So the landlords became affrighted and amended their lives.”  The rural people of Japan have always three weapons against usury, it was explained to me.  First, there may be tried injuring the offending person’s house—­rural dwellings are mainly bamboo work and mud—­by bumping into it with the heavy palanquin which is carried about the roadway at the time of the annual festival.  If such a hint should prove ineffective, recourse may be had to arson.  Finally, there is the pistol.  I remember someone’s remark, “A man does not lose a common mind and heart by becoming a landowner.”

I could not travel about the rural districts without there being brought under my eyes the conditions which lead country girls to go to the towns as joro (prostitutes).  A considerable agricultural authority who had been all over Japan told me that he was in no doubt that most of the girls adopted an immoral life through poverty.  I spoke to this man, who had been abroad, of the disgrace to Japan involved in the presence of thousands of Japanese joro at Singapore and so many other ports of the Asiatic mainland.  Did these women go there of their free will?  My informant was of opinion that “half are deceived.”  I remember that on the Japanese steamship by which I went out to Japan there were several Japanese girls, degraded in aspect and apparently in ill health, who were returning from Singapore.  They were shepherded by an evil-looking fellow.  The parting of these unfortunates from their girl friends as the vessel was about to start was a piteous sight.  An official who called on me in Aichi—­I understood that he was the chief of the prefectural police—­told me that there were in the prefecture 2,011 girls in 222 houses, and that there were in a year 725,598 customers, of whom 2,147 were foreigners.  Sums of from 200 to 500 yen might be paid to parents for a girl for a three-years term.  Food and clothes were also provided, but the girls were almost invariably drawn into debt to the keepers, and not more than 15 per cent. were able to return to their villages.  All the girls in the houses had alleged poverty as the reason for their being there.[47]

Because I was told that the moral condition of the town of Anjo—­population 17,000—­where the agricultural school of the prefecture is situated, had improved since its establishment, I asked for some statistics.  I found that there were 23 registered geisha, no joro, 50 teahouse girls with dubious characters and 55 sellers of sake.  Against these figures were to be counted 19 Buddhist temples of four sects with 19 priests and 20 Shinto shrines with 4 priests.

I met a schoolmaster who had prepared a history of his village in a dozen beautifully written volumes.  He had been a vegetarian for fifteen years because, as a Buddhist, he believed that “all living things are in some degree my relatives.”  I picked up from him a variant on “the early bird catches the worm.”  It was, “The early riser may find a lost rin” (tenth of a farthing).  He gave me another proverb, “The contents of a spitting pot, like riches, become fouler the more they accumulate.”