from Governors who have nothing original to say or are fearful or live in their frock coats or do not mean to show half their minds or are practising the old official trick of talking round and round and always evading the point.  One fault of Governors is that they are being continually transferred from prefecture to prefecture.  You have no doubt yourself noticed how often Governors were new to their prefectures.  But with all the faults that our Governors have, there are not a few able, good and kind men among them and they are not recruited from Parliament but must be members of the Civil Service.  One of the most common words in our political life is genshitsu, ’responsibility for one’s own words.’  If Governors fear to assume the responsibility of their own views they are only of a part with a great deal of the official world.”

We turned away from the northern sea coast and struck south in order to cross Japan to the Inland Sea en route for Kobe and Tokyo.

As we came through Hyogo prefecture my companion pointed to hill after hill which had been afforested since his youth.  One of the things which interested me was the number and the tameness of the kites which were catching frogs in the paddies.

Before I left Hyogo I had the advantage of a chat with one who for many years past had thought about the rural situation in Japan generally.  He spoke of “the late Professor King’s idealising of the Japanese farmer’s condition.”  He went on:  “While King laid stress on the ability to be self-supporting on a small area he ignored the extent to which many rural people are underfed.  The change in the Meiji era has been a gradual transference from ownership to tenancy.  Many so-called representative farmers have been able to add field to field until they have secured a substantial property and have ceased to be farmers.  An extension of tenancy is to be deplored, not only because it takes away from the farmer a feeling of independence and of incentive, but because it creates a parasitic class which in Japan is perhaps even more parasitic than in the West.  A landowner in the West almost invariably realises that he has certain duties.  In Japan a landowner’s duties to his neighbourhood and to the State are often imperfectly understood.

“On the other hand the position of the farmer has been very much improved socially.  A great deal of pity bestowed by the casual foreign visitor is wasted.  The farmer is accustomed to extremes of heat and cold and to a bare living and poor shelter.  And after all there is a great deal of happiness in the villages.  It is hardly possible to take a day’s kuruma ride without coming on a festival somewhere, and drunkenness has undoubtedly diminished.”

I spoke with an old resident about the agricultural advance in the prefecture.  “In fifteen years,” he said, “our agricultural production has doubled.  As to the non-material condition of the people, generally speaking the villagers are very shallow in their religion.  Not so long ago officials used to laugh at religion, but I don’t know that some of them are not now changing their point of view.  Some of us have thought that, just as we made a Japanese Buddhism, we might make a Japanese Christianity which would not conflict with our ideas.”