A true idea of the Japanese village is obtained as soon as one mentally defines it as a commune.  There may be a rural community called son or a municipal community called cho.  The cho or son consists of a number of oaza, that is, big aza, which in turn consists of a number of ko-aza or small aza.  A ko-aza may consist of twenty or thirty dwellings, that is, a hamlet, or it may be only one dwelling.  It may be ten acres in extent or fifty.  I found that the population of a particular municipality was 10,000 in seven big oaza comprising twenty-two ko-aza.

[Illustration:  THE ROOM, OVERLOOKING THE PACIFIC, IN WHICH MUCH OF THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN The feet of the chair and table are fitted with wooden slats so as not to injure the tatami.  Electricity as a matter of course!]

[Illustration:  THE MERCY OF BUDDHA The worshippers in the front row lost relatives by a flood.  This is not the priest referred to in Chapter I.]

THE FOUNDATIONS OF JAPAN

STUDIES IN A SINGLE PREFECTURE
(AICHI)[10]

CHAPTER I

THE MERCY OF BUDDHA

The only hard facts, one learns to see as one gets older, are the facts of feeling.  Emotion and sentiment are, after all, incomparably more solid than any statistics.  So that when one wanders back in memory through the field one has traversed in diligent search of hard facts, one comes back bearing in one’s arms a Sheaf of Feelings.—­HAVELOCK ELLIS.

One day as I walked along a narrow path between rice fields in a remote district in Japan, I saw a Buddhist priest coming my way.  He was rosy-faced and benign, broad-shouldered and a little rotund.  He had with him a string of small children.  I stood by to let him pass and lifted my hat.  He bowed and stopped, and we entered into conversation.  He told me that he was taking the children to a festival.  I said that I should like to meet him again.  He offered to come to see me in the evening at my host’s house.  When he arrived, and I asked him, after a little polite talk, what was the chief difficulty in the way of improving the moral condition of his village, he answered, “I am.”

We spoke of Buddhism, and he complained that its sects were “too aristocratic.”  When his own sect of Buddhism, Shinshu, was started, he said, it was something “quite democratic for the common people.”  But with the lapse of time this democratic sect had also “become aristocratic.”  “Though the founder of Shinshu wore flaxen clothing, Shinshu priests now have glittering costumes.  And everyone has heard of the magnificence of the Kyoto Hongwanji” (the great temple at Kyoto, the headquarters of the sect).[11] “Contrary to the principles of religion and democracy,” people thought of the priest and the temple “as something beyond their own lives.”  All this stood in the way of improvement.