In the management of sheep—­there were about 5,000 in the whole country when I was in Hokkaido—­there has been failure after failure, but it is held that the prospects for sheep in Hokkaido are promising.  (The question is discussed in the next Chapter.) At present, owing to the lack of a market for mutton, pigs, which used to be kept in the days before Buddhism exerted its influence, seem more attractive to experimenting farmers than sheep.  No one has proposed that sheep should be kept in ones and twos for milking as in Holland.[254] When milk is needed it is said that goats, of which there are more than 90,000 in Japan, are desirable stock, but I doubt whether more than 500 of these goats are milked.[255] They are kept to produce meat.  Some people hope that those who eat goat’s flesh will come to realise the superiority of mutton.

The case for pigs is that sweet potatoes and squash can be fed to them, that they produce frequent litters, that pork is more and more appreciated, and that there are 300,000 of them in the country already.  Some confident experts who have possibly been influenced by the large consumption of pork in China argue that pork may become equally popular in Japan.  There are two bacon factories not far from Tokyo.

As in other countries, the argument for doing away with foreign imports is pushed in Japan to ridiculous lengths.  Japan, which aims above all at being an exporting country, cannot attain her desire without receiving imports to pay for her exports.[256] The physiological argument for an animal industry is unconvincing.  The Japanese have a long dietetic history as vegetarians who eat a little fish and a few eggs.  There exists in Japan an exceptionally ingenious variety of nitrogenous foods derived from the vegetable kingdom, and the Japanese have become accustomed to digest vegetable protein.[257] It might be suggested, with some show of reason, that in this matter of the adoption of a meat dietary the Japanese are once more under the influence of foreign ideas which are a little out of date.[258] In Europe and America there is evidence of a decreasing meat consumption among educated people, and medical papers are full of counsels to diminish the amount of meat consumed.  There is also in the West an increasing sensitiveness to the horrors inflicted on animals in transportation by rail and steamer, and if an animal industry were established in Japan there would certainly be a great deal of transportation by rail and steamer from the breeding to the rearing districts, and from these districts to the slaughtering centres.  If the present advocacy of an animal industry for Japan should triumph over the reluctance to take animal life inculcated by Buddhism it is hardly likely to be regarded in the West as a forward step in the ethical evolution of the Japanese.[259]

I had the good fortune to meet in Sapporo a man who has made a special study of the food of the Japanese people, Professor Morimoto of the University.  He said that he had no doubt that when the Japanese began to eat bread instead of rice they would develop a taste for meat as well as butter.  With great kindness he placed at my disposal statistics which he afterwards expanded in a thesis for Johns Hopkins University.  He had investigated the dietary of the families of 200 tenants of the University farms.  Reduced to terms of men per day the result was: