In a roughish tract I came on burial grounds.  One portion was set apart for the eight families which recognised the chief landlord as their head.  The graves of lowlier folk seemed to occur anywhere.  Each grave was covered by a pyramidal mound of sandy earth with a piece of twig stuck in it.  Sometimes a tree had been planted and had grown.  A child’s grave had some tiny bowls of food and a clay doll before a little headstone.  By way of shelter for these offerings there was hung on the headstone a peasant’s wide straw hat.  A large beehive-shaped bamboo basket over another grave was a reminder of the time when a grave needed such protection in order to save the body from wild animals.

I saw at a distance in the midst of paddies two tree-covered mounds, a large one and a small one.  They looked like the grave mounds I had seen in China, but it was suggested that they were probably on an old frontier line and marked spots at which ceremonies for scaring off disease were performed.

In one place I found the people planting plum trees in order to meet their communal taxation.  It was reckoned that the yield of one tree when it came into full bearing would defray the taxes of a moderate-sized family.

An open space in a wood was pointed out to me as the spot on which dead horses were formerly thrown to the dogs and birds.  Nowadays notice was given to the Eta that a dead horse was to be cast away, and they came and, after skinning the animal, buried the body.  Farther off, on the high road, I saw an 8 ft. high monument to a local steed that had died in Manchuria.

One of my further visits to Chiba was in the spring.  The paddies, which had been fallow since November, were under water; but much of the stubble had been turned over with the long-bladed mattock.  The seed beds from which the rice is transplanted to the paddies were a vivid green.  On the high ground I saw good clean crops of barley and wheat, beans and peas, on soil of very moderate quality.

The name of Funabashi at a station reminded me of a Japanese friend having told me that it was “famous for a shrine and a very immoral place.”  But I afterwards heard that the keeper of that shrine, “acting from conscientious motives, gave up his lucrative post and died a poor man.”  It is said of one of the most sacred places in Japan that it is also the “most immoral.”  Kyoto which contains nine hundred shrines is also supposed to harbour several thousand women of bad character.

I passed a place where 25,000 Russian prisoners had been detained.  There was an old peasant there who told his son that he could not understand why so many Japanese went abroad at such great cost to see the different peoples of the world.  If they would only stay at home, he said, they would see them all in turn, for first there had been the Chinese prisoners, then the Russians and now there were the Germans.

In the uplands it was peaceful and restful to walk through the shady lanes between the tree-studded homesteads or along the road passing between plots of mulberry, tea, vegetables or grain, cultivated with the care given to plants in a garden.  In the herbage by the roadside, but not among the crops I need hardly say, I noticed dandelions, sow thistles, Scots thistles, plantains and some other familiar weeds.