But if rice called for only twenty-three days’ labour per tan—­nearly all the farmers’ land was paddy—­and the whole holding numbered only a few tan, it was also plain that there were many days in the year when the farmer was not fully employed.  From this it was easy to proceed to the conviction that the available time should be utilised either in secondary employments, or in, say, draining, which would reduce the quantity of manure needed on the land.  So the farmers began to think about drainage and the means of economising labour.  They began to realise how time was wasted owing to most farmers working not only scattered, but irregularly shaped pieces of land.  So the rice lands were adjusted, and everybody was found to have a trifle more land than he held before, and the fields were better watered and more easily cultivated.  Only from sixteen to seventeen days’ labour instead of twenty-three were now needed per tan[184] and the crops were increased.  There is now no exodus from this progressive village.

Concerning his blindness the headman said that it was more profitable for him to hear than to see, for by sight “energy might be diverted.”  He had recited in every prefecture his personal experience of rural reform.  He asserted that while conditions varied in every prefecture, there was, generally speaking, labour on the land for no more than 200 days in the year.  He deplored the disappearance of some home employments.  He did not approve of the condition of things in the north where women worked as much in the fields as their husbands and brothers.  Women were “so backward and conservative.”  The biggest obstacles to agricultural progress were old women.  To introduce a secondary industry was to take women from the fields.

I spoke with an agricultural expert, one of whose dicta was that “students at normal schools who come from town families are not so clever as students from farmers’ families.”  He told me that 10,000 young men in his county had sworn “to act in the way most fitting to youths of a military state [sic], to buy and use national products as far as possible and so to promote national industry.”

What was wrong with some farming, according to an official of a county agricultural association whom I met later, was that the farmers cultivated too intensively.  They used too much “artificial.”  A prefectural official, speaking of the possibility of extending the cultivated area in Japan, said that in Ehime there were 6,000 cho which might be made into paddies if money were available.  As to afforestation, 100,000 yen a year, exclusive of salaries, was spent in the prefecture.  As a final piece of statistics he mentioned that whereas ten years before pears were grown only in a certain island of the prefecture, the production of a single county was now valued at half a million yen yearly.

I spent a night at a hot spring.  It is said that the volume of water is decreasing.  What a situation for a town which lives on a hot spring if the hot-water supply should suddenly stop!  I heard of another hot-spring resort at which the water is gradually cooling:  it is warmed up by secret piping.