“Because we have much remote, wild, uncultivated land,” the speaker I have interrupted continued, “that is not to say that most of it, often at a high elevation, or sloping, or poor in quality, as well as remote, can be profitably broken up for paddies.  Much of this land can be and ought to be utilised in one fashion or another, but we have found some experiments in this direction unprofitable, even when rice was dear.  But it may be said, Why break up this wild land into paddies?  Why not have nice grassy slopes for cattle as in Switzerland?  But our experts have tried in vain to get grass established.  The heavy rains and the heat enable the bamboo grass to overcome the new fodder grass we have sown.  The first year the fodder grass grows nicely, but the second year the bamboo grass conquers.  In Hokkaido and Saghalien we are conquering bamboo grass with fodder grass.  The advice to go in largely for fruit ignores the fact of our steamy damp climate, which encourages sappy growth, disease and those insects which are so numerous in Japan.  We cannot do much more than grow for home consumption.”

“The advice to draw the cultivation of our small farms under group control has not always been profitable when followed by landlords,” one who had not yet spoken remarked.  “They have not always made more when they farmed themselves than when they let their land.  All the world over, land workers do better for themselves than for others.  Proposals further to capitalise farming which, with a rural exodus already going on, would have the effect of driving people off the land who are employed on it healthily and with benefit to the social organism, do not seem to offer a more satisfactory situation for Japan.  No country has shown itself less afraid of business combination than Japan, and the world owes as much to industry as to agriculture, and I am not in the least afraid of machinery and capital; but production is not our final aim.  Production is to serve us; we are not to serve production.  If people can live in self-respect on the land they are better off in many ways than if they are engaged in industry in some of its modern developments.”

“The world is also better off,” my interpreter in his notes records me as saying when I was pressed to state my opinion.  “The day will come when the uselessness and waste of a certain proportion of industry and commerce will be realised, when the saving power of an export and import trade in unnecessary things will be questioned and when the cultivator of the ground will be restored to the place in social precedence he held in Old Japan.  With him will rank the other real producers in art, literature and science, industry and commerce.  The industrialisation of the West and its capitalistic system have not been so perfectly successful in their social results for it to be certain that Japan should be hurried more quickly in the industrial and capitalistic direction than she is travelling already.[292] If she takes