Japan and Korea.  Up to the time of the fall of the Shogun the revenue of the lords of Yezo was got by taxing the harvest of the sea and the precarious gains of hunters.  The Imperial Rescript carried by the army which was sent against certain adherents of the Shogun who had fled there said:  “We intend to take steps to reclaim and people the island."[235] It is doubtful if at that period the population was more than 60,000[236] (including Ainu).[237]

When Count Kuroda was put at the head of the Colonial Government he went over to America and secured as his adviser-in-chief the chief of the Agricultural Department at Washington.  Stock, seeds, fruit trees, implements and machinery, railway engines, buildings, practically everything was American in the early days of Hokkaido.  During a ten-year period, in which forty-five American instructors were sent for, five Russians, four Britons, four Germans, three Dutchmen and a Frenchman were also imported.[238]

Governor Kuroda had a million yen placed at his disposal for ten years in succession, and a million yen was a big sum in those days.  Before long there were flour mills, breweries, beet-sugar factories, canning plants, lead and coal mining and silk manufacturing and an experiment in soldier colonisation which owed something to Russian experiments in Cossack farming.  An agricultural school grew into a large agricultural college; and this agricultural college has lately become the University of Hokkaido, with nearly a thousand students.[239] How much of a pioneer Sapporo College was may be gathered from the fact that when I was in Hokkaido 67 out of the 140 men who were members of the faculty had been themselves taught there.  Dean Sato (Japan’s first exchange lecturer to American universities), Dr. Nitobe (Japanese Secretary of the League of Nations) and Kanzo Uchimura were among the first students.  There have always been American professors at Sapporo—­its first president came from Massachusetts—­and the professorship of English has always been held by an American.

The 50 acres of elm-studded land in which the University buildings stand are a surprise, for the elm grows nowhere else in Japan but Hokkaido.[240] The extent of the University’s landed possessions is also unexpected.  There are two training farms of 185 and 260 acres respectively, beautifully kept botanic gardens, a tract of 15,000 acres on which there are already more than a thousand tenants, and 300,000 acres of forests in Hokkaido, Saghalien and Korea.  Four or five times as many students as can be admitted offer themselves at Sapporo.

There is in Hokkaido an agricultural and rural life conceived for a country where stock may be kept and a farmer does not need to practise the superintensive farming of Old Japan.  At the first University farm I looked over it was clear that not only American but Swedish, German and Swiss farming practice had had its influence.  No longer was the farmer content with mattocks, hoes and flails.  A silo dominated the scene, and maize, eaten from the cob in Old Japan, was a crop for stock.[241] I also noticed crops of oats and rye.