One of the noteworthy things of Matsumoto was the agricultural association’s market.  Another piece of organisation in that part of the world was fourteen institutes where girls were instructed in the work of silk factory hands.  The teachers’ salaries were paid by the factories.  So were also the expenses of the silk experts of the local authorities.  On the day I left the city the daily paper contained an announcement of lectures on hygiene to women on three successive days, “the chief of police to be present.”  This paper was demanding the exemption of students from the bicycle tax, the rate of which varies in different prefectures.

A young man was brought to see me who was specialising in musk melons.  He said that the Japanese are gradually getting out of their partiality for unripe fruit.

On our way to the Suwas we saw many wretched dwellings.  The feature of the landscape was the silk factories’ tall iron chimneys, ordinarily black though sometimes red, white or blue.

It is not commonly understood that Japanese lads by the time they “graduate” from the middle school into the higher school have had some elementary military training.  A higher-school youth knows how to handle a rifle and has fired twice at a target.  At Kami Suwa the problem of how middle-class boys should procure economical lodging while attending their classes had been solved by self-help.  An ex-scholar of twenty had managed to borrow 4,000 yen and had proceeded to build on a hillside a dormitory accommodating thirty-six boarders.  Lads did the work of levelling the ground and digging the well.  The frugal lines on which the lodging-house was conducted by the lads themselves may be judged from the fact that 5 yen a month covered everything.  Breakfast consisted of rice, miso soup and pickles.  Cooking and the emptying of the benjo[138] were done by the lads in turn.  A kitchen garden was run by common effort.  Among the many notices on the walls was one giving the names of the residents who showed up at 5 o’clock in the morning for a cold bath and fencing.  I also saw the following instruction written by the founder of the house, which is read aloud every morning by each resident in turn: 

Be independent and pure and strive to make your characters more beautiful.  Expand your thought.  Help each other to accomplish your ambitions.  Be active and steady and do not lose your self-control.  Be faithful to friends and righteous and polite.  Be silent and keep order.  Do not be luxurious (sic).  Keep everything clean.  Pay attention to sanitation.  Do not neglect physical exercises.  Be diligent and develop your intelligence.

The borrower of the 4,000 yen with which the institution was built managed to pay it back within seven years with interest, out of the subscriptions of residents and ex-residents.

An agricultural authority whom I met spoke of “farming families living from hand to mouth and their land slipping into the possession of landlords”; also of a fifth of the peasants in the prefecture being tenants.  A young novelist who had been wandering about the Suwa district had been impressed by the grim realities of life in poor farmers’ homes and cited facts on which he based a low view of rural morality.