It is difficult to enter a village which has not its pillar or its slab to the memory of a youth or youths who perished in the Russian or Chinese wars.[212] But in the severe struggle with Russia the villages did more than give their sons and build memorials to them when they were killed.  They tried, in the words of an official circular of that time, “to preserve the spirit of independence in the hearts of the relieved and to avoid the abuses of giving out ready money.”  There was the secret ploughing society of the young men of a village in Gumma prefecture.  “Either at night or when nobody knew these young men went out and ploughed for those who were at the front.”  In one prefecture the school children helped in working soldiers’ farms.  In villages in Osaka and Hyogo prefectures there was given to soldiers’ families the monopoly of selling tofu, matches and other articles.  Some of the societies which laboured in war time were the Women’s One Heart Society, the Women’s Chivalrous Society, the National Backing Society and the Nursing Place of Young Children of those Serving at the Front.

In the train we talked of the hardiness induced by not being the slave of clothing.  When it rains kuruma men and workmen habitually roll up their kimonos round their loins, or if they are wearing trousers, take them off.[213] Of course no Japanese believes in catching cold through getting his feet wet.  This is a condition which is continually experienced, for the cotton tabi are wet through at every shower.  Some years back it was not uncommon in walking along the sea-beach at night to find fishermen sleeping out on the sand.  An old man told me that it used to be the custom in his sea-shore hamlet for all members of a family to sleep on the beach except fathers, mothers and infants.

On my return from the country I found myself in a company of earnest rural reformers who were discussing a plan of State colonisation for the inhabitants of some villages where everything had been lost in a volcanic eruption.  Families had been given a tract of forest land, 15 yen for a cottage, 45 yen for tools and implements and the cost of food for ten months (reckoned at 8 sen per adult and 7 sen per child per day).  During the evening I was shown the figure of a goddess of farming venerated by the afflicted folk.  The deity was represented standing on bales of rice, with a bowl of rice in her left hand and a big serving spoon in her right.

The gathering discussed the question of rural morality.  As to the relations of the young men and women of the villages, to which there has necessarily been frequent references in these pages, the reader must always bear in mind the way in which the sexes are normally kept apart under the influence of tradition.  In nothing does this Japanese countryside differ more noticeably from our own than in the fact that joyous young couples are never seen arming each other along the road of an evening.  Thousands of allusions