him. He need only to go to the shrine and give thanks there." "The
landlord," added the speaker in his imperfect English, "has entirely
hided himself from the business." A third of the tenants had become
peasant proprietors.

In order to better the feeling between the farmers and landowners this
landlord and several others had begun to ask their tenants to their
gardens, where they were given tea and fruit. "In Japan," said one man
to me, "we see feudal ideas broken down by the upper, not the lower
class."

I visited the romantic coast of a peninsula a dozen miles from the
railway. Some 10,000 pilgrims come in a year to the eighty-eight
temples on the peninsula, and in some parts the people are such strict
Buddhists that in one village the county authorities find great
difficulty in overcoming an objection to destroying the insect life
which preys on the rice crops. When rice land does not yield well, one
landlord causes an investigation to be made and gives advice based
upon it to the tenant, saying, "Do this, and if you lose I will
compensate you. If you gain, the advantage will be yours." Money is
also contributed by the landlord to enable tenants to make journeys in
order to study farming methods.

A landlord here--I had the pleasure of being his guest--had started an
agricultural association. It had developed the idea of a secondary
school for practical instruction, "rich men to give their money and
poor men their labour." In order to obtain a fund to enable tenants to
get money with which to set up as peasant proprietors, this landlord
had thought of the plan of setting aside each harvest 250 _shō_[27] of
rice to each tenant's 3 _shō_.