Among the covered lacquer dishes on the little table set before each kneeling breakfaster, luncher or diner in Japan there is one which is empty.  This is the rice bowl.  When the meal begins—­or in the case of an elaborate dinner at the rice course—­the maid brings in a large covered wooden copper-bound or brass-bound tub or round lacquered box of hot rice.  This rice she serves with a big wooden spoon, the only spoon ever seen at a Japanese meal.  A man may have three helpings or four in a bowl about as big as a large breakfast cup.  The etiquette is that, though other dishes may be pecked at, the rice in one’s bowl must be finished.  The usage on this point may have originated in the feeling that it was almost impious to waste the staple food of the country.  It is not difficult to pick up the last rice grains with the wooden hashi (chopsticks), for the rice is skilfully boiled. (Soft rice is served to invalids only.) But when the bowl is almost empty the custom is to pour into it weak tea or hot water, and then to drink this, so getting rid of the odd grains.  It is through omitting to drink in this way that foreigners get indigestion when at a Japanese meal they eat a lot of rice.

At first it is not easy for the foreigner to believe that people can come with appetite to several bowls of plain rice three times a day.[80] But good rice does seem to have something of the property of oatmeal, the property of a continual tastiness.  Further, the rice eater picks up now and then from a small saucer a piece of pickle which may have either a salty or a sweet fermented taste.  The nutrition gained at a Japanese meal is largely in soups in which the bean preparations, tofu and miso, and occasionally eggs, are used.  And there is no country in the world where more fish is eaten than in Japan.  The coast waters and rivers team with fish, and fish—­fresh, dried and salted, shell-fish and fish unrecognisable as fish after all sorts of ingenious treatment—­is consumed by almost everybody.

The Japanese are in no doubt that the foreign rice which is brought into the country to supplement the home supply is inferior to their own.[81] Inferior means that they prefer the flavour of their own rice, just as most Scots prefer oatmeal made from oats grown in Scotland.

II

In the year of the Coronation—­it took place three years after the Emperor’s accession—­two prefectures had the honour of being chosen to produce the rice to be placed before gods, Emperor and dignitaries at Kyoto.  The work was not undertaken without ceremony.  I was a witness of the rites performed at the planting of the rice in one of the prefectures.  Plots had been prepared with enormous care.  Along the top of the special fencing were the Shinto straw bands and paper streamers.  A small shrine had been built to overlook the plots.  Even the instruments of the little meteorological station near, by which