One of the thatched mud houses I came to was at once a primitive co-operative sale-and-purchase society and the clubhouse of the old people of the _oaza_. The rent the old folk received from the society was enough to maintain the building. The oldsters gather from time to time in order to eat, drink and make merry with gossip and dancing. Dancing is a possibility for old people because it is swaying, sliding and attitudinising, with an occasional stamp of the foot, rather than hopping and whirling. One of the best amateur dances I have seen was performed by a grandsire. Such clubhouses, places for the comfort of the ageing and aged, are found in many villages. Young people are not admitted. The subscription to this particular clubhouse was 2 yen and 3 _sho_ of saké on joining and 2 yen a year. As we went on our way there was pointed out to me a house the owner of which had sold half a _tan_ of land for 120 yen and was drinking steadily. He had tried to make money by opening an open-air village theatre which owing to rain had been a failure. I visited an _oaza_ where all the land belonged to the man I called upon. He assured me that most of his tenants "made ends meet." The remainder had a deficiency at the end of the year due to "lack of will to save" and to their "lack of capital which caused them to pay interest to manure dealers." A co-operative society had just been started. In looking at a map of the village to which some of these _oaza_ belonged I noticed many holdings tinted a special colour. These were called "jump land." They consisted of land subdued from the wild by strangers. The properties were regarded as belonging to the _oaza_ in which their cultivators lived. I walked through a bit of woodland which had formerly been held in common and had been divided up, amid felicitations no doubt, at the rate of half a tan each to every family. But the well-to-do people soon got hold of their poorer neighbours' portions. In a roughish tract I came on burial grounds. One portion was set apart for the eight families which recognised the chief landlord as their head. The graves of lowlier folk seemed to occur anywhere. Each grave was covered by a pyramidal mound of sandy earth with a piece of twig stuck in it. Sometimes a tree had been planted and had grown. A child's grave had some tiny bowls of food and a clay doll before a little headstone. By way of shelter for these offerings there was hung on the headstone a peasant's wide straw hat. A large beehive-shaped bamboo basket over another grave was a reminder of the time when a grave needed such protection in order to save the body from wild animals. I saw at a distance in the midst of paddies two tree-covered mounds, a large one and a small one. They looked like the grave mounds I had seen in China, but it was suggested that they were probably on an old frontier line and marked spots at which ceremonies for scaring off disease were performed.