ly saved, and in recent years a considerable demand for
commercial fertilizers has sprung up, $8 to $10 worth per acre being a
normal application.

So much for the farming country as it has impressed me around Tokyo. A
few days ago I saw a somewhat different agricultural area--280 miles
of great rice-farming land between Miyanoshita and Kyoto. This country
is different from that around Yokahoma and north of Tokyo in that it
is so much more rolling and mountainous (majestic Mount Fuji, supreme
among peaks, was in sight several hours) and greater efforts are
therefore necessary to take care of the soil.

But when such effort is necessary in Japan, it is sure to be made. The
population is so dense that every one realizes the essential
criminality of soil-waste, of the destruction of the one resource
which must support human life as long as the race shall last.

Much of the land is in terraces, or, perhaps I should say, tiers. That
is to say, here will be a half-acre or an acre from eighteen inches to
six feet higher (all as level as a threshing-floor) than a similar
level piece adjoining. While the levelling is helpful in any case for
the preservation of fertility and the prevention of washing, the tier
system is necessary in many cases on account of the irrigation methods
used in rice growing. While the lower plot is flooded for rice, upland
crops may be growing on the adjacent elevated acre or half-acre.

The hillside or mountain slopes are also cultivated to the last
available foot, and in dry seasons you may even see the men and women
carrying buckets uphill to water any suffering crop. In nearly all
cases the rows are on a level. Where there was once a slanting
hillside the Japanese here dig it down or grade it, and the
mountainsides are often enormous steps or {25} stairs; one level
terrace after another, each held in place by turf or rock wall.

Rice growing, as it is conducted in Japan, certainly calls for much
bitter toil. The land must be broken by hand; into the muddy, miry,
water-covered rice fields the farmer-folk must wade, to plant the rice
laboriously, plant by plant; then the cultivation and harvesting is
also done by hand, and even the threshing, I understand. When we
recall that the net result of all this bitter toil is only a bare
existence made increasingly hard by the steady rise in land-taxes, and
that the Japanese people know practically none of the diversions which
give joy and color to Americ