At Mr. Yamasaki’s excellent agricultural school (prefectural), which I visited more than once,[43] I was struck by the grave bearing of the students.  I saw them not only in their classrooms but in their large hall, where I was invited to speak from a platform between the busts of two rural worthies, Ninomiya, of whom we have heard before, and another who was “distinguished by the righteousness of his public career.”  As in the Danish rural high schools, store is set on hard physical exercise.  An hour of exercise—­judo (jujitsu), sword play or military drill—­is taken from six to seven in the morning and another at midday with the object of “strengthening the spirit” and “developing the character,” for “our farmers must not only be honest and determined but courageous.”  Severe physical labour, shared by the teacher, is also given out of doors, for example, in heaping manure.  “We believe,” said one of the instructors, “in moral virtue taught by the hands.”

For an hour a day “the main points of moral virtue” are put before the different grades of students, according to their ages and development.  The school has a guild to which the twenty teachers and all the students belong.  It is a kind of co-operative society for the “purchase and distribution of daily necessities,” but one of its objects is “the maintenance of public morality.”  Then there is the students’ association which has literary and gymnastic sides, the one side “to refine wisdom and virtue,” the other “for the rousing of spirit.”  Mention may also be made of a “discipline calendar” of fixed memorial days and ceremonies “that all the students should observe”:  the ceremony of reading the Imperial Rescript on education, thrift and morality, and the ceremonies at the end of rice planting, at harvest and at the maturity of the silk-worm.  The fitting-up of the school is Spartan but the rooms are high and well lighted and ventilated.  The students’ hot bath accommodates a dozen lads at a time.  The studies are also the dormitories, and in the corner of each there is stored a big mosquito netting.  Except for a few square yards near the doors, these rooms consist of the usual raised platform covered with the national tatami or matting.

I heard a characteristic story of the Director.  During the Russo-Japanese war everybody was economising, and many people who had been in the habit of riding in kuruma began to walk.  Our agricultural celebrity had always had a passion for walking, so it was out of his power to economise in kuruma.  What he did was to cease walking and take to kuruma riding, for, he said, “in war time one must work one’s utmost, and if I move about quickly I can get more done.”

I may add a story which this rare man himself told me.  I had seen in his house a photograph of a memorial slab celebrating the heroic death of a peasant.  It appeared that in a period of scarcity there was left in this peasant’s village only one unbroken bale of rice.  This rice was in the possession of the peasant, who was suffering from lack of food.  But he would not cook any of the rice because he knew that if he did the village would be without seed in spring.  Eventually the brave man was found dead of hunger in his cottage.  His pillow had been the unopened bale of rice.