The co-operative credit society which the blind headman established not only buys and sells for its members in the ordinary way but hires land for division among the humbler cultivators.  One of the departments of the society’s work is the collection of villagers’ savings.  They are gathered every Sunday by school-children.  One lad, I found from his book, had collected on a particular Sunday 5 sen each—­5 sen is a penny—­from two houses and 10 sen each from another two dwellings.  The next Sunday he had received 5 sen from one house, 10 sen from two houses, 30 sen and 50 sen from others and a whole yen from the last house on his list.  The subscriber gets no receipt but sees the lad enter in his book the amount handed over to him, and the next Sunday he sees the stamp of the bank against the sum.  Some 390 householders out of the 497 in the village hand over savings to the boy and girl collectors, whose energy is stimulated with 1 per cent. on the sums they gather.  In five years the Sunday collections have amassed 60,000 yen.  The previous year had been marked by a bad harvest and large sums had been drawn out of the bank, but there was still a sum of 14,000 yen in hand.

In this village there had been issued one of the economic and moral diaries mentioned in an earlier chapter.  The diary of this village has two spaces for every day—­that is, the economic space and the moral space.  The owner of this book had to do two good deeds daily, one economic and the other moral, and he had to enter them up.  Further, he had to hand in the book at the end of the year to the earnest village agricultural and moral expert who devised the diary and carefully tabulates the results of twelve months’ economic and moral endeavour.  One might think that the scheme would break down at the handing in of the diary stage, but I was assured that there were good reasons for believing that a considerable proportion of the 440 persons who had taken out diaries would return them.

There is an old custom by which Buddhist believers, in companies of a dozen or so, meet to eat and drink together.  As a good deal is eaten and drunk the gatherings are costly.  Our blind headman met the difficulty of expense in his village by getting the companies of believers to cultivate together in their spare time about three acres of land.  His object was to associate religion and agriculture and so to dignify farming in the eyes of young men.  He also wished to provide an object lesson in the results of good cultivation.  The profits proved to be, as he anticipated, so considerable as to leave a balance after defraying the cost of the social gathering.  The headman prevailed on the cultivators to keep accurate accounts and they made plain some unexpected truths:  as for example, that a tan of paddy did not need the labour of a man for more than twenty-three days of ten hours, and that the net income from such an area was a little more than 16 yen, and that thus the return for a day’s labour was 73 sen.  It was demonstrated, therefore, that labour was recompensed very well, and that instead of farming being “the most unprofitable of industries”—­for in Japan as in the West there are sinners against the light who say this—­it was reasonably profitable.