Again, there was the fact of the rural exodus—­the phrase sounded strangely in the middle of a Japanese sentence.  As to the causes, the first unquestionably was that the farmer had not enough land on which to make a living.  If the farmer could have 5 acres or thereabouts he would be well off.  But the average area per farmer in the prefecture in which we were travelling was a little less than 2-1/2 acres.  High taxes were another cause of the farmer’s present condition.  Then a year’s living would be mortgaged for the expenses of a marriage ceremony.  At a funeral, too, the neighbours came to eat and drink.  They took charge of the kitchen and even ordered in food. (After a Japanese feast the guests are given at their departure the food that is left over.) Further, some farmers wasted their substance on the ambitions of local politics.  Again, conscripts who had gone off to the army hatless and wearing straw shoes came home hatted and sometimes booted.  Military service deprived farmers of labour, and their boys while away asked their parents for money.  Conscription pressed more heavily on the poor because the sons of well-to-do people continued their education to the middle school, and attendance at a middle school entitled a young man to reduction of military service to one year only.[198]

The countryside was suffering from the way in which importance was increasingly attached to industry and commerce.  Many M.P.s were of the agricultural class, but they were chiefly landlords, and they were often shareholders and directors of industrial companies.  There was very little real Parliamentary representation of the farming class and it had not yet found literary expression.  There were signs, however, that some landlords were realising that industry and agriculture were not of equal importance.  But the farmers were slow to move.  The traditions of the Tokugawa epoch survived, making action difficult.  Finally, there was the drawback to rural development which exists in the family system.  But that, as Mr. Pickwick said, comprises by itself a difficult study of no inconsiderable magnitude, and we must return to it on another occasion.

In one of my excursions I went over a large agricultural school, the boast of which was that of all the youths who had passed through it, twenty only had deserted the land.  I met the present scholars marching with military tread, mattocks on shoulders, to the school paddies.

I noticed schoolgirls wearing a wooden tablet.  It was a good-conduct badge.  If a girl was not wearing it on reaching home her parents knew that her teacher had retained it because of some fault; if she was not wearing it at school her teacher knew that her parents had kept it back for a similar reason.  The girls when they come to school have often baby brothers or sisters tied on their backs.  Otherwise the girls would have to stay at home in order to look after them.  I asked a schoolmaster what happened