Chapter IX: Westward Ho!

Back once more in Tokyo, we took an express train westward. We might have traveled by automobile, though the bridges of Japan are small and the roads not very good, or we might even have gone by rickshaw. But the part of Japan west of the capital is quite modern, with many trains, and large cities, and so many telegraph wires on several rows of poles along the way that you wonder how they can all be needed. Most travelers to Japan know this part of the country along the Tokaido, the route between the new and the old capital. There you are much more likely to meet people from your own land than in the northern or the southern islands.

As we wanted to see everything worth seeing we had to stop often. There was Kamakura, for instance, a pleasant little town with a sea beach, not far from Yokohama. It is famous all over the world because of its great bronze Buddha, so large that even grown men look like Lilliputians beneath it. Then we had a very pleasant day strolling on the island of Enoshima. The Japanese, living on larger islands, are very fond of this tiny one at the shallow edge of the Pacific. Many thousands come to visit its temples and shrines cut in the rock and to wander along its streets of booths, shaded by arbors. Women as well as men keep the little open-front shops, and sell religious trinkets and all kinds of Japanese things to eat. When we saw, down on the rocky edge of the little island, fishermen busy at their calling, we were reminded that Japan, with its thousands of miles of seacoast and its many bays and gulfs, is perhaps the greatest fisherman’s country in the world. No wonder the Japanese almost always eat fish with their rice and very seldom taste meat.

The Daibutsu, or great bronze Buddha at Kamakura, not far from Tokyo,
is one of the sights of Japan.
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Some of you might have been more interested in Nagoya than we were. It is a big industrial city, with modern factories and great mills into which thousands of workmen pour every morning and out of which they pour every evening. While we were glad to know that Japan is as up-to-date in her factories as other modern countries, naturally we did not care much about seeing the same sort of things that we could see at home. We were more interested in the ancient castles of Nagoya, and in the men who hauled boats along her canals by poles over their shoulders.

Through an Interesting Country

Japanese women as well as men work in the deep slime of the rice
fields, wearing a parasol-hat made of last year’s rice-straw.
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Plowing in southern Japan. Domestic animals are so rare in Japan that
this peasant is in luck to have one to help him prepare his rice
field. Most of his neighbors have to do the work by hand, with the
help of their wives and children.
]

Yet as we rode on westward through endless rice fields, with tea bushes climbing some of the hills, and mulberry orchards for the silkworms between, we were forced to realize that Japan is a great industrial and commercial country, as well as a land of delightful scenery and quaint customs. Especially when we reached Osaka we saw how modern it had become. Not only is Osaka the second largest city in Japan, but there are only three cities in the United States that are larger. Its factory chimneys belching smoke and its docks heaped with imports and exports, its noise and its rush, made us feel almost as if we were in Chicago or Pittsburgh. But we had only to step into a rickshaw, or stroll along Theatre Street, with its rows of strange posters before the many movie houses, to recall that we were still in Japan. Just a little farther on is Kobe, the greatest port of Japan, which is also quite modern, and rather ugly.

Generally the sheaves are brought in on the backs of men or women in
Japan, but this peasant near Beppu in the southern island of Kyushu
is wealthy enough to own a young steer.
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As we looked out of the car windows on our journey, we noticed that the peasants do not live at all like our farmers. There are no houses standing alone on their own farms. Even the country people are crowded together in villages. That is because land that can be cultivated is precious in mountainous Japan, and the mouths to be fed are many. So the people build their villages on hillsides or rocky ridges—anywhere within reach of their fields—so as not to waste useful land. The fields are so small compared to ours that American farmers would probably consider them gardens. On this largest island there are a great many farmers and not much fertile land for any one owner. Yet because of the cold they do not like to go to the northern islands where there is much more room.

A Japanese usually threshes his rice by beating out the heads on a
stone in the little courtyard of his house. Then the grain is
winnowed by throwing it up into the air with a wooden scoop, and
finally it is spread out on grass mats to dry in the sun. So the
Japanese peasant really earns his “daily rice.”
]

Since his farm is so small, the Japanese peasant usually has no animals to help him work it. We seldom saw a horse or an ox. Most of the farmers, both men and women, were wading about their fields, up to their knees in water and mud, working with hoes or with bare hands. The planting and weeding of rice can perhaps best be done by hand. As rice is almost the only crop, and it is so thirsty a plant that it must be covered with water all the time it is growing, most of the country looks like a great shallow lake, or as if the rains had been so heavy that all but the hills had been flooded.

The Rice Harvest

After it has been threshed by beating the heads out on a stone, and
winnowed by throwing it up in the wind, the rice of Japan is laid
out on grass mats to dry in the sunshine.
]

If we were to come back through Japan a couple of months later, we should find the fields no longer flooded but waving with a yellow grain that would remind us of wheat. By June or July the rice is ripe, and then it is no longer thirsty. But the peasants of Japan do not use reapers or binders, any more than they do tractors and threshing machines. When the proper day comes, the farmer and his wife, even his older children, go out into the little field with curved sickles hardly a foot long and cut down the rice handful by handful. As for planting, in Japan and throughout the Far East every sprig of rice is set out by hand. Bundles of half-grown rice from crowded seed beds are thrown out into the flooded fields, to be poked into the soft earth stalk by stalk. By the time we had seen thousands of miles of rice fields in Japan and the countries on the mainland, all planted in the same way, we realized that the country people of eastern Asia can hardly be called lazy.

Water runs this old mill for hulling rice, in the country district
near Beppu, the “Hot Springs” of Kyushu. A small stream flows into
the paddles or boxes of the crude homemade wheel and turns the
mill-stone.
]

When the rice has been cut by hand and tied into bundles, the Japanese peasant still has much hard work to do. He has no wagon on which to bring the grain home, and he will be luckier than most of his neighbors if he has one little horse or even a cow over whose back he can hang a few bundles. Most Japanese farmers, bent nearly double as they toil across the fields to the communal village, bring in the sheaves on their own backs. Sometimes the farmers let their wives carry the heavy burden. Then comes the threshing, but with no engine, no threshing machine, no neighbors or hired men to help. The Japanese peasant threshes his rice by catching a handful of it at a time by the butts and beating the heads off on a round stone or other good striking-block. The _paddy_, or unhulled rice, thus beaten out is then swept up with a broom on the bare hard earth of the threshing ground. It is winnowed by throwing it into the air with a shovel, so that the wind will blow away the chaff, and then it is spread on grass mats to dry in the sun. Finally it has to be hulled, by another laborious process. The Japanese peasant works harder for his daily rice than most of us do for our daily bread.

On the hillsides, where rice cannot grow, one sees women who appear to be picking berries. Closer examination shows that there are no berries at all on the waist-high bushes, planted so carefully in parallel hedges, but that the women are picking the leaves, and stuffing them into sacks at their waists. Recalling what is one of the most important exports from Japan to the United States, one suddenly realizes that these women are all picking tea. It is easy work, surely, compared to wading in the rice fields, with the water throwing the blazing sunshine into their faces.

Photo from Maude W. Madden

Big trays made of straw matting are filled with silkworm cocoons. The
cocoons desired for breeding purposes are picked out and put on
another tray. The others go into a pot of boiling water to prepare
them for having the silk unreeled.
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How Silk is Obtained

A Japanese journey at the right season will show men and women, boys and girls, picking other leaves, this time from small trees. If one follows them home, he will find the people feeding the leaves to worms. Whole buildings are filled with crudely made trays, set one above another on racks, and in the trays are quantities of great whitish worms. They are very hungry worms, all eating the mulberry leaves as ravenously as a healthy baby drinks from its bottle. The tiny eggs from which the worms are hatched are laid on the bamboo shelves covered with sheets of coarse paper. Especially at the time of hatching, the temperature must be carefully controlled. Japan has grown so modern that a thermometer is now generally used; but in olden times a man stripped off his clothes and entered the room naked to test the heat. This is still done on the Asiatic mainland. By and by, when they have eaten their fill of mulberry leaves, the worms will begin to spin a sort of house about themselves—a cocoon we call it—in which to sleep, and if left alone they would, some day, suddenly burst out as butterflies. But these worms will never reach that stage. While they are sleeping snugly in their winter coat, someone will throw them into boiling water and begin to unwind the fine tough threads of the cocoons. Thus we get our silk, much of which comes from Japan. In Japan the dead worms are usually thrown away, but in China they are eaten, being considered a great delicacy.

Photo from Maude W. Madden

The silk as it is unwound from the cocoons is first rewound on large
reels, then onto smaller ones. If it is to be used as thread, it is
wound on spools, if as embroidery silk, it is made into skeins. If
it is to be used in weaving, it is wound on great bobbins ready for
the factory machines. In this picture the woman is rereeling onto
small reels.
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Manufacturing in Japan

The Japanese make coarse brown paper out of rice-straw by soaking and
then rolling it out into sheets spread on boards set upright, as in
this case, or sometimes on smooth banks of earth.
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A Japanese saw-mill, the common way of making lumber not only in Japan
but in Korea and China. It takes days to saw up one large timber.
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Besides the employees in her great modern factories, and her hard-working peasants, Japan has millions of village craftsmen. That is, in almost every village larger than a mere farm hamlet, men and boys, and often women and girls too, make many things by hand, just as they have done for centuries. Here we see a wood carver making jewel-boxes, or miniature figures of people. He squats on his heels on a mat, perhaps with no front wall between him and the crowd clacking up and down the narrow street outside in their wooden _geta_. Farther on, a number of men and boys are making paper lanterns, pasting the paper over little ribs of split bamboo, and painting figures and characters on them. Even the paper is probably made of bamboo, and certainly it is made by hand. In many villages of Japan the chief occupation of the people is to shave bamboo strips as fine as hair, soak the shavings in water, and roll them out into sheets like our brown wrapping paper. These sheets, still soaking wet, are then laid on walls or upright boards, until they are dried and ready for use. Small or large, delicate or massive, the things made by Japanese craftsmen are so well done that we marvel at the dexterity of their fingers no less than at their endless oriental patience.