is concerned he did not convince me.  Let me quote him on the soy bean:  “It is a remarkably good substitute for meat.  It is very low in price but its nutritive value is very high.  The essential element of miso, tofu and shoyu is soy bean.”  Bread is another matter.  The Japanese Navy, presumably because it may find itself far from Japan, has accustomed its sailors to eat bread, and a case can certainly be made out for the general population not relying on rice as a grain food.  But, as the large quantities of barley eaten show, there is no such reliance now.  Morimoto urged that while there might be no difference in the nutritive value of wheat and rice, rice as usually eaten induced “abnormal distension of the stomach and poor nutrition.”  Again, wheat was a world crop,[263] whereas rice, owing to the Japanese objection to foreign rice, was a local crop.  If the Japanese were users of wheat as well as of rice they would not have to pay so much for food, when, on the failure of the rice crop in considerable parts of Japan, the price of rice was high.  “The consumption is about 10 million bushels more than the production.”  Further, rice was more costly in cultivation than wheat, and its production could not be increased so as to keep pace with the increase in population.  The yield, which was 46 million koku in 1904, was only 50 millions in 1912; and 65 millions in 1927 seemed an excessive estimate.  In 1912 the importation of rice was 2 million koku.  But on all these points the reader should take note of the data on page 84 and in Appendices XXIV and XXV.

The Professor’s concluding point against rice was that it was expensive to prepare.  The washing of the rice in a succession of waters and the cleaning of the sticky pot in which it was cooked and of the equally sticky tub in which it was served took a great deal of time.  Then in order to cook rice properly—­and the Japanese have become connoisseurs—­the exact proportion of water must be gauged.  The supplies of rice to be cooked were so considerable that the name of the servant lass was “girl to boil the rice.”  But when bread was used instead of rice, said the Professor jubilantly, a baking twice a week would do.  Why, an hour a day might be saved, which in twenty years would be 73,000 hours, or a whole year, and, reckoning women’s labour as worth 5 sen an hour, that would be a saving of 565 yen!

FOOTNOTES: 

[247] For statistics of cultivated area and live stock, see Appendix LXVI.

[248] One thinks of Takeuchi Seiho who lives in Kyoto, of Toba Sojo (11th century) for monkeys, frogs and bullocks, and in the Tokugawa period of Okio for dogs and carp, of Jakchu for fowls and birds, of Hasegawa Tohaku and Sosen for monkeys, of Kawanabe Kyosai for crows, and of Kesai and Hokusai for birds, fish and insects.