This day the beginning of sowing at an auspicious time—­
Long life to the rice! 
May it be a token of the years of the Reign,
The seed of peace for the world—­
May it start from this consecrated field! 
One in heart we see to it that our seedlings are well matched. 
Mikawa’s[83] millennium and the millennium of rice. 
Let us pray for an abundant shooting. 
Now let us plant the seedlings straight;
Pleasing to the gods are the ways that are not crooked.

After this ceremony, in which the staple crop of the country and the labour of the farmer in his paddy field had been honoured by the State and dignified by ancestral blessings, there was luncheon in one of those deftly contrived reed-covered structures, of the building of which the Japanese have the knack, and the Governor asked some of us to say a few words.  Then on a raised platform in the open there was enacted a comic interlude such as might have been seen in England in the Middle Ages.  In the evening I was bidden to a dinner of the officials responsible for the day’s doings.  The Governor made a kindly reference to my labours and the local M.P. presented me with a kimono length of the cotton material which had been woven for the planters of the sacred rice.

III[84]

The production of rice has increased more quickly than the growth of the population.  If we consider, along with the advance in population, the crops of the years 1882 and 1913, which were held to be average, and, in order to be as up-to-date as possible, the normal annual yield[85] of the five-years period 1912-18, we find that, as between 1882 and 1913, the population increased 45 per cent. and rice production increased 63 per cent., while as between 1882 and the normal annual yield period of 1912-18, the population increased 55 per cent, and the crop 75 per cent.[86]

This is a noteworthy fact.  But equally noteworthy is the fact that in the 1882-1913 period, in which the production of rice increased 63 per cent. and the population only 45 per cent., the price of rice did not fall.  On the contrary it rose.  This was due largely[87] to the fact that people had begun to eat rice who had not before been able to afford it.  Many people who grow rice eat, as has been noted, barley or barley mixed with a little rice.  From the ’eighties onwards more and more rice was eaten.[88]

The reason was that, what with the cash obtained from cocoons through the enormous development of sericulture,[89] what with the money received by the girls who had gone to the factories, what with the growth of big cities causing an increased demand for vegetables, eggs and especially fruit at good prices, what with the use of better seed and more artificial manure, what with agricultural co-operation, paddy-field adjustment and the taking-in of new land, the farmer, in spite of increased taxation,[90] was doing better, or at