Wherever one goes in Japan one is impressed by the large consumption of fish—­fresh, dried, and salted.  Thin slices of raw fish make one of the tasty dishes at a Japanese meal.  The foreigner, forgetting the Western relish for oysters and clams, is repelled by this raw fish, but a liking for it seems to be quickly acquired.  In Tokyo the slices of raw fish are cut from the meaty bonito (tunny), but tai (bream) is also used.  Bonito also provides the long narrow steaks, dried to a mahogany-like hardness, which are known as katsubushi.  This katsubushi keeps indefinitely and is grated or shaved with a kind of plane and used much as the Western cook employs Parmesan cheese.

I heard a man in Chiba combating very strongly the idea of there being a connection between leprosy and fish eating.  As to leprosy, it is doubtful if the belief expressed by the Chinese name for the disease, “heavenly punishment,” has disappeared.  There are at least 24,000 lepers in Japan, and as a well-known Japanese work of reference casually remarks, “the hospitals can at present accommodate only 5 per cent. of them.”

I could not but compare the undulating countryside, on which so vast an amount of labour had been expended, with what it would have been under European treatment and the influence of an European climate—­possibly picturesque pasture with high hedges.  The congeries of rice fields was fringed, where the water supply had given out, with upland cultivation.  On the low mud walls which separated the paddies beans grew except at a boundary corner, where a tea or mulberry bush served as a landmark.  In looking down or up the little valleys one saw how completely the houses had been brushed aside to the foot of the low hills so that no land cultivable as paddies should be wasted.  This intensely developed countryside was not however ideal land.  It was often much too sandy.  Not a few paddies had to depend to some extent on the water they could catch for themselves.  A naturally draughty and hungry land was yielding crops by a laborious manurial improvement of its physical and chemical condition, by wonders being wrought in rural hydraulics and by unending industry in cultivation and petty engineering.

It might be supposed that beauty had gone from the countryside.  Some of what the land agents call the amenities of the district had certainly disappeared.  There seemed to be nowhere for the pedestrian to sit down in order to refresh himself with those rural sights and sounds which exhilarate the spirit.  But this marvellously delved, methodised and trimmed countryside had a character and a stimulus of its own.  It reflected the energy and persistence that had subdued it.  I saw nothing ugly.  The tidied rice plots, shaped at every possible curve and angle, and eloquent of centuries of unremitting toil; the upland beyond them, worked to a skilled perfection of finish; the nesting houses which nowhere offended the eye; the big still ponds contrived by the rude forefathers of the hamlet for water storage or the succour of the rice in the hottest weather; the low hilltops green with pine because cultivation could not ascend so far, and hiding here and there a Shinto sanctuary:  such a countryside was satisfying in its own way.