I went back to Nagano to visit the silk industrial regions.  My route lay through the prefectures of Saitama and Gumma.  I left Tokyo on the last day of June.  Many farmers were threshing their barley.  On the dry-land patches, where the grain crop had been harvested, soya bean, sown between the rows of grain long before harvest, was becoming bushier now that it was no longer overshadowed.  Maize in most places was about a foot high, but where it had been sown early was already twice that height.  The sweet potato had been planted out from its nursery bed for weeks.  Here and there were small crops of tea which had been severely picked for its second crop.  I noticed melons, cucumbers and squashes, and patches of the serviceable burdock.  Many paddy farmers had water areas devoted to lotus, but the big floating leaves were not yet illumined by the mysterious beauty of the honey-scented flowers.

In order to imagine the scene on the rice flats, the reader must not think of the glistering paddy fields[136] as stretching in an unbroken monotonous series over the plain.  Occasionally a rocky patch, outcropping from the paddy tract, made a little island of wood.  Sometimes it was a sacred grove in which one caught a glimpse of a Shinto shrine or the head stones of the dead.  Sometimes there was a little clump of cropped tree greenery which kept a farmhouse cool in summer and, at another time of the year, sheltered from the wind.  Few householders were too poor or too busy to be without their little patch of flowers.

Before the train climbed out of the Kwanto plain temperature of not far below 100 deg.  F. the planting of rice seemed to be almost an enviable occupation.  The peasant had his great umbrella-shaped straw hat, sometimes an armful of green stuff tied on his back, and a delicious feeling of being up to the knees in water or mud on a hot day-one recalled the mud baths of the West-when the alternative was walking on a dusty road, digging on the sun-baked upland or perspiring in a house or the train.

With the rise in the level a few mulberries began to appear and gradually they occupied a large part of the holdings.  Sometimes the mulberries were cultivated as shoots from a stump a little above ground level, and sometimes as a kind of small standard.  As mulberry culture increased, the silk factories’ whitewashed cocoon stores and the tall red and black iron chimneys of the factories themselves became more numerous.  It is a pity that the silk factory is not always so innocent-looking inside as the pure white exterior of its stores might suggest.  It is certain that the overworked girl operatives, sitting at their steaming basins, drawing the silk from the soaked cocoons, were glad to find the weather conditions such that they could have the sides of their reeling sheds removed.

At many of the railway stations there were stacks of large, round, flat bean cakes, for the farmer feeds his “cake” to his fields direct, not through the medium of cattle.  Although a paddy receives less agreeable nutritive materials than bean cake, the extensive use of this cake must be comforting to a little school of rural reformers in the West.  These ardent vegetarians have refused to listen to the allegation that vegetarianism was impossible because without meat-eating there would be no cattle and therefore no nitrogen for the fields.