[116] Since 1919 the salaries of elementary school teachers have been raised to 26, 16 and 15 yen per month, according to grade.

[117] Only last year (1921) another schoolmaster lost his life in an endeavour to save the Emperor’s portrait from his burning school.

[118] See Appendix XXXVI.

[119] A hot bath is ordinarily obtainable only in the afternoon and evening in most Japanese hotels.  In the morning people are content merely with rinsing their hands and face.

[120] In addressing a superior, many Japanese still draw in their breath from time to time audibly.

[121] That is, persons who might be considered not to have failed in their filial duties.

[122] After the failure of the 1918-19 crop in India, 600,000 persons were in receipt of famine relief.

CHAPTER XIII

THE DWELLERS IN THE HILLS
(FUKUSHIMA)

I didn’t visit this place in the hope of seeing fine prospects—­my study is man.—­BORROW

Before I left the town I had a chat with a landowner who turned his tenants’ rent rice into sake.  He was of the fifth generation of brewers.  He said that in his childhood drunken men often lay about the street; now, he said, drunken men were only to be seen on festival days.

There had been a remarkable development in the trade in flavoured aerated waters, “lemonade” and “cider champagne” chiefly.  I found these beverages on sale in the remotest places, for the Japanese have the knack of tying a number of bottles together with rope, which makes them easily transportable.  The new lager beers, which are advertised everywhere, have also affected the consumption of sake.[123] Sake is usually compared with sherry.  It is drunk mulled.  At a banquet, lasting five or six hours or longer, a man “strong in sake” may conceivably drink ten go (a go is about one-third of a pint) before achieving drunkenness, but most people would be affected by three go.  Some of the topers who boast of the quantity of sake they can consume—­I have heard of men declaring that they could drink twenty go—­are cheated late in the evening by the waiting-maids.  The little sake bottles are opaque, and it is easy to remove them for refilling before they are quite empty.

The brewer, who was a firm adherent of the Jishu sect of Buddhists, was accustomed to burn incense with his family at the domestic shrine every morning.  But this was not the habit of all the adherents of his denomination.  As to the moral advancement of the neighbourhood, his grandfather “tried very earnestly to improve the district by means of religion, but without result.”  He himself attached most value to education and after that to young men’s associations.

As we left the town we passed a “woman priest” who was walking to Nikko, eighty miles away.  Portraits of dead people, entrusted to her by their relatives for conveyance to distant shrines, were hung round her body.