I made enquiries about another county town library.  There were 18,000 volumes of which 300 consisted of European books and 600 of bound magazines.  The annual expenditure on books, and I presume magazines, was 600 yen.

We passed a “special tribe” hamlet.  Here the Eta were devoting themselves to tanning and bamboo work.  I was told of other “peculiar people” called Hachia, also of a hawker-beggar class which sells small things of brass or bamboo or travels with performing monkeys.

Water from hot springs is piped long distances in water pipes made of bamboo trunks, the ends of which are pushed into one another.  A turn is secured by running two pipes at the angle required into a block of wood which has been bored to fit.

When we got down to the sand dunes there were windbreaks, 10 or 15 ft. high, made of closely planted pines cut flat at the top.  Elsewhere I saw such windbreaks 30 ft. high.  On the telegraph wires there were big spiders’ webs about 4 ft. in diameter.

As we sped through a village my attention was attracted by a funeral feast.  The pushed-back shoji showed about a dozen men sitting in a circle eating and drinking.  Women were waiting on them.  At the back of the room, making part of the circle, was the square coffin covered by a white canopy.

While passing a Buddhist temple I heard the sound of preaching.  It might have been a voice from a church or chapel at home.

Shortly afterwards I came on a memorial to the man who introduced the sweet potato into the locality 150 years before.  This was the first of many sweet-potato memorials which I encountered in the prefecture and elsewhere.  Sometimes there were offerings before the monuments.  Occasionally the memorial took the form of a stone cut in the shape of a potato.  There is a great exportation of sweet potatoes—­sliced and dried until they are brittle—­to the north of Japan where the tuber cannot be cultivated.[189]

While we rested at the house of a friend of my companion we spoke of emigration.  There are four or five emigration companies, and it is an interesting question just how much emigration is due to the initiative of the emigrants themselves and how much to the activity of the companies.  The chief reason which induces emigrants to go to South America is that, under the contract system, they get twice as much money as they would obtain, say, in Formosa.[190]

Our host did not remember any foreigner visiting his village since his boyhood, though it is on the main road.  It took nearly four days for a Tokyo newspaper to arrive.  This region is so little known that when a resident mentioned it in Tokyo he was sometimes asked if it was in Hokkaido.

I was interested to see how many villages had erected monuments to young men who had won distinction away from home as wrestlers.

I had often noticed bulls drawing carts and behaving as sedately as donkeys, but it was new to see a bull tethered at the roadside with children playing round it.  Why are the Japanese bulls so friendly?