Concerning his blindness the headman said that it was more profitable for him to hear than to see, for by sight "energy might be diverted." He had recited in every prefecture his personal experience of rural reform. He asserted that while conditions varied in every prefecture, there was, generally speaking, labour on the land for no more than 200 days in the year. He deplored the disappearance of some home employments. He did not approve of the condition of things in the north where women worked as much in the fields as their husbands and brothers. Women were "so backward and conservative." The biggest obstacles to agricultural progress were old women. To introduce a secondary industry was to take women from the fields. I spoke with an agricultural expert, one of whose dicta was that "students at normal schools who come from town families are not so clever as students from farmers' families." He told me that 10,000 young men in his county had sworn "to act in the way most fitting to youths of a military state [sic], to buy and use national products as far as possible and so to promote national industry." What was wrong with some farming, according to an official of a county agricultural association whom I met later, was that the farmers cultivated too intensively. They used too much "artificial." A prefectural official, speaking of the possibility of extending the cultivated area in Japan, said that in Ehime there were 6,000 _chō_ which might be made into paddies if money were available. As to afforestation, 100,000 yen a year, exclusive of salaries, was spent in the prefecture. As a final piece of statistics he mentioned that whereas ten years before pears were grown only in a certain island of the prefecture, the production of a single county was now valued at half a million yen yearly. I spent a night at a hot spring. It is said that the volume of water is decreasing. What a situation for a town which lives on a hot spring if the hot-water supply should suddenly stop! I heard of another hot-spring resort at which the water is gradually cooling: it is warmed up by secret piping. I have not troubled my readers with many stories of the jostling of past and present, but I noticed in an electric street car at Matsuyama a peasant trying to light his pipe with flint and tinder. As he did not succeed a fellow-passenger offered him a match. He was so inexpert with it that he still failed to get a light and he had to be handed a cigarette stump. In riding down to the port in the street car I borrowed for a few moments a schoolboy's English reader. It seemed rather mawkish. A book of Japanese history which I was also allowed to look at was full of reproductions of autographs of distinguished men. "They make the impression very strong," I was told. FOOTNOTES: [182] See Appendix XXXVIII. [183] That is, not only his household but his relatives.