would shriek at the figures, but they are approximately accurate.  Rice naturally fluctuates a good deal, but it may be taken in the rough at five Japanese dollars (fifteen shillings) per koku of 330 lbs.  Wheat and maize of the first spring crop is worth about eleven shillings per koku.  The first crop gives nearly 1-3/4 koku per tau (the quarter acre unit of measurement aforesaid), or eighteen shillings per quarter acre, or L3:12s. per acre.  The rice crop at two koku or L1:10s. the quarter acre gives L6 an acre.  Total L9:12s.  This is not altogether bad if you reflect that the land in question is not the very best rice land, but ordinary No. 1, at L25:16s. per acre, capital value.

A son has the right to inherit his father’s land on the father’s assessment, so long as its term runs, or, when the term has expired, has a prior claim as against any one else.  Part of the taxes, it is said, lies by in the local prefecture’s office as a reserve fund against inundations.  Yet, and this seems a little confusing, there are between five and seven other local, provincial, and municipal taxes which can reasonably be applied to the same ends.  No one of these taxes exceeds a half of the land-tax, unless it be the local prefecture tax of 2-1/2 per cent.

In the old days the people were taxed, or perhaps squeezed would be the better word, to about one-half of the produce of the land.  There are those who may say that the present system is not so advantageous as it looks.  Beforetime, the farmers, it is true, paid heavily, but only, on their nominal holdings.  They could, and often did, hold more land than they were assessed on.  Today a rigid bureaucracy surveys every foot of their farms, and upon every foot they have to pay.  Somewhat similar complaints are made still by the simple peasantry of India, for if there is one thing that the Oriental detests more than another, it is the damnable Western vice of accuracy.  That leads to doing things by rule.  Still, by the look of those terraced fields, where the water is led so cunningly from level to level, the Japanese cultivator must enjoy at least one excitement.  If the villages up the valley tamper with the water supply, there must surely be excitement down the valley—­argument, protest, and the breaking of heads.

The days of romance, therefore, are not all dead.

* * * * *

This that follows happened on the coast twenty miles through the fields from Yokohama, at Kamakura, that is to say, where the great bronze Buddha sits facing the sea to hear the centuries go by.  He has been described again and again—­his majesty, his aloofness, and every one of his dimensions, the smoky little shrine within him, and the plumed hill that makes the background to his throne.  For that reason he remains, as he remained from the beginning, beyond all hope of description—­as it might be, a visible god sitting in the garden of a world made