JAPAN. 35 



is expended in the rice fields of this country. Small, irregular fields 

 owned by conservative families make the use of labor-saving machinery 

 practically impossible, even if the Witter conservatism of the laborers 

 would permit machines to be used which would take away the only 

 occupation they have. 



A wrong impression of this interesting agriculture would be given 

 were one to fail to mention the efforts which the General Government 

 and the provincial governments air making to improve it. In fact. 

 no country except the United States has made such rapid progress as 

 Japan in the establishment of institutes of agricultural research. She 

 has copied our system and adapted it to her different conditions. 

 Within the last five or six years there have been established in the 

 provinces nine well-equipped experiment stations, which compare 

 favorably in their corps of specialists with those which were started 

 in America onlv a few years ago. One central station at Tokyo con- 

 trols these branch stations, or at least has supervision over them, 

 and disburses every year K!»o,000 gold t<> the party of experts, twenty- 

 six assistants, over seventy employees, and a hundred or so laborers, 

 who cany on this work. In addition to these nine branch stations. 

 there are a large number of municipal and prefectural stations scat- 

 tered through the country, and even one private station supported by 

 a marquis, formerly one of the Daimios, or feudal lords. Several of 

 these institutes of research were visited and the excellence of their 

 equipment was a surprise. They were, as a rule. neat, wooden labor- 

 atories, supplied with good apparatus and small working libraries, 

 and were surrounded by white-staked experiment plots, or provided 

 with glass houses for experiments with chemical fertilizers or breed- 

 ing cases for noxious insects. 



The directors and assistants are many of them industrious, enthu- 

 siastic men, who enjoy nothing so well as the use of their microscopes 

 or to study the habits of injurious insects. They delineate with extraor- 

 dinary skill the characters of the parasites, either fungous or insect. 



Chemical fertilizers monopolize the largest share of the attention of 

 these stations. The large number of factories of rape-seed cake, etc., 

 necessitates a correspondingly large number of analyses by the chem- 

 ists, and as many of the stations are directed by chemists who have 

 passed through the agricultural college of Komaba, where Professor 

 Loew (formerly in the United States Department of Agriculture) is 

 actively engaged in teaching, it is natural that the tendency of the 

 lines of research should be chemical. 



No provision has been made for any local control over these stations 

 by practical farmers, such as compose our boards of control in America. 

 As a result of this separation from the practical farmer there is 

 naturally a great lack of appreciation of the work done by the stations. 

 This tendency toward too close laboratory work and too little practi- 



