On a morning in May I went into the country to visit a friend who was taking a holiday in a ramshackle inn 4,000 ft. up Mount Akagi.  I continually heard the note of the kakko (cuckoo).  On the higher parts of the mountain there were azaleas at every yard, some quite small but others 12 or even 15 ft. high.  Many had been grazed by cattle.  Big cryptomeria were plentiful part of the way up, but at the top there were no trees but diminutive oaks, birches and pines, stunted and lichen covered, the topmost branches broken off by the terrific blasts which from time to time sweep along the top of the extinct volcano.

One of the products of rural Japan is the wrestler. Sumo, which is going on in every school and college of the country, exhibits its perfect flower twice a year in the January and May ten-days-long tournaments in the capital.  The immense rotunda of the wrestlers’ association suggests a rather rickety Albert Hall and holds 13,000 people.[216] On the day I went in I paid 2 yen and had only standing room.  Everybody knows the more than Herculean proportions of the wrestlers in comparison with the rest of their countrymen.  The rigorous training, Gargantuan feeding and somewhat severe discipline of the wrestlers enable them to grow beyond the average stature and to a girth, protected by enormously developed abdominal muscles, which reinforces strength with great weight.[217]

I had often the opportunity at a railway station or in a train to witness the easy carriage and magnificent pride of these massive, good-tempered men.  There is not in the world, probably, a more remarkable illustration than they afford of what superior physical training and superior feeding can do.  At first sight, indeed, these gigantic creatures seem to belong to a different race.  It is no wonder that they should be so commonly proteges of the rich and distinguished.  When an eminent wrestler retired in the year in which I first saw a good wrestling bout the ceremony of cutting his hair—­for, like Samson, the wrestler wears his hair long—­was performed by a personage who combined the dignities of an admiral and a peer.  There is nothing of the bruiser in the looks of the smooth-faced wrestlers.  Many, however, are the bruises to their bodies and to their self-esteem which they receive in their disciplinary progress from the contests of their native villages through all the grades of their profession to the highest rank.  Their sexual morality is commonly of the lowest.

In my own hamlet at home in England I have seen the shoemaker, tailor and carpenter successively pass away; the only craftsman left is the smith.  In Japan the hereditary craftsman survives for a while.  I watched in my house one day the labours of such a worker.  He was not arrayed in a Sunday suit fallen to the greasy bagginess of everyday wear, topped by a soiled collar.  He appeared in a blue cotton jacket-length kimono and tight-fitting trousers of