So he did not raise the rent.  Then he was excluded from social intercourse by the other landlords because their tenants grumbled.  These landlords said to him, “You can afford not to raise your rents, but we cannot.”  Therefore the landlord who had not raised his rents called his tenants together.  He said to them, “It is a hard thing for me to have no social intercourse with my equals.  Therefore I will now raise the rents.  But I cannot accept that raised portion, and I will take care of it for you, and in ten years I think it will amount to enough for you to start a cooperative society.”

That was eight years ago and the formation of the society was now proceeding.  In order that the reader may not forget on what a very different scale landlordism exists in Japan, I may mention that the area owned by this landlord was only 10 cho.

I was told the story of a landlord’s solution of the rent reduction problem.  “Tenants,” the narrator said, “sometimes pretend that their crops are poorer than they are.  Landlords may reduce the payment due, but sometimes with a certain resentment.  One landowner was asked for a reduction for several years in succession on account of poor crops, and gave it.  But he was trying to think of a plan to defeat the pretences of his tenants.  At last he hit on one.  While the tenants’ rice was young he often visited the fields, and when any insects were to be seen he sent his labourers secretly to destroy them.  In the same way, when crops seemed to be under-manured, he secretly cast artificial manure on them.  At last his tenants found out what he was doing, and they said, ’As our landlord is so kind to us, we must not pretend that we need a reduction.’  And they did not, and things are going on very well there.  This is an illustration of the fact that our people are moved more by feeling than by logic.”

This was capped by another story.  “A landlord, a samurai, has for his tenants his former subjects, so something of the relation of master and servant still remains.  He wished to raise his tenants to the position of peasant proprietors, so when land was for sale in the village he advised them to buy.  They said they had no money, but he answered, ‘Means may perhaps be found.’  He secretly subscribed a sum to the Shinto shrine and then advised the formation of a co-operative society, which could borrow from the shrine for a tenant, so that the tenant need not go to the landlord to thank him and feel patronised by him.  He need only to go to the shrine and give thanks there.”  “The landlord,” added the speaker in his imperfect English, “has entirely hided himself from the business.”  A third of the tenants had become peasant proprietors.

In order to better the feeling between the farmers and landowners this landlord and several others had begun to ask their tenants to their gardens, where they were given tea and fruit.  “In Japan,” said one man to me, “we see feudal ideas broken down by the upper, not the lower class.”