A pleasant thing during my visit was the presence of a dozen intelligent, kindly students who early in the evening came and knelt in a semicircle round us, “in order to profit by our talk.”  One of them, a son of the house, an athlete (and now, after travelling in Europe, his father’s successor), did all sorts of services for me during my stay, in the simple-hearted fashion that shows such an attractive side of the Japanese character.  One question asked by the students was, “For what reasons does Sensei believe that the influence of women in public life would be good?” Another enquiry was, “Which are the best London and Paris papers?” These lads could hardly hope to get through the university before they were twenty-five or twenty-six.  Yet, compared with our undergraduates, they had very little time for general reading, discussions and outdoor sports.  I remember a man of some experience in the educational world saying to me, “Our students do not read enough apart from their studies; it is their misfortune.”  They have not only the burden of having to learn nearly several thousand ideographs,[209] three scripts and Japanese and Chinese pronunciation.  They have to acquire Western languages, which, owing to their absolute dissimilarity from Oriental tongues—­for example, the word for “I” is watakushi—­must be learnt entirely from memory.  It is not that the Japanese student does not begin early as well as leave off late.  A professor once said to me, “For some little time after I first went to school I was still fed from the bosom of my mother.”  In some ways it is no doubt a source of strength for Japan that her men can spend from their earliest years to the age of twenty-six on the acquirement of knowledge and self-discipline—­the privileges of the student class and the generosity of their families and friends and the public at large are remarkable—­but the disadvantages are plain.  No sight seems stranger to a new arrival in Japan than that of so many men in their middle or late twenties still wearing the conspicuous kimono and German bandsman cap of the student.

To return to our host, he told us that tenants were “getting clever.”  They were paying their rent in “worse and worse qualities of rice.”  The landlords “encouraged” their tenants with gifts of tools, clothes or sake in order that they might bring them the best rice, but the tenants evidently thought it paid better to forgo these benefits and market their best rice.  This raises the question whether rent ought nowadays to be paid in kind.  Rural opinion as a whole is in favour of continuing in the old way, but there is a clear-headed if small section of rural reformers which is for rent being paid in cash.

One thing I found in my notes of my talk with the landowner-oculist I hesitated to transcribe without confirmation.  Speaking of the physique of the people, he had said that few farmers could carry the weights their fathers and grandfathers could move about.  But later on a high agricultural authority mentioned to me that it had been found necessary to reduce the weight of a bale of rice from 19 to 18 kwamme and then to 15—­1 kwamme is 8.26 lbs.