method was adopted in order to cope with high winds and at the same time to arrest growth, for in the damp soil in which Japanese pears are rooted, the branches would be too sappy.  Foreign pears are not more generally cultivated because they come to the market in competition with oranges, and the Japanese have not yet learnt to buy ripe pears.  The native pear looks rather like an enormous russet apple but it is as hard as a turnip, and, though it is refreshing because of its wateriness, has little flavour.  Progress is being made with peaches and apricots.  Figs are common but inferior.  A fine native fruit, when well grown, is the biwa or loquat.  And homage must be paid to the best persimmons, which yield place only to oranges and tangerines.[199] In the north the apples are good, but most orchards are badly in need of spraying.  Experiments have been made with dates.  Flowers have a weaker scent than in Europe.  A rose called the “thousand ri”—­a ri is two and a half miles—­has only a slight perfume two and a half inches away, and then only when pulled.  I met with no heather—­it is to be seen in Saghalien, which has several things in common with Scotland—­but found masses of sweet-scented thyme.

One of the horticulturists to whom I have referred was something of an Alpinist and was married to a Swiss lady.  They had several children.  I also met an American lady who had had great experience of fruit growing in California, had married a Japanese farmer there, and had come to live with him in a remote part of his native country.  From such alliances as these there may come some day a woman’s impressions of the life and work of women and girls on the farms and in the factories of rural Japan.  Many a visitor to the country districts must have marked the dumbness of the women folk.  Women were often present at the conversations I had in country places, but they seldom put in a word.  I was received one day at the house of a man who is well known as a rural philanthropist—­he has indeed written two or three brochures on the problems of the country districts—­but when he, my friend and I sat at table his wife was on her knees facing us two rooms off.  Every instructed person knows that there is a beautiful side to the self-suppression of the Japanese woman—­many moving stories might be told—­and that the “subservience” is more apparent than real.  But there is certainly unmerited suffering.  The men and women of the Far East seem to be gentler and simpler, however, than the vehement and demonstrative folk of the West, and conditions which appear to the foreign observer to be unjust and unbearable cannot be easily and accurately interpreted in Western terms.  At present many women who are conscious of the situation of their sex see no means of improvement by their own efforts.  But the development of the women’s movement is proceeding in some directions at a surprising pace.  Many young men are sincerely desirous to do their part in bringing about greater freedom.  They realise what is undoubtedly true that not a few things which urgently need changing in Japan must be changed by men and women working together.