36 WORCESTER COUNTY HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. [1904. 



150,000 square miles and a population of nearly fifty millions. 

 Of its area scarcely more than one-eighth is arable, in fertile 

 valleys span-wide, amid the mountains, and broadening to the 

 sea. The mountains, of volcanic formation unsmoothed by 

 glacial Action, are wild and broken, bearing shrubs wherever 

 a foothold is given, and having their lower slopes often carefully 

 covered by government forests. Every inch of fertile land is 

 used in intensive agriculture; and nature in all her forms is 

 appreciated and employed in material or aesthetic service. The 

 climate through that long reach of latitude varies from semi- 

 tropical to where snow buries the villages during the months 

 of a long winter. 



A few words concerning Japanese agriculture in general may 

 now not be inappropriate. All labor is manual except in the 

 Hokkaido, where, I am told, American methods and machines 

 are employed on the more extensive farms. In the agriculture 

 of this section the influence of such men as Stockbritlge, Brooks 

 and others of our educators, who from New England went 

 forth to teach and to learn, is vitally effective. The central 

 and southern islands afford but slight opportunity for the 

 introduction of our methods of agriculture, for reasons topo- 

 graphical and social that I cannot here recount. 



Rice is the great staple. Seven million acres are cultivated, 

 with an average yield of about twenty-six bushels per acre. 

 Wheat, rye, barley, peas and beans, millet, buckwheat, rape, 

 potatoes, Irish and sweet, are also raised in large quantities, 

 tliough to none is given more than one-seventh as much area 

 of cultivation. Small fields, often not more than thirty feet 

 square, with levees a foot wide, curved and crooked, within 

 which no draught animal can labor, are the usual farm lands. 

 Nothing is sown l^roadcast, but in hill or drill; and the levee 

 sides are planted with pulse. The soil is worked with spade 

 and mattock, and kept fertilized with straw-ash and night- 

 soil, for the gathering of which every home in city and country 

 is visited, and for retaining which tanks are sunk in the corner 

 of every field. 



The rice is first planted thickly in seed-beds which are kept 



