[229] According to the 1918 figures the ages at which men and women married were as follows per 1,000:  before 20, m. 37.6, w. 259.0; 20-25, m. 304.9, w. 434.8; 26-30, m. 347.9, w. 159.4; 31-35, m. 145.1, w. 67.3; 36-40, m. 70.0, w. 37.1; 41-45, m. 41.8, w. 21.4; 46-50, m. 22.8, w. 10.5; 51-55, m. 14.7, w. 6.0; 56-60, m. 7.3, w. 2.5; 61 and upwards, m. 7.9, w. 2.

[230] See Appendix XXX.

[231] See Appendices XXV and LXXX; also page 363 for the reasons operating against emigration.  Mr. J. Russell Kennedy, of Kokusai-Reuter, declared (1921) that it was “a myth that Japan must find an outlet for surplus population; Japan has plenty of room within her own border,” that is, including Korea and Formosa as well as Hokkaido in Japan.  Mr. S. Yoshida, Secretary of the Japanese Embassy in London, in an address also delivered in 1921, stressed the value of the fishing-grounds and the mercantile marine as openings for an increased population.  “The resources of the sea,” he said, “give Japan more room for her population than appears.”

REFLECTIONS IN HOKKAIDO

CHAPTER XXXVII

COLONIAL JAPAN AND ITS UN-JAPANESE WAYS

Above all, this is not concerned with poetry.—­WILFRED OWEN

When the traveller stands at the northern end of the mainland[232] of Japan he is five hundred miles from Tokyo.  In the north of Hokkaido he is a thousand miles away.  Hokkaido, the most northerly and the second biggest of the four islands into which Japan is divided, is curiously American.  The wide straight streets of the capital, Sapporo,[233] laid out at right angles, the rough buggies with the farmer and his wife riding together, the wooden houses with stove stacks, and, instead of paper-covered shoji, window panes:  these things are seen nowhere else in Japan and came straight from America.  It was certainly from America that the farmers had their cries of “Whoa.”  One of the best authorities on Hokkaido has declared that the administrative and agricultural instructors whom America sent there from about the time of the Franco-Prussian war “gave Japan a fairer, kindlier conception of America than all her study of American history.”

In Old Japan there is always something which speaks of the centuries that are gone; in Sapporo there is nothing that matters which is fifty years old.  One of the most remarkable facts in the agricultural history of Japan is that a country with a teeming population and an intensive farming should have left entirely undeveloped to so late a period as the early seventies a great island of 35,000 square miles which lies within sight of its shores.  The wonder is that an attempt on Yezo[234] was not made by the Russians, who, but for the vigorous action of a British naval commander, would undoubtedly have taken possession of the island of Tsushima, 700 miles farther south and midway between