Note 979 — Chapter XIII · —Island Peoples

It is in Japan that agriculture has attained a national and aesthetic importance reached nowhere else. Of the 150,000 square miles constituting Japan proper, two-thirds are mountains; large tracts of lowlands are useless rock wastes, owing to the detritus carried down by inundating mountain torrents.979 Hence to-day arable land forms only 15.7 per cent. of the whole area. During the two hundred and fifty years of exclusion when emigration and foreign trade were forbidden, a large and growing population had to be supplied from a small insular area, further restricted by reason of the configuration of the surface. Here the geographical effects of a small, naturally defined area worked out to their logical conclusion, Consequently agriculture progressed rapidly and gave the farmer a rank in the social scale such as he attained nowhere else.980 His methods of tillage are much the same as in overcrowded China, but his national importance and hence his ranking in society is much higher. In Japan to-day farming absorbs 60 per cent. of the population. The system of tillage, in many respects primitive, is yet very thorough, and by means of skilful manuring makes one plot of ground yield two or three crops per annum.981 Every inch of arable land is cultivated in grain, vegetables and fruits. Mountains and hills are terraced and tilled far up their slopes. Meadows are conspicuously absent, as are also fallow fields. Land is too valuable to lie idle. Labor is chiefly manual and is shared by the women and children; mattock and hoe are more common than the plow.982 Such elaborate cultivation and such pressure of population eventuate in small holdings. In Japan one hectar (2 1-2 acres) is the average farm per family.