Because they speak with all sorts of people and hear a great deal of conversation the blind amma are full of interesting gossip.  A clever amma who ran his knuckles up and down my back said that farm land a good way from Niigata was sold at from 200 yen to 300 yen and sometimes at 400 yen per quarter acre.[130] Prefectural officials who called on me explained that drainage operations on a large scale were being completed.  The water of which the low land was relieved would be used to extend farming in the hills.  An effort was also being made to develop stock-keeping in the uplands.  It was proposed “to supply every farmer with a scheme for increasing his live stock.”  The optimistic authorities were particularly attracted by the notion of keeping sheep.  The plan was to arrange for co-operation in hill pasturing and in wool and meat production.  Mutton was as yet unknown, however, in Niigata. (The mutton eaten by foreigners in Japan usually comes from Shanghai.)

I went into the country to a little place where the natural gas from the soil was used by the farmers for lighting and cooking.  I heard talk in this village and in others of the influence of the local army reservists’ society.  “Young men on returning from their army service are always influential.  They are much respected by the youths and are talkative indeed in the village assembly.”

As our host was the village headman he kindly brought the assembly together to meet me.  I asked the assembled fathers about two stones erected in the village.  Somebody had kindled a fire of rice screenings near one of them and it had been scorched.  On the other stone a kimono had been hung to dry.  The explanation was that the stones were monuments not shrines, and that the people who had set them up had left the district.  The stones were no doubt respected while the donors lived.  It was not uncommon for a pilgrim to a shrine to erect a memorial on his return home.

In this village fifty Shinto shrines of the fifth class had been closed under the influence of the Home Office.  They were shrines which had no offering from the village to support them.  They had only a few worshippers.  All the remaining shrines were of the fifth class but one, and it was of the fourth class.  In the county there was a second-class shrine and in the whole prefecture there were two or three first-class shrines.  The villagers had agreed among themselves which of their own shrines should be made an end of.  A shrine which was dispensed with was burnt.  The stone steps approaching it were also removed.  Burning was not sacrilege but purification.  On the closing of a shrine there might be complaints on the part of some old man or woman, but the majority of people approved.  One Shinto shrine guardian lived at the fourth-class shrine and conducted a ceremony at the sixteen fifth-class shrines.  Of the twenty Buddhist temples in the village (300 families cultivating an average of a cho apiece), twelve were Hokke, five Shingon, two Shinshu and one Zen.  All the priests were married.[131]