cities? The peasants make good soldiers but would seem to constitute unpromising material for the development of a political or industrial democracy.

However, the Japanese bureaucracy is doing much to improve and ameliorate the economic conditions of the peasants. Many model or experimental farms and agricultural stations have been established by the Government, the main or Imperial Agricultural Experiment Station being located at Nishigahara near Tokyo. It has several branch stations at Osaka and elsewhere, and there are also a considerable number of local or prefectural farms and stations. Numerous agricultural institutions are maintained by local funds, and hundreds of lecturers on agriculture are engaged in disseminating a knowledge of practical and scientific farming. As a consequence, about twenty-five per cent. of the farming population may be said to possess some knowledge of scientific agriculture, over a million having attended farming classes or evening schools in 1912. The crown of the system of agricultural education is, of course, the Agricultural College of the Imperial University at Tokyo.

Several institutes for the study and investigation of matters relating to sericulture (so important to the Japanese peasant as a subsidiary occupation) have been established, and there are also a number of local sericultural institutes. Especially to be commended are the efforts made by the Government to increase the number and improve.

the quality of horses and cattle by means of Imperial horse studs and cattle breeding farms.

Within recent years the Government has been very successful in creating a spirit of co-operation and mutual aid among farmers. In 1900 a co-operative societies law was enacted providing for the organization of co-operative farmers' guilds or societies for obtaining credit on the purchase, sale and production of commodities. At the end of 1913 no less than 10,455 such societies had been formed with a total membership of 1,160,000 of which about eighty per cent. are farmers. Through the credit or loan societies, the hypothec and industrial banks of Japan have made considerable loans to farmers at from ten to fifteen per cent. interest, which in Japan is considered to be a low rate, the prevailing rate for a loan on credit having been as high as twenty per cent. and even more.

On the whole, it must be said that while the lot of the peasant has been somewhat improved and ameliorated, his condition, judged by Western standards, can hardly be said to be an enviable one. It is only his ignorance of the poverty of that condition and a lack of knowledge or experience of the luxuries of modern life that render his existence at all tolerable. But it is this same ignorance, combined with poverty, which induces him to submit to his fate with apparent cheerfulness, and even to sell his daughters into the slavery of the Yoshiwara or the modern factory.

CHAPTER III

THE JAPANESE FAMILY

I

THE whole structure of social and political life in Japan is based on the family. In order to understand the Japanese family, full account must be taken of its religious, feudal and patriarchal origins. Since a very early period religion centered closely around patriarchal ideals and gave solidarity to family customs and observances which in the long run contributed much to the stability and cohesion of the whole nation. Certain collateral social evils have developed, however, along with the system.

As in the case of the early Greeks and Romans, the first gods of the Japanese were the deified forces of nature and the dead or ghosts of the dead. In the main, nature-worship and the fear and worship of the spirits of the dead shaped the patriarchal system.

The cult of nature- and ancestor-worship or the worship of the so-called kami,* which included all things worthy of veneration, such as stones, moun

*For an explanation of the kami and Shintoism, see infra, chapter vi.

tains, rivers, animals and superior human beings, developed at an early period into Shintoism. Gradually a few simple laws for governing the family, clan or community were formulated. These laws were in the course of time reinforced and modified by the advent of the two later religions Confucianism and Buddhism-introduced from China. These new religions soon absorbed Shintoism, or at least the soul of it, but the soul of old Japan-the worship of the kami-remained essentially Shinto.

Ancestor-worship means that the spirits of the dead survive and are linked up with the spirits of the Eving descendants or hover always about them. The happiness and prosperity of the living depend largely upon the peace and happiness of the dead, who in order to continue happy require certain attentions from living descendants in the way of rites and ceremonies such as continuing the funeres pasts. Should they be neglected, the ancestral vie its would fall to the rank of malevolent lemors und wander about in perpetual misery and rest. Such spirits often bring retribution on the fring for neglect by inficting disease upon some member of the can, or sterility on the wil la far, they often give the ring no rest mr fe verlos aí, offerings of nourishment are renevat vierdy they are restored to e mb and so er konne un butes. Clearly he teaf take a most myrk in the affairs of the ring and parenlady in de perpetuation of families rev of his face wit a kez

bacy was a grave impiety and calamity: an impiety because he who did not marry put the happiness of his ancestors in peril, a calamity because no offspring meant damnation to him who did not propagate. The man who died without a son received no offerings and was exposed to perpetual hunger.

II

An important canon of this ancestral cult held that the mysterious force which perpetuated life came only from the male. The female was merely a medium for protecting and nurturing this force, therefore she was relatively unimportant in the scheme of life. Herein lies the crux of the religious deification of the male and the subjugation of the female which appears in one form or another among most primitive peoples and religions.

Marriage in its early development under the patriarchal system was never the joining together of two equal beings to live in equal fellowship. In Japan it was bringing to the son a woman who abandoned her own parents, her own ancestors, her own cult to adopt his, since no one could invoke two series of ancestors. Her prime function from the time of marriage was to bear children to carry on her husband's family cult. Should she, perchance, prove sterile, this was ample ground for her being divorced, though later religious development made provisions against divorce in case the wife were