It is delightful to find so many things made of copper.  Copper, not iron, is in Japan the most valuable mineral product after coal.[182] But there are drawbacks to a successful copper industry.  Several times as I came along by the coast I heard how the farmers’ crops had been damaged by the fumes of a copper refinery.  “There are four copper refineries in Japan, who fighted very much with the farmers,” it was explained.  The Department of Agriculture is also the Department of Commerce and “it was embarrassed by those battles.”  The upshot was that one refinery moved to an island, another rebuilt its chimney and the two others agreed to pay compensation because it was cheaper than to install a new system.  The refinery which had removed to an island seven miles off the coast I had been traversing had had to pay compensation as well as remove.  I saw an apparatus that it had put up among rice fields to aid it in determining how often the wind was carrying its fumes there.  The compensation which this refinery was paying yearly amounted to as much as 75,000 yen.  It had also been compelled to buy up 500 cho of the complaining farmers’ land.  When we ascended by basha into the mountains we looked down on a copper mine in a ravine through which the river tumbled.  The man who had opened the original road over the pass had had the beautiful idea of planting cherry trees along it so that the traveller might enjoy the beauty of their blossoms in spring and their foliage and outlines the rest of the year.  The trees had attained noble proportions when the refinery started work and very soon killed most of them.  They looked as if they had been struck by lightning.

Some miles farther on, wherever on the mountain-side a little tract could be held up by walling, the chance of getting land for cultivation had been eagerly seized.  It would be difficult to give an impression of the patient endeavour and skilful culture represented by the farming on these isolated terraces held up by Galloway dykes.  Elsewhere the heights were tree-clad.  In places, where the trees had been destroyed by forest fires or had been cleared, amazingly large areas had been closely cut over for forage.  One great eminence was a wonderful sight with its whole side smoothed by the sickles of indomitable forage collectors.  In some spots “fire farming” had been or was still being practised.  Here and there the cultivation of the shrubs grown for the production of paper-making bark had displaced “fire farming.”  I saw patches of millet and sweet potato which from the road seemed almost inaccessible.

On the admirable main road we passed many pack ponies carrying immense pieces of timber.  Speaking of timber, the economical method of preserving wood by charring is widely practised in Japan.  The palisades around houses and gardens and even the boards of which the walls or the lower part of the walls of dwellings are constructed are often charred.  The effect is not cheerful.  What does have a cheerful and trim effect is a thing constantly under one’s notice, the habit of keeping carefully swept the unpaved earth enclosed by a house and buildings as well as the path or roadway to them.  This careful sweeping is usually regarded as the special work of old people.  Even old ladies in families of rank in Tokyo take pleasure in their daily task of sweeping.