When we had gone on some distance I stopped to watch a farmer’s wife and daughter threshing in a barn by pulling the rice through a row of steel teeth, the simple form of threshing implement which is seen in slightly different patterns all over Japan. (It is the successor of a contrivance of bamboo stakes.) The women told me that one person could thresh fourteen bushels a day.  The implement cost 2-1/2 yen from travelling vendors but only 1-1/2 yen from the co-operative society.  While we talked the farmer appeared.  I apologised to him for unwittingly stepping on the threshold of the barn—­that is, the grooved timber in which the sliding doors run.  It is considered to be an insult to the head of the house to tread on the threshold as in some way “standing on the householder’s head.”

This man had a bamboo plantation, and he told me, in reply to a question, that the bamboo would shoot up at the rate of more than a foot in twenty-four hours. (During the month in which this is dictated I have measured the growth of a shoot of a Dorothy Perkins climber and find that it averages about quarter of an inch in twenty-four hours.)

FOOTNOTES: 

[185] See Appendix XII.

CHAPTER XXVIII

MEN, DOGS AND SWEET POTATOES

(SHIMANE)

Nothing but omniscience could suffice to answer all the questions implicitly raised.—­J.G.  FRAZER

When we descended from the hills we were in Shimane, a long, narrow, coastwise prefecture through which one travels over a succession of heights to the capital, Matsue, situated at the far end.  Two-thirds of the journey must be made on foot and by kuruma.[186] Some talk by the way was about the farmers going five or six miles daily to the hills to cut grass for their “cattle,” the average number of cattle per farmer being 1.3 hereabouts.  It seemed strange to see buckwheat at the flowering stage reached by the crops seen in Fukushima several months before.  The explanation was that buckwheat is sown both in spring and autumn.

In the old days notable samurai, fugitives from Tokyo, had kept themselves secluded in the rooms we occupied at Yamaguchi.  In Shimane we had small plain low-ceiled rooms in which daimyos had been accommodated.  Not here alone had I evidences of the simplicity of the life of Old Japan.

I was wakened in the morning by the voice of a woman earnestly praying.  She stood in the yard of the house opposite and faced first in one direction and then in another.  A friend of mine once stayed overnight at an inn on the river at Kyoto.  In the morning he saw several men and a considerable number of women praying by the waterside.  They were the keepers and inmates of houses of ill-fame.  The old Shinto idea was that prayers might be made anywhere at other times than festivals, for the god was at the shrine at festivals only.  Nowadays some old men go to the shrine every morning, just as many old women are seen at the Buddhist temples daily.  Half the visitors to a Shinto shrine, an educated man assured me, may pray, but in the case of the other half the “worship” is “no more than a motion of respect.”  My friend told me that when he prayed at a shrine his prayer was for his children’s or his parents’ health.