The Birmingham age-herald., 1904-05-01
JAPANESE DISCIPLINE.
Patience and High Respect for the
 Law Are General.

From the London Globe.
 The Japanese soldier is drawn mainly from the class of the heimin or com moners, and as agriculture is still, in splre of the recent progress in manufacture, the staple occupation of Japan. the Ja- panese soldier comes mostly from fam fly of peasants. The peasants of Japan were always part proprietors of the land, even before the revolution; they farmed it under certain conditions, paying so much of the produce, sometimes hall, sometimes two-fifths, to the daimo of the province. Theoretically the land belonged to the lord, but in reality he very sell dom enforced his power of taking it away from the peasant in occupation. In the same way today all the land belongs theo- . retically to the emperor. but it is own ed by the peasant under certain condi- tions of taxes and so forth. One does not need to be an agriculturist to appreciate the care with which the Japanese peasant farms his land. Rudyard Kipling in the record of his nasty journey from Kobe to Tokyo, observed a farmer going over his bean crop stalk by stalk, and every traveller to Japan must have noticed the rice fields growing, not only in the plains, where irrigation is simple, but up the sides of the hills, which are sometimes terraced in fields from top to bottom. have seen rice fields not larger than
 
 uncompromisng powders on a mountain elde, which had been literally created with basketfuls of earth. Their irriga- ton was a Chinese puzzle. In agriculture the Japanese peasant has bulldog per severance which that ugly intelligent bull let head of his does not belle. What is more, he contrives to express in it that artistic soul which animateS his whole race. His fields are rarely square. I think l was never more struck with the innate art of the nation than when standing in front of the deserted temple of Tesshuji. I looked down over the miles of fertile plain which stretch like a broad band along the cost from the province of Su- ruga into the peninsula of Tzaru. Above rose the blue line of Fuji. crowned wiln snow. The rice fields at that season were mere pools of liquid mud, each set in a low mud wall, ugly and dreary in the extreme, and yet not monotonous. It took some looking 10 find the reason. It was this: Few of those fields were square; not two were identical in shape in most the low mud walls were curved as gracefully as the lines in Greek vase There was no agricultural reason Tor these ever varying yet always grace ful shapes. It was merely the expression of art in the mind of the peasant
 It has been said of the Japanese sol nier that he is singularly amendable to discipline. One nas only to see a Japanese .. "N coiiAi oiiteu py - pouceInan 10 know that. Most of the policemen, as we'll as the officers of the army in Japan. be- long to the old samurai class. and their power over the people is enormous. nave seen surging crowd In the midst of a religious festival at Kioto, damned between the car of the god and the fam Ing torches of the priests, give way in- stantly, politely and in order at the mere wave of the hand of one white uniformed policeman. Yet this implicit obedience Is not slavish fear. It is respect for au- thority.