In not a few places I found that the tiny shrines of hamlets (_aza_) had been taken away and grouped together at a communal shrine with the notion of promoting local solidarity. At one such combination of shrines I saw notice boards intimating that "tramps, pedlars, wandering priests and other carriers of subscription lists and proselytisers" were not received in the village. It was explained that a community was sometimes all of one faith: "therefore it does not want to be disturbed by tactless preachers of other beliefs." At an inn there was a middle-aged widow who served there as waitress in the summer but in the winter returned to Tokyo, where she employed a number of girls in making _haori_ tassels. (She gave them board and lodging and clothes for two years, and, after that period, wages.[215]) Remembering what I had written down about courting, I asked for her mature judgment on our rural custom of "walking out." She was amused, but, in that way the Japanese have of trying to look at a Western custom on its merits, she said, after consideration, that there was much to be said for the plan. "In Japan," she declared, "you cannot know a husband's character until you are married. On the whole, I wish I had been a man." In order to catch our train we had to leave this inn the moment our meal was finished, although the widow quoted to us the adage, "Rest after a meal even if your parents are dead." On a morning in May I went into the country to visit a friend who was taking a holiday in a ramshackle inn 4,000 ft. up Mount Akagi. I continually heard the note of the _kakkō_ (cuckoo). On the higher parts of the mountain there were azaleas at every yard, some quite small but others 12 or even 15 ft. high. Many had been grazed by cattle. Big cryptomeria were plentiful part of the way up, but at the top there were no trees but diminutive oaks, birches and pines, stunted and lichen covered, the topmost branches broken off by the terrific blasts which from time to time sweep along the top of the extinct volcano. One of the products of rural Japan is the wrestler. _Sumo_, which is going on in every school and college of the country, exhibits its perfect flower twice a year in the January and May ten-days-long tournaments in the capital. The immense rotunda of the wrestlers' association suggests a rather rickety Albert Hall and holds 13,000 people.[216] On the day I went in I paid 2 yen and had only standing room. Everybody knows the more than Herculean proportions of the wrestlers in comparison with the rest of their countrymen. The rigorous training, Gargantuan feeding and somewhat severe discipline of the wrestlers enable them to grow beyond the average stature and to a girth, protected by enormously developed abdominal muscles, which reinforces strength with great weight.[217]