to the paddies were a
vivid green. On the high ground I saw good clean crops of barley and
wheat, beans and peas, on soil of very moderate quality.

The name of Funabashi at a station reminded me of a Japanese friend
having told me that it was "famous for a shrine and a very immoral
place." But I afterwards heard that the keeper of that shrine, "acting
from conscientious motives, gave up his lucrative post and died a poor
man." It is said of one of the most sacred places in Japan that it is
also the "most immoral." Kyoto which contains nine hundred shrines is
also supposed to harbour several thousand women of bad character.

I passed a place where 25,000 Russian prisoners had been detained.
There was an old peasant there who told his son that he could not
understand why so many Japanese went abroad at such great cost to see
the different peoples of the world. If they would only stay at home,
he said, they would see them all in turn, for first there had been the
Chinese prisoners, then the Russians and now there were the Germans.

In the uplands it was peaceful and restful to