I heard of temples which were promoting rural improvement by means of lanterns.  In one village the lanterns were at the service of borrowers at three different places.  The inscription on the lanterns says, “Think of the mercy of Buddha who illuminates the darkness of your heart.”  There is written in smaller characters, “If you live half a ri away you need not return this lantern.”  Three hundred lanterns are lost or damaged in a year, but paper lanterns are cheap.

One temple has a society composed of those who have family graves in its grounds.  These people “study how to get the most abundant crop.”  There is a prize for the best cultivated tan.  Under this temple’s auspices there is not only a co-operative credit and purchase association, a poultry society and an annual exhibition of agricultural products, but a school for nurses—­they are “taught to be nurses not only physically but morally.”  The boys and girls of the village are invited to the temple once a month and “told a story.”  The youngsters are asked to come to a “learning meeting” where they must recite or exhibit something they have written or drawn; “blockheads as well as clever children are encouraged.”  A fund is being raised so that “a genius who may be suffering from poverty may be able to get proper education.”  Then there is a Women’s Religious Association which aims at “the improvement, necessary from a religious point of view, in the home and of agricultural business.”  Sermons are given to 500 women monthly.  The society sent comfort bags, containing letters, tooth-brushes and sweets, to soldiers at the taking of Tsingtao.  A similar organisation for men had for thirteen years listened to a monthly lecture by a well-known priest.  It sends occasional subscriptions outside the village.  Finally, this praiseworthy temple issues every month 20,000 copies of a 4-1/2-sen magazine.

The Shinto shrines of the prefecture have in all a little more than 40 cho of land.  Someone has hit on the plan of getting the agricultural societies of the county and villages to provide the priests with rice seed of superior varieties, the crop of which can be exchanged with farmers for common rice.  This is done on a profitable basis, because the shrines exchange unpolished rice for polished.  A go of seed rice makes only about .5 go when husked.

I walked along the road some little way with a Buddhist priest.  In answer to my enquiry he said that as a Buddhist he felt no difficulty about the bag strung across his shoulders being of leather, for the founder of his sect (Shinshu) ate meat.  Even a strict Buddhist might nowadays eat animals not intentionally killed, animals which had not been seen alive and animals which were killed painlessly.  But my companion abstained as much as possible from meat.  As to the reason why some priests were inactive in the work of rural amelioration, he supposed that their poverty, the tradition of devoting themselves to unworldly business and the fact that many of them were hereditary priests accounted for it.  He dwelt on the things in common between Shinshu and Christianity and said that, next to the teaching of the head of the agricultural college in the prefecture, the preaching of a missionary had led him to work for the good of his village.