Just after Christmas I walked again into the country.  There were miles of dreary brown paddies with the stubble in puddles.  On the non-paddy land there was the refreshing green of young corn which seemed greatly to enjoy being treated as a garden plant in a deep exquisitely worked soil with never a weed in an acre.  But children were kept from school because their parents could not get along without their help.  Many of the school teachers seemed as poor as the farmers.  As I passed the farm-houses in the evening they seemed bleak and uninviting.  In the fire hole[214] of every house, however, there was a generous blaze and the bath tub out-of-doors was steaming for the customary evening hot dip in the opening.

In my host’s house I noticed an old painting of a forked daikon.  Such malformed roots used to be presented to shrines by women desirous of having children.

In the office of one village I visited I was permitted to examine the dossiers of some of the inhabitants.  Among a host of other particulars about a certain person’s origin and condition I read that he was a minor when his father died, that such and such a person acted as his guardian, that the guardianship ended on such and such a date, and that his widowed mother had a child nine years after her husband’s death.

In not a few places I found that the tiny shrines of hamlets (aza) had been taken away and grouped together at a communal shrine with the notion of promoting local solidarity.  At one such combination of shrines I saw notice boards intimating that “tramps, pedlars, wandering priests and other carriers of subscription lists and proselytisers” were not received in the village.  It was explained that a community was sometimes all of one faith:  “therefore it does not want to be disturbed by tactless preachers of other beliefs.”

At an inn there was a middle-aged widow who served there as waitress in the summer but in the winter returned to Tokyo, where she employed a number of girls in making haori tassels. (She gave them board and lodging and clothes for two years, and, after that period, wages.[215]) Remembering what I had written down about courting, I asked for her mature judgment on our rural custom of “walking out.”  She was amused, but, in that way the Japanese have of trying to look at a Western custom on its merits, she said, after consideration, that there was much to be said for the plan.  “In Japan,” she declared, “you cannot know a husband’s character until you are married.  On the whole, I wish I had been a man.”  In order to catch our train we had to leave this inn the moment our meal was finished, although the widow quoted to us the adage, “Rest after a meal even if your parents are dead.”