File:A glimpse of the isles of the Pacific (1907) (14760785856).jpg

Identifier: glimpseofislesof00whee (find matches)
Title: A glimpse of the isles of the Pacific
Year: 1907 (1900s)
Authors: Wheeler, William Webb, 1845- (from old catalog)
Subjects:
Publisher: (St. Joseph, Mo., Hardman press)
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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ugh most of them are in po\ertv,are energetic and industrious, and do not beg. There is agood street car line in Yokohama, but the natives usuallvwalk, and those who can afford it ride in jinrikshas. After a few days in Yokohama, we left for Tokyo, onlytwenty miles north by train; the railway passes through alevel plain, or \alley, which is in the highest state ofcultivation, all under irrigation, much of it planted to wheatand barley, which will be ready to harvest about June first.There are many other crops of vegetables, and occasionallya field of tea plants, which grow about three feet high andlook like a hardy shrub tree, also a few fields of mulberrybushes, to raise leaves which they feed to silk worms; butmost of the tillable land here is used for growing rice,which is just being planted now. The rice fields at presentha\e about three inches of water over them, and thefarmers are digging up the mud, getting the ground inreadiness to plant. They work all day in the water and 167
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mud up to their knees, with a long hoe, turning over thesoil. One would think this rather unhealthy work, butthese people think it is all right. Notwithstanding thelarge amount of rice grown, the Japanese do not raiseenough for their home consumption, and annually importabout 17,000,000 yen in value, of rice. The poorer peoplecannot afford rice as a diet, but use barley, with riceoccasionally as a luxury. All this plain is cut up by smallcanals for irrigation, and sub-divided into small lots ofabout an acre each, with a little earth bank raised aroundthe plots so that they can be flooded when necessarywithout interfering with other fields. In this vast plain, we saw no horses or oxen; the men,women and children do all the labor, planting, weedingand harvesting, without the aid of horsepower, and wherethe ground is a little too high to flood the field, they raisethe water by man-power pumps. They cannot afford tohave animals to do such work, as it would cost too much.1 have seen women

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