ia in October, one sees here miles on miles of rice fields,
some of vivid green, others of green turning to gold. The foothills of
the mountains remind one of the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, as they
all bear evidences of the rounding and smoothing of glacial action.

At a distance the rice fields look like grain fields, but seen near at
hand they are found to be great swamps of water, with row on row of
rice, the dead furrows either serving as ditches or as raised paths
across the fields. Every bit of hillside is terraced and planted to rice
or vegetables or fruit.

Often these little, terraced fields, which look like the natural mesa of
southern California, will not be over fifty feet long by ten or fifteen
feet wide. Between the rows of fruit trees are vegetables or corn or
sorghum. The farmers live in little villages and apparently go home
every night after tilling their fields. There are none of the scattered
farmhouses, with trees around them, which are so characteristic a
feature of any American rural scene.

The towns as well as the cities show a uniformity of architecture, as
most of the shops are one story or a story and one-half, while the
residences seem to be built on a uniform plan, with great variety in
gateways and decoration of grounds. Most of the roofs are made of a
black clay, corrugated so that it looks like the Spanish-American tile,
and many of the walls that surround residences and temples are of adobe,
with a tiled covering, precisely as one sees to-day the remains of adobe
walls in old Spanish-Californian towns.

The general impression of any Japanese city when seen from a height is
that of a great expanse of low buildings with a liberal sprinkling of
trees and a few pagodas or roofs of Buddhist temples.

The strongest impression that the unprejudiced observer receives in
Japan is of the small value set upon labor as well as upon time by the
great mass of the people. In Yokohama and in Kobe, which show the most
signs of foreign influence, the same traits prevail.

It is one of the astonishing spectacles of the world, this
accomplishment of the business of a great nation by man power alone.
Only in one city, Osaka, the Chicago of Japan, is there any general
evidence of the adoption of up-to-date methods in manufacturing.
Everywhere one sees all the small industries of the country carried on
in the same way that they were conducted in Palestine in the time of
Christ.

Everywhere men, h