The notes for the account of rural life in Japan which will be found in this book were chiefly made in the second and third years of the War.  Since that time there has been an enormous rise in the price of everything.  For a time the farmers prospered as they had prospered in the high rice-price years, 1912-13.[93] The high prices of all grain as well as the fabulous price of raw silk (due to increased export to America and to increased home consumption) were a great advantage.

[Illustration:  MINISTER OF AGRICULTURE’S EFFORTS TO KEEP THE PRICE OF RICE FROM RISING]

Then came the rice riots of the city workers, the general slump and finally the commercial and industrial crash.  Raw silk fell nearly to one-third of its top price, and farmers had to sell cocoons under the cost of production.  Everywhere countrymen and countrywomen employed in the factories were discharged in droves.  A large proportion of these unfortunates returned to their villages to dispel some rural dreams of urban Eldorado.

But this matter of the going up and coming down of prices has but a passing interest for the reader.  The only economic fact of which he need lay hold is that in recent years the farmers have been led into the way of spending more money—­in taxation as well as in general expenses of living—­and that, when account is taken of every advantage they have gained from better methods of production, they have pressing on them the limitations imposed by the size of their farms and their farming practice.  Whatever the prices obtained for the:  products of the soil, climatic facts,[94] the character and social condition of the people, their attitude towards life and authority and the attitude of authority towards them remain very much the same.  And thus a narrative of things seen and heard chiefly during the first years of the War is not at all out of date even if it were not supplemented as it is by a plentiful supply of notes containing the latest statistical data.

There is one curious exception only.  The reader of these pages will constantly come on references to the poverty of the tenant farmers.  They are, of course, practically labourers, for they cultivate two or three acres only, and at the end of the year, as has been shown, have merely a trifle in hand and sometimes not that.  Influenced by the labour movement, which developed in the industrial centres during and after the War,[95] this depressed class has of late shown spirit.  It has begun to assert its claims against landowners.  At the end of 1920 there were as many as ninety associations of tenant farmers, and sixty of these had been started for the specific purpose of representing tenants’ interests against landowners.  Strikes of tenants began and continue.  The end of this movement of a proverbially conservative class is not at all certain.[96]