AGRICULTURE IN JAPAN.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XLVIII, Issue 8132, 30 November 1904, Page 4

AGRICULTURE IN JAPAN.

Japan is the country of the small man on the land. Mr Harold Boyce, in the Book Lovers' Magazine, calculates that if all the tillable acres of Japan were merged in one field a man in an automobile travelling at the rate of 60 miles an hour would skirt the entire perimeter of arable Japan in 11 hours. During 2500 years Japan has regarded agriculture as the most honorable of occupations, and now about 60 per cent, of the population | is working on the land. It is said that the intense cultivation of the 19,000 square miles considered arable has built up i the race which is just now hanging to the throat of the great Russian bear. The commercial triumphs of Japan and her meteoric success in war are the fruits of her agricultural conquests. We learn that patient diligence, with knowledge of the chemistry of soils and the physiology of plants, has yielded results that have astounded the most advanced agriculturists in western nations. To Australians Japanese agriculture would seem at first to be toy agriculture, carried on in garden farms. When a Japanese goes on the land he occupies about as much of the earth as a middle-class suburban dweller in an. outside suburb of an Australian city. He need not worry about the best kind of fence to put up or how many furrows he will have to a plough. If he were to introduce a four-horse team he would not turn at the ends without serious trespass on his next neighbor, there are nearly 200 experimental farms in Japan, yet the area of the Whole of these places is not as great as that of one State farm in Australia. The great big principal experimental station which is regarded as the leading institution of its kind in the kingdom comprises a little less than six acres. The agricultural scientists, however, have discovered secrets in the mystic art of making the bosonyrf earth produce strange and wonderful quantities of produce, which they do not impart to the neighbors. ,In this aa in all progressire things the Japanese is always a learner. He goes abroad, selects the best stock, products, and information that our lands afford, pays for the stock and the (products with money, and for the information with smiles, and sunny invitations to his kind friends to visit the agricultural country of Japan. And when his friends visit him he extends hospitality, but when it comes to points in tillage, new crops, and so foith, he still continues his responses to smiles. Japan has almost supported nearly 60,000,000 of people on the produce of 19,000 square miles of garden and the trade that has resulted. She has also accumulated gold, established a magnificent modern fighting army, and for Us size an incomparable navy. Japan s 500 islands are mere dots, and much of her mountain territory i» almost inaccessible. Earthquakes seriously disturb the country. Five hundred shocks is the annual average, and there is a Professor of Earthquakes and Volcanoes in the Imperial University at Tokio, presumably kept for the purpose of predicting the extent of disturbances and educating people in respect of means to minimise the damage. The fertile plains are assaulted by typhoons and storms in the season when the best crops are flowering. It would Beem that when the agriculturist on the plains is not suffering through hurricanes he is in hourly dread of a flood of molten lava. Then cholera and other plagues paralyse industry, and altogether the small man on his small holding In the kingdom ox the Mikado seems to have quite as uncertain an existence as a homestead selector out at the back of out-back beyond the Never Never in New South Waled. Yet the Japanese farmer lives in a r;*,an, pretty, comfortable bark paper houw, which lets in the light and keeps out «l« l c wind, and it is said that among his cla«s absolute squalor and poverty are unknown. The inches of land which would be occupied by fences are too valuable, ro there are no fences save where there 6 a very "rich" holder. The space an Amtralian wheat grower turns niß horsss on at the end of his long furrow keeps a Japanese family in great comfort. A team >.l Clydesdales would be as much- use on the average farm as a team of bullocks in a. conservatory. The hoe is the principal part of the Japanese farmer s plan . Tor him there are no persuasive machin-jry agents and no bills to meet on tha fourt;. of March. His total outlay on 'mpluments and a place to keep uw-n ia nJ:om 355. The Government will supply him with seeds. If ever they institute closer settlement by. resumption in Japan the bloated monopolist will be compelled to tsell his enormous estate comprising two acres, and it will be divided among 80 small men who will own one se each. Ten of these make a tan, and four tan go to one acre. The Government haß in in four years worked out a scheme by which each holder will have his land in ono piece, farms having been somewhat disintegrated under the old rule. The boundaries were crooked, but now everything will be on straight lines, and the farmer will be able to see right alone his boundary. Holders are compelled to build a foot and a half back from the boundary line, so that it may be possible to enter the houses, and if a window be overlooking another holding the owner may be ordered to close it up. The owners of land who sell leases crush the tenant just the same as the class does In other countries and often the profits of a leased farm will not cover^the cost of fertilising material, which is the greatest expense. . . The value of the manure imported each year is about £10,000,000, and of course there is immense local manufacture. Fish, guaho, dried herrings, rape seed cake, oil cake, cotton seed, an.d superphosphates are prepared to quicken the soil; indeed, cultivated Japan reeks with manures. Rice, tea, potatoes, and other products are exported to the value of millions. Paper plants are extensively cultivated. American experts are now endeavoring to secure and establish in the States the mitsuinata plants for the paper industry. The Japanese farmer not only grows, but also to an extent manufactures in this industry, as also in the silk industry, so that the little brown person, who is a great land holier when he owns one aero, is never idle. It is a wonderful example of the best effects of overcrowding the earth with human beings. Necessity drove the millions of Japan to make the most of every pound of soil that could be fertilised. Yet with alt her marvellous production and the astounding resourcefulness of the man with the hoe, Japan holds millions of people so near to starvation that they care not whether they exist or end the # wretched thing called life by hari-kan. According to the fanatics in intense culture a country has achieved its true purpose *wtieß#it has placed every human being on the soil that the soil, stimulated and worked to its last fraction of capacity, will carry. To healthy - minded people, however, the lot of the wretched toiler on the territory over-stocked with humanity k pitiable in tho extreme. The land in Australia is not so far half used, and rioter orcnoation must come, but it is to be honed that this new country may never see the day* when the farmer will not have room to turn his team on his own land.