agricultural professor, "Difficulties Polish You."

"Some villagers," said a local authority, "want to make the Buddhist
temple the centre of the development of village life. In several
places agricultural products are exhibited at Shinto shrines. Farmers
offer them out of a kind of piety, but the products are afterwards
criticised from a technical point of view. This is done on the
initiative of the villagers encouraged by the prefecture."

Hereabouts the winter work of the people, in addition to basket, rope
and mat making, was paper making and smoothing out the wrinkles of
tobacco.[157] A considerable number of people had emigrated to South
America. The principal need of the villages, it was stated, was money
at less than the current rate of 20 per cent. In one place I found a
factory built on the side of a daimyo's castle.

I was told of crops of _konnyaku_ which had made one man the second
richest person in the prefecture and had therefore qualified him for
membership in the House of Peers. (The House includes one member from
each prefecture as the representative of the highest taxpayers of that
prefecture.)

During my journeys I picked up many odds and ends of information by
walking through the trains and having chats with country people. I was
also helped by county and prefectural agricultural officials who,
having learnt of my movements, were kind enough to join me in the
train for an hour or so. One head of an agricultural school which was
full up with students told me that there were already in Fukushima two
prefectural and five county agricultural schools.