Mr. N. K. ROSCOE : 'The Japanese
Farmer'
THE JAPANESE FARMER will be shown in this vivid talk as an individual and wholly admirable figure, skilful, industrious, scientific, and incredibly patient.
Even in England, where farms are small compared to America and the Dominions, one thinks of a farm of 200 acres as being of average size, and the tenant of it has to work from cockcrow to dark to keep the family going. It seems incredible, then, that seventy per cent. of Japanese farms run to no more than two to two and a half acres each, and the farmers and their families are able to subsist on them.
There is practically no pasture. The flats are paddy fields, the hills are mulberry orchards. Mulberry leaves feed the silkworms, an important asset to every farmer, requiring attention day and night. Imagine the patience of those people transplanting rice seedlings one by one for hours on end, having to stoop in mud and water to do it.
A picturesque person, the Japanese farmer, in his tunic and trousers of blue, wearing a mushroom hat and mackintosh of grass to keep off the rain.
N. K. Roscoe spent sixteen years in Japan, and eleven of them were connected with agriculture. He travelled over 54,000 miles throughout the whole Empire, meeting and lecturing to farmers. He speaks and reads Japanese.