But the _kō_, or _tanomoshi_, as I ought to call it, is not always the innocent organisation I have described. There is a _tanomoshi_ system under which, after member A, the beneficiary, has received the first month's subscriptions, the other members are open to receive bids for their shares. That is to say that, when the time comes round for the second paying out of 50 yen, member F, who happens to have become as much in need of ready money as A was, offers, if the month's moneys be handed over to him, to distribute among the members sums up to 20 yen. July and December, when most people need ready money, are months in which a hard-up member of a _tanomoshi_ may sometimes offer to distribute as much as 50 per cent. of what he receives. The result of such bidding for shares is that well-to-do members of a _tanomoshi_, who are the last to draw their 50 yen, receive in addition to it all the extra payments made by impoverished members who took their shares earlier. Benevolence in a _tanomoshi_ is not seldom a mask for avarice that the law against usury cannot touch. In truth, the only virtuous part of a _tanomoshi_ may be the first sharing out to the person in whose interest it was supposed to be started. It should be added, however, that there is a sort of _tanomoshi_ which has no particular beneficiary and is merely a kind of co-operative credit society. In one place I heard of a _tanomoshi_ that maintained a large fund for the relief of orphans and the sick. In many villages there were private or co-operative godowns for the storage of rice against fire, rats and damp. Though the farmer who sends rice to such a store receives a receipt, it is not legally a marketable document. Hence an improvement on this simple storage plan. I visited the premises of a company that could store more than 500,000 bushels of rice, and I found purification by carbon bisulphide going on. The receipts given by this company--"certificated" for large quantities and "tickets" for small--certify not only the quantity but the quality of the rice, and are readily cashed. The storehouse owners work under a licence, and they have the advantage that the buyer of the receipts of non-licensed stores is not protected by the courts. In the office of the company were samples of eleven market qualities of rice, and before them, by way of showing respect to the great food staple, was set the _gohei_ of cut white paper seen in Shinto shrines. Outside the office, girl porters carried the bales of rice to and fro. Close to the store was a river in which some of the dusty, perspiring porters were washing and cooling themselves with a simplicity to which Western civilisation is not yet equal. Opposite them men were fishing by casting in draw nets from the shore just as in biblical pictures the apostles are represented as doing.