The farm rents now charged in Oiwake had not been changed for thirty, forty or fifty years.  In the old inn there was a Shinto shrine, about 12 ft. long by nearly 2 ft. deep, with latticed sliding doors.  It contained a dusty collection of charms and memorials dating back for generations.  Outside in the garden at the spring I found an irregular row of half a dozen rather dejected-looking little stone hokora about a foot high.  Some had faded gohei thrust into them, but from the others the clipped paper strips had blown away.  At the foot of the garden I discovered a somewhat elaborate wooden shrine in a dilapidated state.  “Few country people,” someone said to me, “know who is enshrined at such a place.”  It is generally thought that these shrines are dedicated to the fox.  But the foxes are merely the messengers of the shrine, as is shown by the figures of crouching or squatting foxes at either side.  A well-known professor lately arrived at the conviction that the god worshipped at such shrines is the god of agriculture.  He went so far as to recommend the faculty of agriculture at Tokyo university to have a shrine erected within its walls to this divinity, but the suggestion was not adopted.

In the course of another chat with the old host of the inn he referred to the time, close on half a century ago, when 3,000 hungry peasants marched through the district demanding rice.  They did no harm.  “They were satisfied when they were given food; the peasants at that time were heavily oppressed.”  To-day the people round about look as if they were oppressed by the ghosts of old-time tyrants.  But there is “something that doth linger” of self-respect.  When we left on our way to Tokyo I gave the man who brought our bags a mile in a barrow to the station 40 sen.  He returned 10 sen, saying that 30 sen was enough.

FOOTNOTES: 

[133] Although, as has been seen, the rural problems under investigation in this book are inextricably bound up with religion, limits of space make it necessary to reserve for another volume the consideration of the large and complex question of missionary work.

[134] As to the “bubbly-nosed callant,” to quote the description given of young Smollett, nasal unpleasantness seems to be popularly regarded as a sign of health.  The constant sight of it is one of the minor discomforts of travel.

IN AND OUT OF THE SILK PREFECTURE[135]

CHAPTER XVI

PROBLEMS BEHIND THE PICTURESQUE

(SAITAMA, GUMMA, NAGANO AND YAMANASHI)

A foreigner who comes among us without prejudice may speak his mind freely.—­GOLDSMITH