At the small ramshackle hot-spring inns of the remote hills the guests are mostly country folk.  Many of them carefully bring their own rice and miso, and are put up at a cost of about 10 sen a day.  In the passage ways one finds rough boxes about 4 ft. square full of wood ash in the centre of which charcoal may be burned and kettles boiled.

We were in a region where there is snow from the middle of November to the middle of April.  For two-thirds of December and January the snow is never less than 2 ft. deep.  The attendance of the children at one school during the winter was 95 per cent. for boys and 90 per cent. for girls. (See note, p. 112.)

My kurumaya pointed to a mountain top where, he said, there were nearly three acres of beautiful flowers.  The rice fields in the hills were suffering from lack of water and a deputation of villagers had gone ten miles into the mountains to pray for rain.  It is wonderful at what altitudes rice fields are contrived.  I noted some at 2,500 ft.  In looking down from a place where the cliff road hung out over the river that flowed a hundred feet below I noticed a stone image lying on its back in the water.  It may have come there by accident, but the ducking of such a figure in order to procure rain is not unknown.

At an inn I asked one of the greybeards who courteously visited us if there would be much competition for his seat when he retired from the village assembly.  He thought that there would be several candidates.  In the town from which we had set out on our journey through the highlands a doctor had spent 500 yen in trying to get on the assembly.

The tea at this resting place was poor and someone quoted the proverb, “Even the devil was once eighteen and bad tea has its tolerable first cup.”  On going to the village office I found that for a population of 2,000 there were, in addition to the village shrine, sixteen other shrines and three Buddhist temples.  Against fire there were four fire pumps and 155 “fire defenders.”  A dozen of the young men of the village were serving in the army, four were home on furlough, six were invalided and forty were of the reserve.  As many as thirty-seven had medals.  The doctors were two in number and the midwives three.  There was a sanitary committee of twenty-three members.  The revenue of the village was 5,740 yen.  It had a fund of 740 yen “against time of famine.”  The taxes paid were 2,330 yen for State tax, 2,460 yen for prefectural tax and 4,350 yen for village tax.  The village possessed two co-operative societies, a young men’s association, a Buddhist young men’s association, a Buddhist young women’s association, a society for the development of knowledge, a society of the graduates of the primary school, two thrift organisations, a society for “promoting knowledge and virtue,” and an association the members of which “aimed at becoming distinguished.”  There were in the village ninety subscribers to the Red Cross and two dozen members of the national Patriotic Women’s Association.