The man who was brought forward as the representative of the village was an ex-soldier and seemed a quiet, able and self-respecting but sad human being.  His house and holding were in excellent order.  None of his neighbours smiled on us.  Some I thought went indoors needlessly; a few came as near to glowering as can be expected in Japan.  I got the impression that the people were cared for but were conscious of being “hauden doon” or kept at arm’s length.[179]

Our next stop was for a rest in a fine garden, the effect of which was spoilt in one place by a distressing life-size statue of the owner’s father.  When we took to our kuruma again we passed through a village at the approaches to which thick straw ropes such as are seen at shrines had been stretched across the road.  Charms were attached.  The object was to keep off an epidemic.

The indigo leaves drying on mats in front of some of the cottages were a delight to the eye.  There were also mats covered with cotton which looked like fluffy cocoons.  On the telegraph wires, the poles of which all over Japan take short cuts through the paddies, swallows clustered as in England, but it is to the South Seas, not to Africa, that the Japanese swallow migrates.  When the telegraph was a newer feature of the Japanese landscape than it is now swallows on the wires were a favourite subject for young painters.

We crossed a dry river bed of considerable width at a place where the current had made an excavation in the gravel, rocks and earth several yards deep.  It was an impressive illustration of the power of a heavy flood.

I found in one mountainous county that only about a sixth of the area was under cultivation.  A responsible man said:  “This is a county of the biggest landlords and the smallest tenants.  Too many landowners are thinking of themselves, so there arise sometimes severe conflicts.  Some 4,000 tenants have gone to Hokkaido.”  The conversation got round to the young men’s societies and I was told a story of how an Eta village threatened by floods had been saved by the young men of the neighbouring non-Eta village working all night at a weakened embankment.  Some days later an Eta deputation came to the village and “with tears in their eyes gave thanks for what had been done.”  The comment of a Japanese friend was:  “In the present state of Japan hypocrisy may be valuable.  The boys and the Eta were at least exercising themselves in virtue.”

Four villages in this county have among them eight fish nurseries, the area of salt water enclosed being roughly 120 acres.  I looked into several cottages where paper making was going on.[180]

I also went into two cotton mills.  In both there were girls who were not more than eleven or twelve.  “They are exempted from school by national regulation because of the poverty of their parents,"[181] I was told.

As we passed the open shop fronts of the village barbers I saw that as often as not a woman was shaving the customer or using the patent clippers on him.