When I was in Hokkaido sheep were being experimented with at different places on the mainland, investigators and sheep buyers had gone off to Australia, New Zealand and South America, and a Tokyo Sheep Bureau of two dozen officials had been established. Great hopes were built on a few hundred sheep in Hokkaido.[265] But I noticed that Government farm sheep were under cover on a warm September day. Also I heard of trouble with two well-known sheep ailments. There was talk nevertheless of the day when there would be a million sheep in Hokkaido, perhaps three millions. On the mainland I also met high officials and enthusiastic prefectural governors who dreamed dreams of sheep farming in Old Japan, where land is costly, farms small, agriculture intensive, grazing ground to seek, and farmland necessarily damp. This sheep keeping is conceived as one animal or perhaps two on a holding as rather unhappy by-products. The notion is that the wool and manure of a sheep would meet the expense of its keep and that the mutton would be profit. Hopes of an extension of sheep breeding resting on such a basis seem to be extravagant. One high authority told me that it would take twenty or thirty years to develop sheep keeping. The sheep at present in Japan are not living in natural conditions. They feed on cultivated crops. Sheep could hardly live a week on natural Japanese pasture. The wild herbage is full of the sharp bamboo grass. In the summer much of the eatable herbage dries up. Not only must sheep endure the summer heat and insects; they must survive the trying rainy season. But they must do more than merely endure and survive. In order to produce good wool it is necessary that they shall be in good condition. The hair of one's head immediately shows the effect of imperfect nutrition or unhealthy conditions, and it is the same with the wool on the back of the sheep. It is said that the quality of the wool on the sheep kept in Japan depreciates. However this may be, it is plain that sheep breeding must be conducted on a large scale in order to produce wool in commercial quantities and of even quality. Some notion of the land normally required for sheep may be estimated from the fact that Australian pasture carries no more than four sheep per acre.[266]