At Ueda I went through corridors and rooms, sterilised thrice a year, to visit professors engaged in a variety of enquiries.  One professor had turned into a kind of beef tea the pupae thrown away when the cocoons are unwound; another had made from the residual oil two or three kinds of soap.  The usual thing at a silk factory is for the pupae, which are exposed to view when the silk is unrolled from the scalded cocoons, to lie about in horrid heaps until they are sold as manure or carp food.  The professor declared that his product was equal to a third of the total weight of the pupae utilised, and was sure that it could be sold at a fifteenth of the price of Western beef essences.  The Director of the College had tried the product with his breakfast for a fortnight and avowed that during the experiment he was never so perky.

It was a pleasure to look into the well-kept dormitories of the students, where there was evidence, in books, pictures and athletic material, of a strenuous life.  The young men are made fit not only by judo, fencing, archery, tennis and general athletics, but by being sent up the mountains on Sundays.  The men are kept so hard that at the open fencing contest twice a year the visitors are usually beaten.  The director quoted to me Roosevelt’s “Sweat and be saved.”

From men we went to machines and mulberries.  I inspected all sorts of hot chambers for killing cocoons.  I saw, in rooms draped in black velvet like the pictured scenes at a beheading, silk testing for lustre and colour.  I gazed with respect on many kinds of winding and weaving machinery.  Then, going out into the experiment fields, I strode through more varieties of mulberry than I had imagined to exist.  There are supposed to be 500 sorts in the country but many are no doubt duplicates.  The varieties differ so much in shape and texture of leaf that the novice would not take some of them for mulberries.

It was held that it would not be difficult to increase the mulberry area in Japan by another quarter of a million acres.  The yield of leaves might be raised by 3,300 lbs. per acre if the right sort of bushes were always grown and the right sort of treatment were given to them and to the soil.  As to the additional labour needed for an extended sericulture, the annual increase in the population of Japan would provide it.  I was told that “the technics of sericulture are sure to improve.”  It would be easy to raise the yield 2 kwan per egg card for the whole country.  Within a seven-year period the production of cocoons per egg card had become 20 per cent. better.  The talk was of doubling the present yield of cocoons.  The “proper encouragement” needed for doubling the production of cocoons was more technical instruction and more co-operative societies.  There had been a continual rise in the world’s demand for silk and there was no need to fear “artificial silk.”  “People who buy it often come to appreciate natural silk.”  And I read in an official publication that “the climate of Japan is suitable for the cultivation of mulberry trees from south-west Formosa to Hokkaido in the north.”