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THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



Photograph from Publishers' Photo Service 



the: tea-pickers op japan wear long sleevelets or gloves to keep their 

 hands and arms from being scratched 



them natural and considerate and pro- 

 motes a resourcefulness and readiness to 

 help each other that must be experienced 

 to be understood. 



It is among such as these that one finds 

 human nature most unsophisticated and 

 unspoilt, nor has all that is artificial and 

 materialistic in our vaunted twentieth- 

 century civilization yet laid a paralyzing 

 hand upon that inborn simplicity and 

 courteous bearing which in days gone by 

 did so much to justify the title by which 

 the Japanese delighted that their land 

 should be known — Kunshi no Kokn — 

 "The Country of Gentlemen.'' 



One of the most striking features of the 

 countryside, to one who wanders out 



from the crowded life of the great towns, 

 is the extraordinary and minute care with 

 which the hills, rising abruptly, as most 

 of them do, from the alluvial plains and 

 the seashore, are terraced from base to 

 summit, wherever a single ear of rice or 

 corn can be made to grow, the resultant 

 landscape resembling nothing so much as 

 a gigantic chessboard decked in yellows, 

 gold, and greens of every shade. 



What makes these agricultural achieve- 

 ments the more astonishing is the fact 

 that they are attained with the most prim- 

 itive of instruments, for the peasantry 

 are the most conservative class in the na- 

 tion. The whole of their agricultural sys- 

 tem was borrowed from China nearly two 



