I arrived in Hokkaido in the last week of August in a linen suit and was glad to put on a woollen one.  By September 29 it was snowing.  Snow-shoes were shown among the products of the island at the prefectural exhibition.  Canadians have likened the climate of Hokkaido to that of Manitoba.  Hokkaido is on the line of the Great Lakes, but the cold current from the North makes comparisons of this sort ineffective.  It is only in southern Hokkaido that apples will grow.  Thirty years ago wolves and bear were shot two miles from Sapporo and bear may still be found within ten miles.

The sea fisheries of Hokkaido are valuable but agriculture and forestry are greater money makers.  Even without forestry agriculture is well ahead of factory industry, which is also eclipsed by mining.  Industry is aided by the presence of coal.  Among manufactures, brewing stands out even more conspicuously than wood-pulp making or canning.  One of the three best-known beers in Japan comes from Hokkaido.[242] In contrast with the situation in Old Japan, where the land is half paddy and half upland, there is in Hokkaido only a ninth of the cultivated land under rice.[243] When I was in Hokkaido there were 600,000 cho under cultivation, a hundred and fifty times more than there were in 1873.  The line marking the northern or rather the north-eastern limit of rice shows roughly a third of the island on the northern and eastern coasts to be at present beyond the skill of rice growers.  There is always uncertainty with the rice crop in Hokkaido.  As the growing period is short, half the rice is not transplanted but sown direct in the paddies.  A bad crop is expected once in seven years.  In such a season there is no yield and even the straw is not good.

Immigrants get 5 cho, but if they are without capital they first go to work as tenants.  There are contractors in the towns who supply labourers to farmers and factories at busy times.  When newcomers have capital and are keen on rice growing and are families working without hired labour, they are strongly recommended not to devote more than 2-1\2 cho to rice—­from 3 to 5 cho are the absolute limit—­against 1-1\2 or 2 cho to other crops.  When the holder of a 5-cho holding prospers he buys a second farm and more horses and implements, and hires labour for the busy period.  But 10 or 15 cho is considered as much as can be worked in this way.  If the area is more than 10 or 15 cho it is difficult to get labour in the busy season, for it is the busy season for everybody.  Labourers from a distance can be got only at an unprofitable rate.  It is first the lack of capital and then the lack of labour which prevents the farmer extending his holding.[244] The limit of practical mixed farming is 30 cho. (Stock farming is for milk rather than for meat, and more than one condensed-milk factory is in operation.) Even in Hokkaido large farming, as it is understood in Great Britain and America, is not easy to find.[245]