[Illustration:  A SCARECROW.—­A SKETCH BY PROFESSOR NASU.]

In his scarecrow-making the Japanese farmer seems to have great faith in the Western-style cap, felt hat, or even umbrella, if he can get hold of one.  Ordinarily, the bogey man has a bow with the arrow strung.  Occasionally a farmer seeks to scare birds by means of clappers which he places in the hands of a child or an old man who sits in a rough shelter raised high enough to overtop the rice.  Now and then there is a clapper connected with a string to the farm-house.  I have also seen a row of bamboos carried across a paddy field with a square piece of wood hanging loosely against each one.  A rope connecting all the bamboos with one another was carried to the roadway, and now and then a passer-by of a benevolent disposition, or with nothing better to do, or, it may be, standing in some degree of relationship to the paddy-field proprietor, gave the rope a tug.  Then all the bamboos bent, and as they smartly straightened themselves caused the clappers to give forth a sound sufficiently agitating to sparrow pillagers in several paddies.

On leaving Miyagi we were once more in Fukushima, with notes on which this account of a trip to the north of Japan and back again began.  This time, instead of journeying by routes through the centre of the prefecture, as in coming north, or as in the visit paid to Fukushima in the Tokyo-to-Niigata journey, I travelled along the sea coast.  When we had passed through Fukushima we were in Ibaraki, a characteristic feature of which is swamps.  Drainage operations have been going on since the time of the Shogunate.  There is in this prefecture the biggest production of beans in Japan, and we have come far enough south to see tea frequently.  In the lower half of the prefecture we are in the great Kwanto plain, the prefectures in which are most conveniently surveyed from Tokyo.

FOOTNOTES: 

[160] Some Yamagata notes and those relating to Akita are conveniently included in this Chapter, but these two prefectures are on the west coast.

[161] A rin is the tenth part of a sen, which in its turn is a farthing.

[162] A kind of barley sugar.

[163] Bean soup.

[164] A street in Akita in which many prostitutes live.

[165] Closet.

[166] Bean paste.

[167] The warm black current from the south flows up the east and west coasts.  Some distance north of Tokyo, the east-coast current meets the cold Oyashiro current from Kamchatka, and is turned off towards America.

[168] See A Free Farmer in a Free State, pp. 173-4, for an account of the custom in Zeeland by which peasants preserved themselves from the calamity of childless marriage.

CHAPTER XXIII

A MIDNIGHT TALK

True religion is a relation, accordant with reason and knowledge, which man establishes with the infinite life surrounding him, and it is such as binds his life to that infinity, and guides his conduct.—­TOLSTOY