From time to time there are such things as tenants’ strikes.  Mr. Yamasaki assured me that the problem of the rural districts can be solved only by appealing to the feelings of the people in the right way.  He said that “the Japanese are largely moved by feelings, not by convictions.”  In some coastwise counties, someone told me, a hurricane destroyed the crops to such an extent that the tenants could not pay rent, and the landlords who depended on their rents were impoverished.  Things reached such a pass that a hundred thousand peasants signed a paper swearing fidelity to an anti-landlord propaganda.  Officials and lawyers achieved nothing.  Then Mr. Yamasaki went, and, sitting in the local temple, talked things over with both sides for days.  He got the landlords to say that they were sorry for their tenants and the tenants to say that they were sorry for the landlords, and eventually he was allowed to burn the oath-attested document in the temple.[33]

Many landlords are “endeavouring to cultivate a moral relation” between themselves and their tenants.  They have often the advantage that their ancestors were the landlords of the same peasant families for many generations.  But there are still plenty of absentee landlords and landlords who are usurers.  There are also the landlords who have let their lands to middlemen.  The cultivator therefore pays out of all proportion to what the landlord receives.  Of landlords generally, an ex-daimyo’s son said to me:  “Many landlords treat their tenants cruelly.  The rent enforced is too high.  In place of the intimate relations of former days the relations are now that of cat and dog.  The ignorance of the landlords is the cause of this state of things.  It is very important that the landlord’s son shall go to the agricultural school, where there is plenty of practical work which will bring the perspiration from him.”  The object of most good landlords is to increase the income of their tenants.  It is felt that unless the farmers have more money in their hands, progress is impossible.  There is one direction in which the landlords are not tried.  The franchise is so narrow that farmers cannot vote against their landlords.

In the house of one old landowning family in which I was a guest I saw a gaku inscribed, “Happiness comes to the house whose ancestors were virtuous.”  I was admitted to the family shrine.  Round the walls of the small apartment in which the shrine stood were the autographs or portraits of distinguished members of the house going back four or five hundred years.  It was easy to see that the inspiring force of this family was its untarnished name.  It was a crime against the ancestors to reduce the prestige or merit of the family.  No stronger influence could be exerted upon an erring member of such a family than to be brought by his father or elder brother before the family shrine and there reprimanded in the presence of the ancestral spirits.  The head