But there is another way of borrowing.  The plan of the ko may be adopted.  A ko—­it is odd that it should so closely resemble our abbreviation “Co.”—­is simple and effective.  If a man is badly off or wants to undertake something beyond his financial resources, and his friends decide to help him, they may proceed by forming a ko.  A ko is composed of a number of people who agree to subscribe a certain sum monthly and to divide the proceeds monthly by ballot, beginning by giving the first month’s receipts to the person to succour whom the ko was formed.  Suppose that the subscription be fixed at a yen a month and that there are fifty subscribers.  Then the beneficiary—­who pays in his yen with the rest—­gets 50 yen on the occasion of the first ingathering.  Every month afterwards a member who is lucky in the ballot gets 50 yen.  The monthly paying in and paying out continue for fifty months and all the subscribers duly get their money back, with the advantage of having had a little excitement and having done a neighbourly action.

But the ko, or tanomoshi, as I ought to call it, is not always the innocent organisation I have described.  There is a tanomoshi system under which, after member A, the beneficiary, has received the first month’s subscriptions, the other members are open to receive bids for their shares.  That is to say that, when the time comes round for the second paying out of 50 yen, member F, who happens to have become as much in need of ready money as A was, offers, if the month’s moneys be handed over to him, to distribute among the members sums up to 20 yen.  July and December, when most people need ready money, are months in which a hard-up member of a tanomoshi may sometimes offer to distribute as much as 50 per cent. of what he receives.  The result of such bidding for shares is that well-to-do members of a tanomoshi, who are the last to draw their 50 yen, receive in addition to it all the extra payments made by impoverished members who took their shares earlier.  Benevolence in a tanomoshi is not seldom a mask for avarice that the law against usury cannot touch.  In truth, the only virtuous part of a tanomoshi may be the first sharing out to the person in whose interest it was supposed to be started.  It should be added, however, that there is a sort of tanomoshi which has no particular beneficiary and is merely a kind of co-operative credit society.  In one place I heard of a tanomoshi that maintained a large fund for the relief of orphans and the sick.

In many villages there were private or co-operative godowns for the storage of rice against fire, rats and damp.  Though the farmer who sends rice to such a store receives a receipt, it is not legally a marketable document.  Hence an improvement on this simple storage plan.  I visited the premises of a company that could store more than 500,000 bushels of rice, and I found purification by carbon bisulphide going on.  The receipts given by this company—­“certificated” for large quantities and “tickets” for small—­certify not only the quantity but the quality of the rice, and are readily cashed.  The storehouse owners work under a licence, and they have the advantage that the buyer of the receipts of non-licensed stores is not protected by the courts.