It is in the middle of the country that sericulture chiefly nourishes.  The smallest output of raw silk is from the most northerly prefecture and from the prefecture in the extreme south-west of the mainland.  But human aptitude plays its part as well as climate.  The Japanese hand is a wonderful piece of mechanism—­look at the hands of the next Japanese you meet—­and in sericulture its delicate touch is used to the utmost advantage.

The gains of sericulture are not made without corresponding sacrifices.  Silk-worm raising is infinitely laborious.  The constant picking of leaves, the bringing of them home and the chopping and supplying of these leaves to the smallest of all live stock and the maintenance of a proper temperature in the rearing-chamber day and night mean unending work.  The silk-worms may not be fed less than four or five times in the day; in their early life they are fed seven or eight times.  This is the feeding system for spring caterpillars.  Summer and autumn breeds must have two or three more meals.  The men and women who attend to them, particularly the women, are worn out by the end of the season.  “The women have only three hours’ rest in the twenty-four hours,” I remember someone saying.  “They never loose their obi.”

When the caterpillars emerge from the tiny, pin-head-like eggs of the silk-worm moth they are minute creatures.  Therefore the mulberry leaves are chopped very fine indeed.  They are chopped less and less fine as the silk-worms grow, until finally whole leaves and leaves adhering to the shoots are given.  Some rearers are skilful enough to supply from the very beginning leaves or leaves still on the shoots.  The caterpillars live in bamboo trays or “beds” on racks.  In the house of one farmer I found caterpillars about three-quarters of an inch long occupying fifteen trays.  When the silk-worms grew larger they would occupy two hundred trays.

The eggs, when not produced on the farm, are bought adhering to cards about a foot square.  There are usually marked on these cards twenty-eight circles about 2 ins. in diameter.  Each circle is covered with eggs.  The eggs come to be arranged in these convenient circles because, as will be explained later on, the moths have been induced to lay within bottomless round tins placed on the circles on the cards.  The eggs are sticky when laid and therefore adhere.  In a year 35,000,000 cards, containing about a billion eggs, are produced on some 10,000 egg-raising farms.

The eggs—­they are called “seed”—­are hatched in the spring (end of April—­as soon as the first leaves of the mulberry are available—­to the middle of May), summer (June and July) and autumn (August and October).  It takes from three to seven days—­according to temperature—­for the “seed” to hatch, and from twenty to thirty-two days—­according to temperature—­for the silk-worms to reach maturity.  Half the hatching is done in spring.  In one farmer’s house