In my host’s house in the evening someone happened to quote the proverb, “Richer after the fire.”  It means, of course, that after the fire the neighbours are so ready with help that the last state of the victim of the fire is better than the first.  The view was expressed that hitherto charitable institutions of some Western patterns had not been so much needed in Japan as might be supposed.[48] “Those who go to Europe from Japan are indeed much surprised by the number of institutions to help people.”  Here, however, is the story of an institution coming into existence in a village:  “There was a man who was thought to be rich, but he lived like a miser.  His shoji were made of waste paper and his guests received tea only.  So he was despised.  But many years afterwards it was found that for a long time he had been collecting books.  Then, to the surprise of everybody, he built a library for his village.  He is not at all proud of this and those who ridiculed him are now ashamed.”

I was invited to a “Rural Life Exhibition.”  Some agricultural produce was shown, but three hundred of the exhibits were manuscript books or diagrams.  One diagram illustrated the development in a particular county of the use of two bactericides, formalin and carbon bisulphide.  The formalin was in use to the value of 2,000 yen.  Then there was a wall picture, a sort of Japanese “The Child:  What will he Become?” The good boy, aged fifteen, was shown spending his spare time in making straw rope to the value of 3 sen 3 rin nightly, with the result that after thirty years of such industry he became a rural capitalist who possessed 1,000 yen and lived in circumstances of dignity.  In contrast with this virtuous career there was shown the rural rake’s progress.  A youth who was in the habit of laying out 3 sen 3 rin riotously in sweet-shops was proved to have wasted 1,000 yen in thirty years:  the prodigal was justly exhibited fleeing from his home in debt.

One of the books on exhibition mentioned the volumes most in demand at some village library.  I translate the titles: 

        Physical and Intellectual Training
        About being Ambitious
        The Housewife of a Peasant Family
        The Management of a Farm
        The Days when Statesmen were Boys
        Culture and Striving
        Essence of Rural Improvement
        A Hundred Beautiful Stories
        The Art of Composition
        The Preparation of the Conscript
        A Medical Treatise
        A Translation of “Self-Help”
        Nature and Human Life
        The Glories of Native Places
        Anecdotes concerning Culture
        Lives of Distinguished Peasants
        Mulberry Planting
        Chinese Romances
        Glories of this Peaceful Reign
        Ninomiya Sontoku

I noticed among the exhibits a short autobiography of a farmer, an engaging egoist who wrote: