In travelling southwards I noticed between Kyoto and Osaka that farms were being irrigated from wells in the primitive way by means of the weighted swinging pole and bucket.  Along the coast to the south, indeed as far as Hiroshima, there have been great gains from the sea, and in the neighbourhood of Kobe there are three parallel roads which mark successive recoveries of land.  Before crossing the Inland Sea at Okayama to Shikoku (area about 1,000 square miles) I visited one of the new settlements on recovered land.  The labour available from a family was reckoned as equal to that of two men, and as much as 4 to 5 cho was allotted to each house.  It will be seen how much larger is this area—­5 cho is 12-1/2 acres—­than the average Japanese farming family must be content with, a little less than 3 acres.  The company supplied houses, seeds, manures, etc., and after all expenses were met the workers were allowed 25 per cent, of the net income of their summer crop and 35 per cent, of the net income of their second crop.  The cultivation was directed by the company.  There had been 300 applications for the last twenty houses built.  An experiment station was maintained, and a campaign against a rice borer had been of benefit to the amount of about 10,000 yen.  I found the company’s winnowing machine discharging its chaff into the furnace of the rice-drying apparatus.

One of the experts of the company came with me for some distance in the train in order to discuss some of his problems.  He thought agricultural work could be done in less back-breaking ways.  He wanted a small threshing machine which would be suitable not only for threshing small quantities of rice or corn but for easy conveyance along the narrow and easily damaged paths between the rice fields.  If he had such a machine he would like to improve it so that it would lay out the threshed straw evenly, so making the straw more valuable for the many uses to which it is put.  He wished to see a machine invented for planting out rice seedlings and another contrivance devised for drying wheat.  The company’s rice-drying machine handled 200 koku of rice a day, but there were difficulties in drying wheat. (In many places I noticed the farmers drying their corn by the primitive method of singeing it and thus spoiling it.)[173]

On the Inland Sea, aboard the smart little steamer of the Government Railways, my companion spoke of the extent to which sea-faring men, a conservative class, had abandoned the use of the single square sail which one sees in Japanese prints; the little vessels had been re-rigged in Western fashion.  But many superstitions had survived the abolished square sails.  The mother of my fellow-traveller once told him that, when she crossed the Inland Sea in an old-style ship and a storm arose, the shipmaster earnestly addressed the passengers in these words, “Somebody here must be unclean; if so, please tell me openly.”  The title of the book my companion was reading was