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You are near the southwestern end of the chief Island of the Mikado's empire. Oshima, with the high wooded hill, is only a small island where a few farmers and fishermen live; the farther hills, standing up against the sky, are on Shikoku, a large island including four provinces with a number of small towns; beyond Shikoku lie the vast open swells of the mighty Pacific. You can see by the look of the beach down below this bluff that the tide is low. 

This barley has been raised on a little farm behind you. Twenty bushels to the acre make a good crop. The men cut the stalks by hand with sickles and the women separate the heads from the stalks by pulling the stalks, a handful at a time, through iron combs. The straw has all been thriftily saved to mend the thatched roof and to weave matting, hats and baskets like those you see in present use. Now the barley kernels are being separated from the chaff by beating the heads with these awkward wooden clubs tied by ropes to handle poles. The straw matting is spread out to keep the grain clean. A good deal of it will be boiled and eaten like rice; some will be pounded into meal. It is a long, wearisome process. 

You see men and women work together here at the hardest tasks. Their wants are few and their expenses are hardly anything a year, but that means drawing almost every bit of their subsistence direct from the sea and the soil and they have to make up by hard physical toil that they lack in the way of apparatus and modern methods. Even here the countrywoman at the right has her ideals of correct costume and though her kimono is of cheap cotton she has arrayed herself in a gay striped sash (obi) such as city women wear, and tied behind in the most correct fashion, with big, square cushion-like loops below her waist. 

From Notes of Travel, No. 8, copyright, 1904, by Underwood & Underwood. 


Flailing Barley beside the Inland Sea; Japan. 
Battant l'Orge avec Fléaux à Côté de la Mer de l'Intérieur; Japon. 
Dreschen von Gerste am Binnen-See; Japan. 
Desgranando la Cebada al Lado del Mar Interior; Japón. 
Siktande korn bredvid insjön; Japan. 
Молотьба ячменя у Внутренняго моря; Японія.