ontract, see Appendix LXV.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

SHALL THE JAPANESE EAT BREAD AND MEAT?

_Bon yori shoko_ (Proof, not argument)

One day in Tokyo I heard a Japanese who was looking at a photograph of
a British woman War-worker feeding pigs ask if the animals were sheep.
Sheep are so rare in Japan that an old ram has been exhibited at a
country fair as a lion. In contrast with Western agriculture based on
live stock we have in Japan an agriculture based on rice.[247] But a
section of the Japanese agricultural world turns its eyes longingly to
mixed farming, and so, when I returned to Sapporo from my trip to the
north of Hokkaido, I was taken to see a Government stock farm--with a
smoking volcano in the background. Hokkaido has four other official
farms, one belonging to the Government and one for raising horses for
the army. I was shown, in addition to horses, Ayrshire, Holstein and
Brown Swiss cattle, Berkshire and Yorkshire pigs and Southdown and
Shropshire sheep in good buildings. I noticed two self-binders and a
hay loader and I beheld for the first time in Japan a dairymaid and
collies--one was of a useless show type.

The extent to which the knack of looking after animals and a liking
for them can be developed is an interesting question. Experts in
stock-keeping with generations of experience behind them will agree
that it is on the answer to this question that the success or
non-success of the Japanese in animal industry in no small measure
depends.

I have a note of a discussion on the general treatment of domestic
animals in Japan in the course of which it was admitted that they were
"certainly not treated as well as in most parts of Europe, or as in
China." One reason given was that "most sects believe in the
reincarnation of the wicked in the form of animals." The freedom which
dogs enjoyed in English houses seemed strange; my friends no doubt
forgot that Western houses have no _tatami_ to be preserved. It was
contended, however, that cavalry soldiers "often weep on parting from
their horses" and that "people with knowledge of animals are fond of
them." I have myself seen farmers' wives in tears at a horse fair when
the foals they had reared were to be sold and the animals in their
timidity nuzzled them. Westerners who are familiar with the exquisite
and humoursome studies of animal, bird and insect life by Japanese
artists of the past and present day,[248] are in no doubt that such
work was prompt