f Japan's
crop values, 20 per cent, below last year's figures, and many people
will suffer.

Ordinarily, however, these little handkerchief-sized farms yield
amazingly. It has been shown by Prof. F. H. King that the fields of
Japan are cultivated so intensively, fertilized so painstakingly, and
kept so continuously producing some crop, that they feed 2277 people
to the square mile--21,321 square miles of cultivated fields in the
main islands supporting a population of 48,542,376. If the tilled
fields of Iowa, for {22} example, supported an equal number of people per
square mile, the population so supported would be over 100,000,000.
That state alone could feed the entire population of the United States
and then have an excess product left for export to other countries! If
North Carolina did as well with her cultivated land she would support
30,000,000 people, and if Mississippi's 11,875 square miles of land
under cultivation supported each 2277 persons, then 27,041,375 people,
or thirteen times the present population of the state, could live off
their produce!

And yet these Japanese lands have been in cultivation for unnumbered
centuries. Some of them may have been cleared when King Herod trembled
from his dream of a new-born rival in Judea, and certainly "the glory
that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome" had not faded from the
earth when some of these fields began their age-long ministry to human
need. And they have been kept fertile simply by each farmer putting
back on the ground every ounce of fertility taken from it, for
commercial fertilizers were absolutely unknown until our own
generation.

Of course, with a population so dense and with each man cultivating an
area no larger than a garden-patch in America, the people are poor,
and the wonder is that they are able to produce food enough to keep
the country from actual want. Practically no animal meat is eaten; if
we except fish, the average American eats nearly twice as much meat in
a week as the average Japanese does in a year: to be exact, 150 pounds
of meat per capita is required per year for the average American
against 1.7 pounds for the average Japanese! Many of the farmers here
are too poor even to eat a good quality of rice. Consequently Japan
presents the odd phenomenon of being at once an exporter and a large
importer of rice. Poor farmers sell their good rice and buy a poorer
quality brought in from the mainland of Asia and mix it with bar