One man reported that an old farmer had said to him that paddy-field labour was harder than dry-land labour, but young men did not go off to Tokyo because of the severity of the work; they went away because of “the bondage of rural life.”

How much has the economic stress affected old convictions?  How general and how eager is the Japanese resolution to Westernise farther?  None of the rural sociologists had given any thought apparently to a new factor in the rural problem:  the way in which compulsory military service, in taking farmers’ sons to the cities as soldiers and bluejackets, is giving them an acquaintance with neo-Malthusianism.  In Tokyo and other large cities certain articles are prominently advertised on the hoardings.  It is of some importance to consider what will be the effect of this knowledge in competition with the national appreciation of large families.[227] Is it likely that an intensely “practical” people, which has bolted so much of European and American “civilisation,” will be wholly uninfluenced by the Western practice of limitation of offspring?  What is to-day the actual strength of the social needs which have produced the large Japanese family?[228] Whatever middle-aged Japanese may think, the matter is not in their hands, but in the hands of the younger generation.  Most Western economists would no doubt argue that if fewer babies arrived in Japan there would not be so many farmers’ boys and university graduates bent on emigrating.

Without the voluntary limitation of families, however, the number of children born is likely to be diminished by the increased cost of living and by the postponement of marriage.  I know Japanese men who were married before they were twenty; the younger generation of my friends is marrying nearer thirty.[229]

There is reason to believe that the population has not increased of recent years at the old rate.[230] A responsible authority expressed the opinion to me that the necessities of the population are unlikely to overtake the means of production in the near future.[231]

The Japanese are intensely practical, but they have, as we have seen, another side.  If that other side is not “spiritual,” in the sense in which the word is largely used in the West, it is at least regardful of other considerations than the “practical.”  It is with thoughts of that vital side of the national character that I recall a story told me by Dr. Nitobe of the last days of the Forty-seven Ronin.  It is well authenticated.  When the Ronin had slain their dead lord’s persecutor and had given themselves up to the authorities, they were found worthy of death.  But the Shogun was in some anxiety as to what might justly be done.  He sent privily to a famous abbot saying that it was at all times the duty of the Shogun to condemn to death men who had committed murder.  Yet it was the privilege of a priest to ask for mercy, and in the matter of the lives of the Ronin the Shogun