tiller." The old idea was patronage on the one side and respect on the
other. This idea is disappearing. "We wish," said one landlord to me,
"to pass through the transition stage gradually. We do not feel the
same responsibility to our people, perhaps, now that they do not show
the same reverence for us, but we do not say to them that they may go
to the factory and we will invest our money for our children. We check
ourselves. We know well, however, that things will change in our
grandsons' time. We therefore try to mix our grandfathers' ideas and
modern ideas. We are believers in co-operation and we try to be
counsellors and to work behind the curtain."

From time to time there are such things as tenants' strikes. Mr.
Yamasaki assured me that the problem of the rural districts can be
solved only by appealing to the feelings of the people in the right
way. He said that "the Japanese are largely moved by feelings, not by
convictions." In some coastwise counties, someone told me, a hurricane
destroyed the crops to such an extent that the tenants could not pay
rent, and the landlords who depended on their rents were impoverished.
Things reached such a pass that a hundred thousand peasants signed a
paper swearing fidelity to an anti-landlord propaganda. Officials and
lawyers achieved nothing. Then Mr. Yamasaki went, and, sitting in the
local temple, talked things over with both sides for days. He got the
landlords to say that they were sorry for their tenants and the
tenants to say that they were sorry for the landlords, and eventually
he was allowed to burn the oath-attested document in the temple.[33]

Many landlords are "endeavouring to cultivate a moral relation"
between themselves and their tenants. They have often the advantage
that their ancestors were the landlords of the same peasant families
for many generations. But there are still plenty of absentee landlords