When we had crossed the pass and descended on the other side and taken kuruma we soon came to a wide but absolutely dry river bed.  The high embankments on either side and the width of the river bed, which, walking behind our kuruma, it took us exactly four minutes to cross, afforded yet another object lesson in the severity of the floods that afflict the country.  The rock-and rubble-choked condition of the rivers inclines the traveller to severe judgments on the State and the prefectures for not getting on faster with the work of afforestation; but it is only fair to note that in many places hillsides were pointed out to me which, bare a generation ago, are now covered with trees.  Within a distance of twenty-five miles hill plantations were producing fruit to a yearly value of half a million yen.  As for the cultivation on either side of the roadway, along which our kurumaya were trotting us, I could not see a weed anywhere.

A favourite rural recreation in Ehime, as in Shimane on the mainland, is bull fighting.  It is not, however, fighting with bulls but between bulls:  the sport has the redeeming feature that the animals are not turned loose on one another but are held all the time by their owners by means of the rope attached to the nose ring.  The rope is gripped quite close to the bull’s head.  The result of this measure of control is, it was averred, that a contest resolves itself into a struggle to decide not which bull can fight better but which animal can push harder with his head.  That the bulls are occasionally injured there can be no doubt.  The contests are said to last from fifteen to twenty minutes and are decided by one of the combatants turning tail.  There is a good deal of gambling on the issue.  In another prefecture of Shikoku the rustics enjoy struggles between muzzled dogs.  A taste for this sport is also cultivated in Akita.  A certain amount of dog and cock fighting goes on in Tokyo.

At an inn there was an evident desire to do us honour by providing a special dinner.  One bowl contained transparent fish soup.  Lying at the bottom was a glassy eye staring up balefully at me. (The head, especially the eye, of a fish is reckoned the daintiest morsel.) There was a relish consisting of grapes in mustard.  A third dish presented an entire squid.  I passed honourable dishes numbers two and three and drank the fish soup through clenched teeth and with averted gaze.

I interrogated several chief constables on the absence of assaults on women from the lists of crimes in the rural statistics I had collected.  Various explanations were offered to me:  if there were cases of assault they were kept secret for the credit of the woman’s family; no prosecution could be instituted except at the instance of the woman, or, if married, the woman’s husband; women did not go out much alone; the number of cases was not in fact as large as might be imagined, because the people were well behaved.  An official who had had police experience in the north of Japan declared that the south was more “moral and more civilised and had higher tastes.”  In Ehime, for example, there was very little illegitimacy and fewer children still-born than in any other prefecture.  Nevertheless four offences against women had occurred in villages in Ehime within the preceding twelve months.