4+8 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



pursuits, and on the ownership and use of ships, boats, and ve- 

 hicles. The land taxes, however, contribute the largest amount of 

 revenue to the national treasury, furnishing about seventy per 

 cent of its receipts, exclusive of the local land taxes ; and in many 

 districts of Japan the total amount yielded by the farmer to the 

 Government, national and local, was estimated in 1891 at even 

 more than fifty per cent of his crop.* 



Very curiously, the responsibility for the existence and con- 

 tinuance of this extraordinary system of land taxation in Japan, 

 which finds no parallel in any other country, and the incidence of 

 which constitutes such a burden on the mass of its population, 

 has until a very recent period rested with foreign nations rather 

 than the Japanese Government, and in this wise : When treaties 

 were first made by foreign nations with Japan, after the open- 

 ing of its ports and the abandonment of its old-time system of 

 non-intercourse with the rest of the world, it was assumed on 

 the part of the former that the Government and people of 

 Japan were in a semi-barbarous condition, and ought to be 

 treated as such in all political and commercial negotiations ; and 

 that in respect to trade and commerce the greatest advantage 

 should be taken of the weaker nation that circumstances would 

 permit. The leading nations of Europe and the United States 

 accordingly stipulated, in their treaties with Japan, that it should 



* " This statement, however, gives no indication of the true condition of the Japanese 

 farmer. In this country, where the Government performs so many functions which in 

 America are left to the individual, a high rate of taxation is not necessarily an indication of 

 poverty or of a low standard of living. With a sufficiency of land and a variety of crops, 

 even the Japanese farmer can live comfortably, especially if a good fraction of his land is 

 dry field (hata), on which he generally raises two crops a year. Very few of the farmers 

 of Japan, however, are in this condition of tolerable comfort. The amount of the culti- 

 vated land of the empire is so small (less than twelve per cent of the whole area) and the 

 population so large (over forty millions) that the land belonging to each family is absurdly 

 insufficient. The average holding is less than two acres, subdivided into smaller parcels, 

 which vary in size in different provinces, but average nearly one eighth of an acre each. 

 Thus, to picture a typical Japanese farm, one must imagine a piece of land less than two 

 acres, cut up into about fourteen pieces, or bits, each separated from the other by a raised 

 path of earth. Even then the picture is incomplete, since the bits belonging to one farmer 

 are not necessarily adjacent to each other, but frequently many a rood apart. Such a beg- 

 garly amount of land, even under the most perfect system of cultivation, can not of course 

 yield sufficient to bring up a family according to Western standards of comfort. The idea 

 of wages, or remuneration for labor, scarcely enters the Japanese farmer's mind ; he is con- 

 tent if, after paying his taxes, he can in some rough fashion merely make both ends meet. 

 At any fair rate of wages, farming is carried on at a loss in Japan. The farmer seldom 

 eats the rice he grows, generally using barley or millet as a cheaper means of subsistence. 

 His expenditures are on an infinitesimal scale ; the clothes of the family are often heir- 

 looms handed down from generation to generation ; and as for saving anything from year 

 to year, the practice is so little known in this country as hardly to be considered a virtue." 

 Correspondence New York Nation, 1891. 



