The foundations of Japan : $b Notes made during journeys of 6,000 miles in the rural districts as a basis for a sounder knowledge of the Japanese peopleRobertson Scott, J. W. (John William)
General
The foundations of Japan : $b Notes made during journeys of 6,000 miles in the rural districts as a basis for a sounder knowledge of the Japanese people
Robertson Scott, J. W. (John William)
Agriculture -- Japan; Country life -- Japan; Japan -- Description and travel; Japan -- Social conditions
The co-operative credit society which the blind headman established
not only buys and sells for its members in the ordinary way but hires
land for division among the humbler cultivators. One of the
departments of the society's work is the collection of villagers'
savings. They are gathered every Sunday by school-children. One lad, I
found from his book, had collected on a particular Sunday 5 sen
each--5 sen is a penny--from two houses and 10 sen each from another
two dwellings. The next Sunday he had received 5 sen from one house,
10 sen from two houses, 30 sen and 50 sen from others and a whole yen
from the last house on his list. The subscriber gets no receipt but
sees the lad enter in his book the amount handed over to him, and the
next Sunday he sees the stamp of the bank against the sum. Some 390
householders out of the 497 in the village hand over savings to the
boy and girl collectors, whose energy is stimulated with 1 per cent.
on the sums they gather. In five years the Sunday collections have
amassed 60,000 yen. The previous year had been marked by a bad harvest
and large sums had been drawn out of the bank, but there was still a
sum of 14,000 yen in hand.
In this village there had been issued one of the economic and moral
diaries mentioned in an earlier chapter. The diary of this village has
two spaces for every day--that is, the economic space and the moral
space. The owner of this book had to do two good deeds daily, one
economic and the other moral, and he had to enter them up. Further, he
had to hand in the book at the end of the year to the earnest village
agricultural and moral expert who devised the diary and carefully
tabulates the results of twelve months' economic and moral endeavour.
One might think that the scheme would break down at the handing in of
the diary stage, but I was assured that there were good reasons for
believing that a considerable proportion of the 440 persons who had
taken out diaries would return them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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