milk can now be got in unlikely places on giving notice overnight.  It is produced for invalids and children.  If one makes no fuss, remembers one is a traveller who has resolved to see rural Japan, and realises that the inn people will try to do their best, one will not fare so badly.  On the railway one is well catered for by the provision of bento (lunch) boxes, sold on the platforms of stations.  These chip boxes contain rice (hot), cold omelette, cold fish or chicken and assorted pickles, and provide an appetising and inexpensive meal.

Monkeys, bears and antelopes are shot in this district.  One man spoke of a troop of eighty monkeys.  In the high mountain regions there are still people who escape the census and live a wild life.  The records of a gipsy folk called Sanka have a history going back 700 or 800 years.

As we wound our way up and down the hill-sides we saw evidence of “fire-farming.”  It is the simple method by which a small tract with a favourable aspect is cleared by fire and cultivated, and then, when the fertility is exhausted, abandoned.  I was assured that after fire-farming “tea springs up naturally,” and that though tea-drinking may have been introduced from China there could not be such large areas of tea growing wild if tea were not indigenous.

Most of our paths lay through woods and matted vegetation.  I noticed that trees were often felled in order that mushrooms might be grown on and around their trunks.  There is a large consumption of these tree-grown mushrooms in Japan and an export trade worth two and a half million yen.

[Illustration:  CULTIVATION TO THE HILL-TOPS.]

An inscribed stone by our path was a reminder of the belief in “mountain maidens.”  They have the undoubted merit of not being “so peevish as fairies.”  At another stone, before which was a pile of small stones, a farmer told us that when a traveller threw a stone on the heap he “left behind his tiredness.”

[Illustration:  IMPLEMENTS, MEASURES AND MACHINES, AND A BALE OF RICE The photograph was taken in Aichi-ken. p. 73]

In the first house we came to we found a young widow turning bowls with power from a water-wheel.  She could finish 400 bowls in a day and got from one to five sen apiece.  She said that she had often wished to see a foreigner.  Like nearly all the girls and women of the hills, she wore close-fitting blue cotton trousers.

We descended to a kind of prairie which had a tree here and there and roughly wooded hills on either side.  This brought us to the problem of the wise method of dealing with the enormous wood-bearing areas of the country, the timber crop of which is so irregular in quality.  Japan requires many more scientifically planned forests.  As coal is not in domestic use, however, large quantities of cheap wood are needed for burning and for charcoal making.  The demand for hill pasture is also increasing.  How shall the claims of good timber, good firewood, good charcoal-making material and good pasture be reconciled?  In the county through which we were passing—­a county which, owing to its large consumption of wood fuel, needs relatively little charcoal—­the charcoal output was worth as much as 35,000 yen a year.