[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 _saké_. 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 _saké_.[123] _Saké_ is usually compared with sherry. It is drunk mulled. At a banquet, lasting five or six hours or longer, a man "strong in _saké_" 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 _saké_ 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 _saké_ 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. As the route became more and more hilly I realised how accurate is that representation of hills in Japanese art which seems odd before one has been in Japan: the landscape stands out as if seen in a flash of lightning. Three things by the way were arresting: the number of shrines, mostly dedicated to the fox god; the rice suspended round the farm buildings or drying on racks; and the masses of evening primroses, called in Japan "moon-seeing flowers."