Foreign News: IN RURAL JAPAN

The plum blossoms and toads are out a month early in the warmest Japanese winter for years. Nevertheless, Japan's farmers, like farmers anywhere, worry about the weather—and everything else. Last week TIME Correspondent Sam Welles listened to their troubles in backroad villages less than 100 miles from Tokyo where no American had been seen since V-J day. He cabled:

At the village of Nakago, a bluff old man with a Dewey mustache said: "The food is not good now—but still people do not die off. Will the peace conference let Japanese migrate abroad? As things stand now, there seems nothing to do...