I am fifty-five years old, the housewife of a farmer's household. I was born 1895 in Ishima-son, near Okayama, the youngest child among one boy and three girls, in a farmer's house.

I was beloved by my parents and sisters and passed a pleasant childhood. In the spring after I turned seven I entered Ishima Primary School with my hair done in a plait tied with a ribbon and wearing a brown hakama skirt for the time. I was by turns full of joy and shyness. At that time school pupils had narrow-sleeved garments with sashes and aprons for everyday wear, and on special days we wore black garments with a crest and long, figured sleeves.

In the winter of my thirteenth year, my father built a new house. I came home from school and found my family busily pounding rice for rice cakes in two motars, side by side, singing loudly "From the High Mountain!" The next morning carpenters came early and raised a big house with the help of villagers and relatives. They fixed shelves when only the main posts were raised, decorated them handsomely with various masks, wheel fans, and gihei [purificatory cut-paper pendants], and beside them they set crates of rice cakes sent in congratulations by relatives. And then everyone [of the family], dressed in haori and hakama with family crest, divided into groups to toss the big, square rice cakes down the four corners and to throw smaller cakes with all their might out and down. People from the village and nearby jostled each other catching these rice cakes. I too climbed up and threw the cakes to my friends down below as I could. It was such fun. I can still see them gathering the cakes up.

Eight years of school life were ordinary, perhaps, but constantly happy. After I finished school I went to a girl's sewing school in Okayama City and studied the art of sewing, and on Sunday I used to study flower arrangement, and the tea ceremony with some friends. In these three years before graduating, I cherished the dreams that girls have. Then there followed a dreamlike period helped with housework at home and learned women's skills. In those days girls liked to wear their hair in either the momoware or shimada style.

In the spring after I turned twenty, my aunt arranged my engagement, and in October of that year I was married into the Hiramatsu family. At that time a bride used to ride off in a ricksha, her hair done up with combs, hairpins, and a red kanoko ornament. These were the days before the revamping of the rice fields [here], and I had a sinking feeling, wondering what sort of place I was being taken to as I was brought [for marriage] farther and farther west from 0kayama over the hills. The day after the wedding my mother-in-law took me to visit the village shrine and to greet our near neighbors. I remember how a man who looked like a shopkeeper said, "Why, this bride has come from near Okayama City!" because at that time when the roads were bad there was quite a difference in dress between Okayama City and here.

The next year, with the prefectural government's assistance, revision of the rice fields was started. There was a continual commotion, involving everyone, young and old, men and women alike, some moving dirt in trucks, others pounding their thousand strokes [on the rocks and dirt]. This took three or four years to finish, as I remember. Even as rustic as these parts are, they are now incomparably more pleasant and easier to farm than in the old days.

At first the new family ways were strange, but I learned to get along in the family and finally became used to the life and felt at home. Three years after my marriage my first daughter Kazuko was born, and everyone came around for congratulations. We had a big feast to celebrate the seventh day [after birth]. On the thirty-first day I dressed the baby in the ubugi [baby's kimono] which my family had sent and took her to the shrine to pray for protection that she might be strong and grow up to be a fine girl.

My days were happy as I cared for the baby, seeing her get affection from all the family as she grew up carefree. When she turned three, we held the himo otoshi ceremony for her; again, everyone came to congratulate us, and my family sent a set of festival clothes (haregii) for her. Our family here also made various things for her, and as I watched her going off to the shrine with her grandmother, wearing her long sleeves and high pokkuchi-geta I felt her as lovable as any doll.

When my first daughter was six, my first son was born and all the family were overjoyed to have a boy child--above all, my father-in-law. But just as we were busy preparing for the seventh-day celebration, he caught a slight cold and suddenly died the day before the celebration. We went through the funeral service in deep grief. The following autumn my favorite elder sister passed away, leaving three children behind her. For some time I was so heartbroken over her death t I lost my energy and couldn't go about my work. And then my second daughter was born and then died within sixty days. How bitter and thankless life seemed then.

But from that time on I watched over our single daughter as I would over a tender plant. When she was eight, she entered Kamo Primary School, and I for my part enjoyed helping her with her homework at night. We had an especially severe drought when Kazuko was in the second grade. Then my father-in-law, who never was sick and was as fine as ever in the morning, had a stroke when he went out to weed the rice, fainted, and died just as the doctor arrived. I shall sys regret that he died without even a single day's gentle nursing.

My daughter Kazuko was always well and finished her six-year course without serious illness. She then started to attend the Soja Girls' High School. She to put on her uniform and go over the hill daily four kilometers to school her friends, while I would pray that she would get safely home. Five years passed quickly as an arrow, and after her graduation she went to study dress-making, and learned how to keep house along with flower arrangement and the ceremony. When she was finishing these lessons, my mother-in-law took to bed and died after half a year of fruitless treatments.

At about this time I went up to Mt. Washiu on the annual outing of the Women's Association. We rode there in sections in eight big busses and spent a pleasant spring day. I have lived always surrounded with mountains, and the view down to the sea from the mountain top is still an unforgettable memory. I wish now sometimes that we could go out and refresh ourselves drinking in the sea air.

When my daughter was twenty-two, we adopted a son [for marriage], with my relatives serving as go-betweens. This fall was in the middle of the war and men were being called up to the colors. Our adopted son was working for a company in Yamaguchi Prefecture, and our daughter also went there. My husband and I were shorthanded and terribly busy at harvest time and worked with might and main from early in the morning till the stars were out above us without time to have a leisurely meal. In the meanwhile we got a pretty grandchild, and I went visiting in Yamaguchi two or three times.

Living in the country, we seldom ride on a train, so I felt the trip to Yamaguchi was very long. I was taken on a tour of such famous places as Miyajima and the Kintai Bridge in Iwakuni City, and the trip to beautiful and picturesque Itsukushima shrine by ferryboat is a lifelong memory.

The war news was being reported in each day's newspaper and radio. This was 1945, the year of the air raid on Okayama City, which makes me shiver just to recall it. As my relatives lived near Okayama City, I worried greatly about them. They were all burned out of their houses. I was relieved to think that my own family would be all right, for they lived away from the center part of Okayama City. But they took a direct hit and three children were burned to death, and family made a narrow escape with no more than the clothing on their backs, their house was burned right down to the foundation. Their distress is beyond my power to describe. This was one of the worst things in my life.

Two families from Okayama City evacuated to our house here, and at the end, my daughter and her husband came home, so that we had a big family all of a sudden and had a truly hard time getting along, since foodstuffs were so short then. In due time, however, the world returned to its senses. My relatives went one by one to build their houses at their old homesites; I have three grandchildren; and all the household is now happily together to try to raise our level of production. Bus service recently has been opened between Okayama and Soja, so that traveling is much pleasure when there is time to spare in taking the grandchildren with me to Okayama.

Formerly their black hair was as dear to women as their lives, but young girls these days actually go to get a permanent, and, in the city, ballroom dancing has become the rage. Even the social studies class that started in Kamo-son this year has dancing as part of its recreation activities, which is a great change from the past.

In April of this year we were surprised to see a strange car stop here, a thing which never had happened before. At that time I heard Mr. Eyre Japanese. Although I have often seen foreigners in Okayama City, I had never before spoken to one directly and was very impressed at hearing his good Japanese. Since then we have come to expect the visits of these scholars almost every day.

Niiike hamlet, since I came here, has been a peaceful and calm farming village. However, it was on the night of Constitution Day (May 3), a windy and rainy night, that a thief took advantage of the housewife's absence and broke into the most newly built home in Niiike, seriously wounded the husband, and fled, leaving us peaceable villagers in a state of alarm. Since then most of us have gotten watchdogs, but as the criminal is still at large, he has put us all on edge.

The other day I went to see our grandchildren's athletic meet and saw housewives joining in social dancing and the hundred-meter race, practices which leave me with open-mouthed astonishment as compared with the old days. Up till now, farm housewives would stay at home and be more than busy with cooking and other housework, but now they go out in ever larger numbers. I hope young women of today will bring back new knowledge to improve our living.

I have tried to write about my life just as it happened, uneducated though I am. I shall be very happy if my writing will be of any help.

I was born on December 1, 1897, and entered Kamo Primary School on April 1, 1905. I finished the six-year course in April, 1911. At that time only the six-year course was compulsory education, and the two-year higher course was added in 1913.

As my father's health was not very good, I started helping him with farming as soon as I finished my six-year course. In my spare time, I studied Japanese dressmaking. When I was about eighteen, farmers were wearing kimonos with sleeves. They worked with their sleeve ends tucked into a shoulder-harness belt [tasuki], shielded the back of their hands with handguards [tezashii], and wore leggings.

Formerly we had to weed fields bit by bit with a field hoe in summer. Looking k now, I can hardly believe how hard we worked then.

In growing wheat, we had to plow two or three times before sowing the seed. W would then cultivate, weed, and cut the wheat, harvesting it ear by ear and then threshing it on the "thousand tooth" and drying it on rice-straw mats. When thoroughly dried, the ears were beaten with the flail, sieved, winnowed in the winnower, and put into straw bags.

In rice-growing, harvest time is in November. The ears were removed on the "thousand tooth," spread out, about nine sho per straw mat, dried for four days, hulled in a pottery mortar. Only about three hyo (six bushels) could be hulled at once. We usually worked till about 11:00 at night. We threshed by daylight and hulled at night. At that time it used to take more than forty days to finish the round of harvesting, hulling, and wheat-planting.

I was married in April, 1916, when I was twenty years old and my husband twenty-four. On March 12, 1917, my first son Masayoshi was born; my second son Kiyoshi was born on October 3, 1919; my first daughter Yukiko on January 1, 1923; my third son Takeshi on March 12, 1926. I had four children. But my first son Masayoshi fell sick and died when he was six. I have never felt deeper grief. For a while afterward I did not work, I grew weak, and took no joy in anything. But after four or five years, I more or less forgot my dead baby. My third daughter Yukiko had been born in the meantime, and I finally got too busy to think of my dead child. I really feel the world has no sorrow more terrible than the death of one's own child.

There were no electric lights at that time. It was about in 1924 that we got electricity for the first time, and life began to be more convenient. Even if we got home after dark, the rooms were bright enough to work in, whereas when we had no electricity, we had to put up with it and go to bed in the dark. So the world changes.

Farming tools have changed, too, in these twenty years. For instance we now have weeders, motors, threshers, irrigation pumps, rice-cleaning machines, straw-rope machines, and so on. Farming has become easier than before. As against old days, I think particularly of weeders, threshing machines, and hulling machines. But of things that have not changed as culture has advanced, I think of rice-planting, where no machine can yet be used. We transplant rice by hand. But wheat-planting has been so changed that I can't imagine there is much room for more improvement.

The thirty-eight years from when I was sixteen to my present age of fifty-are like a dream. There has been a terrific rise in prices since prewar days, one hundred times, they say, and some things have gone as much as much as two hundred times higher.

What gives farmers the most trouble is taxes, and second is the high price of clothes. Rice prices are low, but fertilizer costs are high. We work from early in the morning till late at night, but if we forget to pay attention for a moment when our hands are full, we end up in the red. So the world changes.

On another subject my son Kiyoshi, when he was twenty, passed the physical examination for conscription and entered the First Infantry Regiment Imperial Guard in Tokyo on January 10, 1940. This was the first time my boy had been away from home, and I worried about him. I wondered how he was when it got cold. While he was away, I arranged for my daughter Yukiko to be married. A year later my husband passed the conscription physical examination and entered the Fukuyama Regiment. Then the Pacific War began and I worried all the more. And then my third son Takeshi went into the Navy. And I worried so terribly about my boys that I couldn't get to work.

But while I was worrying, the war ended. On August 19, 1945, Kiyoshi came home, right after the armistice. And then my daughter's husband returned safely; and Takeshi got back on October 20.

I was no end relieved to see both boys home.

Soon after their return we got a bride for my first son and planned to set up a branch family for Takeshi, the third son, and built a new house on October 11, 1949. On December 26, 1949, he got married, and I was much relieved to have him set up in his own house, on February 11. I felt then that my job was finished.

On May 3, 1950, he was sleeping alone, when somebody stole into his house and seriously wounded him in the head. At that time you, Dr. Beardsley, took him to the Tsuda Surgery in Okayama University Medical College. Really thanks to you, he got well after a twenty-one-day treatment in the hospital.

Eds. Note: Both of these autobiographical sketches are taken from Village Japan (344-348), published in 1959 by the University of Chicago Press and based on field research conducted from April 1950 to July 1954 at the hamlet of Niike in the prefecture of Okayama, southwestern Honshu, by a team from the Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan. The authors, Richard K. Beardsley, John W. Hall, and Robert E. Ward, who were respectively an anthropologist, historian, and political scientist, were assisted by geographer J. E. Eyre. As the authors comment, each sketch "was written only after urging by the American researcher made it difficult to refuse. Though introspective writings have an honored place in Japanese literature, it is not easy for proper countrywomen to expose their feelings to public view. Each account complements the other. The first deals mainly with its author's experiences as a mother; the second stresses her working life as a farm wife."