I find a Y.M.A. counselling its members “not to speak vulgar words in a crowd.”  There is also among the members of Y.M.A.s a certain addiction to diary keeping for moral as well as economic purposes.  The diaries are distributed by the associations and “afterwards examined and rewarded”—­a plan which would hardly work in the West.  There are Y.M.A.s which make a point of seeing off conscripts with flags and music.  Others have fallen on the more economical plan of “writing to the conscript as often as possible and helping with labour the family which is suffering from the loss of his services.”  By some Y.M.A.s “old people are respected and comforted.”  More than one association has a practice of serving out red and black balls to its members at the opening of every new year, when good resolutions are in order, and at the end of the year recalling either the red or the black according to the degree to which the publicly announced good resolutions have been kept.  Among the good resolutions are:  to worship at the Shinto shrine or the Buddhist temple regularly, to be tidier, to be more efficient in cropping the land, to undertake work for the common good, to have a secondary occupation in addition to farming, to sit with more decorum at meals, to rise earlier, to visit the graves of ancestors monthly, to be more considerate to parents or elder brothers, and “not to remain idly at people’s houses.”

One Y.M.A. decrees that a member found in a tea-house in conversation with a geisha shall be fined 20 yen.  There is even a village in which the young men’s association and the young women’s association have united to issue a regulation providing that at night time members, in order that their doings shall be public, shall carry lanterns painted with the ideographs of their societies.[20]

With regard to the young women’s associations, I found that one of them studied domestic matters and good manners, “asking questions and receiving answers.”  The motto of the organisation was “Good Wives and Good Mothers.”  A member, this Society believes, should be “polite, gentle and warm-hearted, but with a strong will inside and able to meet difficulties.”  Her hairdressing and clothes “should not be luxurious,” and she “must not run after fashions.”  She must “respect Buddha and abandon sweet-eating,” for “taking food between meals is bad for your health, for economy and for your posterity.”

Let us now hear something of Societies for the Cultivation of Rice by Schoolboys.  The lads become responsible for the cultivation of a tan of their family land, or of a small paddy, and they work it themselves with the help of such advice as the schoolmaster may give them. (The cultivation of a tan of a paddy, a quarter of an acre, is supposed to need in a year about twenty-one days’ labour of a man working from sunrise to sunset.) The report of one boy to which I turned in a collection of reports by members of a rice-cultivation society showed that he was between fourteen and fifteen.  His diary of work and observations was as follows: