[261] The reader must put away the impression which this table gives of a varied dietary.  Few Japanese have such a range of food.  The average man habitually lives on rice, bean products (tofu, bean jelly and miso, soft bean cheese), pickles, vegetables, tea, a little fish and sometimes eggs.  People of narrow means see little of eggs and not much fish, unless it be katsubushi.

[262] The watering of vegetables with liquid manure, the usual practice of the Japanese farmer, and the pollution of the paddies make salads and insufficiently cooked green stuff dangerous and many water supplies of questionable purity.  Great efforts have been made to provide safe tap water from the hills.  Intestinal parasites are common.  The build of the Japanese makes for strength, but in the urban areas there is much absence from work on the plea of ill-health.  Both in Japan and in England I have been struck by the fact that when I made an excursion with an urban Japanese he often tired before I did, and on none of these trips was I in anything like first-class condition.

[263] Many Japanese look forward to a great production of wheat on the north-eastern Asiatic mainland under Japanese auspices.  In considering imports of wheat it should be remembered that some of it is used in soy and macaroni.

CHAPTER XXXIX

MUST THE JAPANESE MAKE THEIR OWN “YOFUKU"?[264]

“God damn all foreigners!"_—­Interrupter at one of Mr. Gladstone’s early meetings at Oxford_

When I was in Hokkaido sheep were being experimented with at different places on the mainland, investigators and sheep buyers had gone off to Australia, New Zealand and South America, and a Tokyo Sheep Bureau of two dozen officials had been established.  Great hopes were built on a few hundred sheep in Hokkaido.[265] But I noticed that Government farm sheep were under cover on a warm September day.  Also I heard of trouble with two well-known sheep ailments.  There was talk nevertheless of the day when there would be a million sheep in Hokkaido, perhaps three millions.  On the mainland I also met high officials and enthusiastic prefectural governors who dreamed dreams of sheep farming in Old Japan, where land is costly, farms small, agriculture intensive, grazing ground to seek, and farmland necessarily damp.  This sheep keeping is conceived as one animal or perhaps two on a holding as rather unhappy by-products.  The notion is that the wool and manure of a sheep would meet the expense of its keep and that the mutton would be profit.  Hopes of an extension of sheep breeding resting on such a basis seem to be extravagant.  One high authority told me that it would take twenty or thirty years to develop sheep keeping.