ABSTRACT
THOUGH Japan played a very small part in the Great War, the conflict affected profoundly both her economic position and her place among the Powers, and it may therefore be of interest to pass in review the condition of the country at the time when the Western Powers became so much afraid of one another that they rushed into war. To the eye of a discerning traveller it would probably seem that the wonderful transformation of Japan that had been so much talked about was a thing that affected only the ports and large towns, and the aristocratic and industrial part of the population. Japan as a whole would appear to be in much the same condition of rural simplicity as it had always been. In a country so mountainous that the hills are never out of sight, the great majority of the people lived in villages dotted over the narrow plains and winding valleys. Wooden houses with roofs of thick thatch huddled together. Country mansions were few, and private parks very rare. Rice was the most conspicuous crop, because of its cultivation requiring a skilful levelling and terracing of the land, and up every little valley the terraces rose in higher and narrower steps till the land became so steep that it was impracticable to carry the process any farther. The village, with its Buddhist temple, the Shinto shrines with the torii as an open gate indicating the way of approach, the terraced fields, and the hills above covered with spruce fir or bamboo, the higher mountains with their great temples and groves of cryptomeria, the lofty ridges crossed by narrow roads
doubling and twisting to surmount passes which were little less in altitude than the main ridge itself-these were the features of a country unrivalled in its own type of beauty and unfailingly picturesque. The cultivators were frugal and laborious, the older D ones reminding one of the “strange gnarled creatures” whom the Lady Murasaki had described in her Tale of Genji nearly a thousand years ago. The straw cape, like a porcupine, was still the only raincoat; a piece of leather with the edge turned up round the foot and a string run through was the primitive shoe for field work. The bullock dragged an inadequate plough and a not much more adequate cart. With hoe and spade the cultivator made the trimmest rows on which food crops were ever grown. Up to their knees in mud, both sexes tended the rice-plant-the most exacting of all cereals. They cut it with a tiny sickle, hung it up to dry, stripped it stalk by stalk, hulled it in stone basins or dragged it by bullock-cart up steep valleys, where it was hulled by little water-mills. Even more hardy and primitive, the fishermen all round Japan’s innumerably indented coast plied their trade with no other apparatus than their fathers had used from time immemorial. These were the foundations upon which Japan had built all that made her a Great Power.
