A village headman, encountered in the train just as we were leaving Yamagata prefecture, gave me some insight into the life of his little community.  The fathers of two-score families were shopkeepers and tradesmen—–­ that is, tradesmen in the old meaning of the word.  There were also a few labourers.  About two hundred and fifty families owned land and some of them rented additional tracts.  Another sixty were simply tenants.  The poorer farmers were also labourers or artisans.  Most of them were “comfortable enough.”  There were, however, half a dozen people in the village who were helped from village funds.  Of the middle-grade farmers “it might be said that they do not become richer or poorer.”

The headman had formed a society which sent its members to visit prefectures more developed agriculturally.  This society had engaged an instructor from without the prefecture and he had taught horse tillage and the management of upland fields and had made model paddies.  Five stallions had been obtained and a simple adjustment of paddy-land had been brought about.  As a result the rice yield had risen.

This headman had also had addresses delivered in the village for the first time.  Further, after buying a number of books, he had visited all the villagers in turn and shown them the books and had said to each of them, “I wish you to buy a book and, after reading it, to give it to the library.”  “And,” he told me, “none of them objected.”  Soon a valuable library came into existence.

This admirable functionary felt some satisfaction at having been able to abate the custom according to which the young men, with the tacit permission of their parents, had gone into the neighbouring town after harvest “to visit the immoral women.”  “They used to spend as much as 5 yen,” said our headman.  He had started worthier forms of after-harvest relaxation, and “the cost of the amusement days is now only 50 or 60 sen.”

When we got on the main line again and pursued our way farther north, it was through even stouter snow shelters and through many tunnels.  Not a few miserable dwellings were to be seen as we passed into Akita prefecture.  We broke our journey after some hours’ travelling to stay the night at a rather primitive hot spring inn four or five miles up in the hills.  A slight rain was falling.  Four passengers at a time made the ascent to the hotel, squatting on a mat in an old contractor’s wagon, pushed along roughly laid rails by two perspiring youths in rain-cloaks of bark strips.  At the inn, on going to the bath, I found therein a miscellaneous collection of people of both sexes from grandparents to grandchildren.  One bather enlivened us by performances on the flute, which, if a musical instrument must be played in a bath, seems as suitable as any.  In this rambling inn there were many farmers who, by preparing their own food and doing for themselves generally, were holiday-making at bedrock prices.