It was not only the bean cakes at the stations which caught my attention but the extensive use of lime.  Square miles of paddy field were white with powdered lime, scattered before the planting of the rice, an operation which in the higher altitudes would not be finished until well on in July.

A contented and prosperous countryside was no doubt the impression reflected to many passengers in the train that sunny day.  But I knew how closely pressed the farmers had been by the rise in prices of many things that they had got into the way of needing.  I had learnt, too, the part that superstition[137] as well as simple faith played in the lives of the country folk.  When, however, I pondered the way in which the rural districts had been increasingly invaded by factories run under the commercial sanctions of our eighteen-forties, I asked myself whether there might not be superstitions of the economic world as well as of religious and social life.

I heard a Japanese speak of being well treated at inns in the old days for 20 sen a night.  It should be remembered, however, that there is a system not only of tipping inn servants but of tipping the inn.  The gift to the inn is called chadai and guests are expected to offer a sum which has some relation to their position and means and the food and treatment they expect.  I have stayed at inns where I have paid as much chadai as bill.  To pay 50 per cent. of the bill as chadai is common.  The idea behind chadai is that the inn-keeper charges only his out-of-pocket expenses and that therefore the guest naturally desires to requite him.  In acknowledgment of chadai the inn-keeper brings a gift to the guest at his departure—­fans, pottery, towels, picture postcards, fruit or slabs of stiff acidulated fruit jelly (in one inn of grapes and in another of plums) laid between strips of maize leaf.  The right time to give chadai is on entering the hotel, after the “welcome tea.”  In handing money to any person in Japan, except a porter or a kurumaya, the cash or notes are wrapped in paper.

On the journey from the city of Nagano to Matsumoto, wonderful views were unfolded of terraced rice fields, and, above these, of terraced fields of mulberry.  How many hundred feet high the terraces rose as the train climbed the hills I do not know, but I have had no more vivid impression of the triumphs of agricultural hydraulic engineering.  We were seven minutes in passing through one tunnel at a high elevation.

I spoke in the train with a man who had a dozen cho under grapes, 20 per cent. being European varieties and 80 per cent.  American.  He said that some of the people in his district were “very poor.”  Some farmers had made money in sericulture too quickly for it to do them good.  He volunteered the opinion, in contrast with the statement made to me during our journey to Niigata, that the people of the plains were morally superior to the people