I.
FIRST GLIMPSES OF JAPAN.
We left the United States from Seattle for Shanghai,
China, sailing by the northern route, at one P. M. February
second, reaching Yokohama February 19th and Shanghai,
March 1st. It was our aim throughout the journey
to keep in close contact with the field and crop problems
and to converse personally, through interpreters or otherwise,
with the farmers, gardeners and fruit growers
themselves; and we have taken pains in many cases to visit the
same fields or the same region two, three or more times at
different intervals during the season in order to observe
different phases of the same cultural or fertilization methods
as these changed or varied with the season.
Our first near view of Japan came in the early morning of February 19th when passing some three miles off the point where the Pacific passenger steamer Dakota was beached and wrecked in broad daylight without loss of life two years ago. The high rounded hills were clothed neither in the dense dark forest green of Washington and Vancouver, left sixteen days before, nor yet in the brilliant emerald such as Ireland's hills in June fling in unparalleled greeting to passengers surfeited with the dull grey of the rolling ocean. This lack of strong forest growth and even of shrubs and heavy herbage on hills covered with deep soil, neither cultivated nor suffering from serious erosion, yet surrounded by favorable climatic conditions, was our first great surprise.
