In the mountainous regions we passed through I saw several paddies no bigger than a hearthrug.  At one spot a land crab scurried across the road.  It was red in colour and about 2-1/2 ins. long.

At a village office the headman’s gossip was that priests had been forbidden by the prefecture to interfere in elections.  We looked through the expenses of the village agricultural association.  For a lecture series 5 yen a month was being paid.  Then there had been an expenditure by way of subsidising a children’s campaign against insects preying on rice.  For ten of the little clusters of eggs one may see on the backs of leaves 4 rin was paid, while for 10 moths the reward was 2 rin.  The association spent a further 10 yen on helping young people to attend lectures at a distance.  The commune in which those things had been done numbered 3,100 people.  There had been two police offences during the year, but both offenders were strangers to the locality.

In a cutting which was being made for the new railway, girl labourers were steering their trucks of soil down a half-mile descent and singing as they made the exhilarating run.  The building of a railway through a closely cultivated and closely populated country involves the destruction of a large amount of fertile land and the rebuilding of many houses.  The area of agricultural land taken during the preceding and present reigns, not only for railways and railway stations but for roads, barracks, schools and other public buildings, has been enormous.  “The owner of land removed from cultivation may seem to do well by turning his property into cash,” a man said to me.  “He may also profit to some extent while the railway is building by the jobs he is able to do for the contractor, with the assistance of his family and his horse or bull; but afterwards he has often to seek another way of earning his living than farming.”

We neared railhead on a market day and many folk in their best were walking along the roads.  Of fourteen umbrellas used as parasols to keep off the sun that I counted one only was of the Japanese paper sort; all the others were black silk on steel ribs in “foreign style” except for a crude embroidery on the silk.

When we got into the town it was as much as our kurumaya could do to move through the dense crowd of rustics in front of booths and shops.  Once more I was impressed by the imperturbability and natural courtesy of the people.  At the station quite a number of farmers and their families had assembled, not to travel by the train but to see it start.

During the short journey by train I noticed lagoons in which fish were artificially fed.  At an agricultural experiment station in the place at which we alighted there were two specimen windmills set up to show farmers who were fortunate enough to have ammonia water on their land the cheapest means of raising it for their paddies.  The tendency here as elsewhere was to apply too much of the ammonia water.  All rubbish on this extensive experiment station was carefully burnt under cover in order to demonstrate the importance not only of getting all the potash possible but of preserving it when obtained.