The Foundations of Japan Part 9

Just one-half of the cultivated area of j.a.pan is devoted to paddy, but there is to be added to this area under rice more than a quarter million acres producing the upland rice, the yield of which is lower than that of paddy rice. The paddy and upland rice areas together make up more than a half of the cultivated land. The paddies which are not in situations favourable to the production of second crops of rice (they are grown in one prefecture only) are used, if the water can be drawn off, for growing barley or wheat or green manure as a second crop[63].

It is not only the Eastern predilection for rice and the wet condition of the country, but the heavy cropping power of the plant[64]--500 _go_ per _tan_ above barley and wheat yields--that makes the j.a.panese farmer labour so hard to grow it[65]. Intensively cultivated though j.a.pan is, the percentage of cultivated land to the total area of the country is, however, little more than half that in Great Britain[66].

This is because j.a.pan is largely mountains and hills. Level land for rice paddies can be economically obtained in many parts of such a country by working it in small patches only. There is no minimum size for a j.a.panese paddy. I have seen paddies of the area of a counterpane and even of the size of a couple of dinner napkins.

The problem is not only to make the paddy in a spot where it can be supplied with water, but to make it in such a way that it will hold all the water it needs. It must be level, or some of the rice plants will have only their feet wet while others will be up to their necks.

The ordinary procedure in making a paddy is to remove the top soil, beat down the subsoil beneath, and then restore the top soil--there may be from 5 to 10 in. of it. But the best efforts of the paddy-field builder may be brought to naught by springs or by a gravelly bottom. Then the farmer must make the best terms he can with fortune.

Paddies, as may be imagined from their physical limitations, are of every conceivable shape. There is a.s.suredly no way of altering the shape of the paddies which are dexterously fitted into the hillsides.

But large numbers of paddies are on fairly level ground.[67] There is no real need for these being of all sizes and patterns. They are what they are because of the degree to which their construction was conditioned by water-supply problems, the financial resources of those who dug them or the position of neighbours' land. And no doubt in the course of centuries there has been a great deal of swapping, buying and inheriting. So the average farmer's paddies are not only of all shapes and sizes but here, there and everywhere.

Therefore there arose wise men to point out that for a farmer to work a number of oddly shaped bits of land scattered all about the village was uneconomical and out of date. (Like the old English strip system which still survives in the Isle of Axholme.) So what was called an adjustment of paddy fields was carried out in many places. The farmers were persuaded to throw their varied a.s.sortment of fields into hotchpot and then to have the ma.s.s cut up into oblong fields of equal or relative sizes. These were then shared out according to what each man had contributed. In some cases a little compensation had to be given, for there were differences in the qualities as well as the areas of the holdings. But reasonable justice was eventually done all round, and ever afterwards a farmer, now that his holding was in adjoining tracts, might spend his time working in his paddies instead of in walking to and from them. Because many unnecessary paths and divisions between paddies were done away with there was brought about a saving of labour and increased efficiency of cultivation. There was also a little more land to cultivate and the paddies were big enough for an ox or a pony to be employed in them, and the water supply was better and sufficiently under control for floods to be averted.[68] In brief, costs were lower and crops were better.[69]

Thus all over j.a.pan nowadays one sees considerable tracts of adjusted paddy fields. They are a joy to the rural sociologist. In its way there has been nothing like it agriculturally in our time. For each of these little farmers valued his odds and ends of paddy above their agricultural worth. He or his forbears had made them or bought them or married into them. And he believed that his own paddies were in a condition of fertility surpa.s.sing not a few, and he doubted greatly whether after adjustment he would find himself in possession of as valuable land as his own. Sometimes also he believed that his paddies were especially fortunate geomantically.[70] Yet, convinced by the arguments for adjustment, the peasant agreed to the proposed rearrangement, let his old tracts go and accepted in exchange neat oblongs out of the common stock. Sometimes so great was the change brought about in a village by adjustment that more than the paddies were dealt with. Cottages were taken to new sites and the bones in many little grave plots were removed. In a village in which there had been an exhumation of the bones of 2,700 persons and a transference of tombstones, I was told that the a.s.sembling together of the remains of the departed in one place "had had a unifying effect on the community." In this village within a period of twelve years 96 per cent. of the paddies had been adjusted.[71]

An advantage of adjustment which has not yet been mentioned is that adjusted paddies can usually be dried off at harvest and can therefore be put under a second crop, usually of grain. More than a third of the paddy-field area of the country can be dried off, and therefore produces a second crop of barley or wheat. The farmer has two advantages if, owing to adjustment or natural advantages, he is able to dry off his land. Of the first or rice crop, if he is a tenant farmer, he has had to pay his landlord perhaps 60 per cent, in rent, less straw;[72] but the second crop is his own. The further advantage is that second-crop land can be cultivated dry shod. One-crop paddy is under water all the year round, and must be cultivated with wet feet and legs.

It is because more than half the paddies are always under water that rice cultivation is so laborious. Think of the Western farm labourer being asked to plough and the allotment holder to dig almost knee-deep in mud. Although much paddy is ploughed with the aid of an ox, a cow or a pony,[73] most rice is the product of mattock or spade labour.

There is no question about the severity of the labour of paddy cultivation. For a good crop it is necessary that the soil shall be stirred deeply.

Following the turning over of the stubble under water, comes the clod smas.h.i.+ng and harrowing by quadrupedal or bipedal labour. It is not only a matter of staggering about and doing heavy work in sludge. The sludge is not clean dirt and water but dirty dirt and water, for it has been heavily dosed with manure, and the farmer is not fastidious as to the source from which he obtains it.[74] And the sludge ordinarily contains leeches. Therefore the cultivator must work uncomfortably in sodden clinging cotton feet and leg coverings. Long custom and necessity have no doubt developed a certain indifference to the physical discomfort of rice cultivation. The best rice will grow only in mud and, except on the large uniform paddies of the adjusted areas, there is small opportunity for using mechanical methods.

One day when I went into the country it happened to be raining hard, but the men and women toiled in the paddies. They were breaking up the flooded clods with a tool resembling the "pulling fork" used in the West for getting manure from a dung cart. On other farms the task of working the quagmire was being done by two persons with the aid of a disconsolate pony harnessed to a rude harrow. The men and women in the paddies kept off the rain by means of the usual wide straw hats and loose straw mantles, admirable in their way in their combination of lightness and rainproofness. Often, besides the farmer's wife, a young widow or a young unmarried woman may be seen at work, but, as was once explained to me, "The old Miss is not frequent in j.a.pan."[75]

Planting time arrives in the middle of June or thereabouts, when the paddy has been brought by successive harrowings into a fine tilth or rather sludge. It is ill.u.s.trative of the exacting ways of rice that not only has it to have a growing place specially fas.h.i.+oned for it, it cannot be sown as cereals are sown. It must be sown in beds and then be transplanted. The seed beds have been sown in the latter part of April or the early part of May, according to the variety of rice and the locality.[76] The seeds have usually been selected by immersion in salt water and have been afterwards soaked in order to advance germination. There is a little soaking pond on every farm. By the use of this pond the period in which the seeds are exposed to the depredations of insects, etc., is diminished. The seed bed itself is about the width of an onion bed, in order that weeds and insect pests may be easily reached. The seed bed is, of course, under water. The seed is dropped into the water and sinks into the mud. Within about thirty or forty days the seedlings are ready for transplanting. They have been the object of unremitting care. Weeds have been plucked out and insects have been caught by nets or trapped. There is a contrivance which, by means of a wheel at either end, straddles the seed bed, and is drawn slowly from one end to the other. It catches the insects as they hop or fly up.

In many localities specially fine varieties are grown for seed on the land of the s.h.i.+nto shrines. In other localities special sorts are raised in ordinary paddies but surrounded by the rope and white paper streamers which represent a consecrated place. In not a few villages there are communal seed beds so that many farmers may grow the same variety, and there may be a considerable bulk for co-operative sale.

At transplanting time every member of the family capable of helping renders a.s.sistance. Friends also give their aid if it is not planting time for them too. The work is so engrossing that young children who are not at school are often left to their own devices. Sometimes they play by the ditch round the paddies and are drowned. Five such cases of drowning are reported from three prefectures on the day I write this. The suggestion is made that in the rice districts there should be common nurseries for farmers' children at planting time.

The rate at which the planters, working in a row across the paddy, set out the seedlings in the mud below the water, is remarkable.[77] The first weeding or raking takes place about a fortnight after planting.

After that there are three more weedings, the last being about the end of August. All kinds of hoes are used in the sludge. They are usually provided with a wooden or tin float. But most of the weeding is done simply by thrusting the hand into the mud, pulling out the weed and thrusting it back into the sludge to rot. The back-breaking character of this work may be imagined. As much of it is done in the hottest time of the year the workers protect themselves by wide-brimmed hats of the willow-plate pattern and by flapping straw cloaks or by bundles of straw fastened on their backs.

A sharp look-out must be kept for insects of various sorts. In more than one place I saw the boys and girls of elementary schools wading in the paddies and stroking the young rice with switches in order to make noxious insects rise. The creatures were captured by the young enthusiasts with nets. The children were given special times off from school work in which to hunt the rice pests and were encouraged to bring specimens to school.

There is no greater delight to the eye than the paddies in their early green, rippled and gently laid over by the wind. (One should say greens, for there is every tint from the rather woe-begone yellowish green of the newly planted out rice to the happy luxuriant dark green of the paddies that have long been enjoying the best of quarters.) As harvest time approaches,[78] the paddies, because they are not all planted with the same variety of rice, are in patches of different shades. Some are straw colour, some are reddish brown or almost black.

A poet speaks of the "hanging ears of rice." Rice always seems to hang its head more than other crops. It is weaker in the straw than barley, but rice frequently droops not only because of its natural habit, but because it has been over-manured or wrongly manured or because of wind or wet.

Beyond wind,[79] insects and drought, floods are the enemies of rice.

When the plants are young, three or four days' flooding do not matter much, but in August, when the ears are shooting, it is a different matter. The sun pours down and soon rots the rice lying in the warm water. Sometimes the farmer, by almost withdrawing the water from his paddies, raises the temperature of the soil with benefit to the crop.

The farmer is fortunate who is able to get the water completely out of his paddies by the time harvest arrives, but, as we have seen, two-thirds of the paddies must be harvested in sludge. Many crops are muddied before they can be cut. Sometimes on the eve of harvest the farmer wades in and tries, by arranging the fallen stems across one another, to keep some of the ears out of the water. But he is not very successful. Rice may lie in the wet a week or even the best end of a fortnight without serious damage. But all that this means is that within the period specified it may not sprout. It must be damaged to some extent even by a few days' immersion. The reason why it is not damaged more than it is is no doubt, first, because rice is a plant which has been brought up to take its chances with water, and in the second place because the thing which is known to the housewife as rice is not really the grain at all but the interior of the grain.

Western farmers are hard put to it when their grain crops are beaten down by wind and rain; j.a.panese agriculturists, because they gather their harvest with a short sickle, do not find a laid crop difficult to cut. But these harvesters are very muddy indeed. When the rice is cut and the sheaves are laid along the low mud wall of the paddy they are still partly in the sludge. We know how miserable a wet harvest is at home, but think of the slushy harvest with which most j.a.panese farmers struggle every year of their lives. The rice grower, although year in and year out he has the advantage of a great deal of suns.h.i.+ne, seldom gets his crop in without some rain. How does he manage to dry his October and November rice? By means of a temporary fence or rack which he rigs up in his paddy field or along a path or by the roadside. On this structure the sheaves are painstakingly suspended ears down. Sometimes he utilises poles suspended between trees. These trees, grown on the low banks of the paddies, have their trunks trimmed so that they resemble parasols.

When the sheaves are removed in order to be threshed on the upland part of the holding, they are carried away at either end of a pole on a man's shoulder or are piled up on the back of an ox, cow or pony.

The height of the pile under which some animals stagger up from the paddies gives one a vivid conception of "the last straw."

Thres.h.i.+ng is usually done by a man, woman, girl or youth taking as many stems as can be easily grasped in both hands and drawing the ears, first one way and then another, through a horizontal row of steel teeth. The flail is not used for thres.h.i.+ng rice but is employed for barley. Another common way of knocking out grain is by beating the straw over a table or a barrel. There are all sorts of cheap hand-worked thres.h.i.+ng machines. After the thres.h.i.+ng of the rice comes the winnowing, which may be done by the aid of a machine but is more likely to be effected in the immemorial way, by one person pouring the roughly threshed ears from a basket or skep while another worker vigorously fans the grain. The result is what is known as paddy rice.

The process which follows winnowing is husking. This is done in the simplest possible form of hand mill. Before husking the rice grain is in appearance not unlike barley and it is no easy matter to get its husk off. The husking mill is often made of hardened clay with many wooden teeth on the rubbing surface. After husking there is another winnowing. Then the grains are run through a special apparatus of recent introduction called _mangoku dos.h.i.+_, so that faulty ones may be picked out. The result is unpolished rice.

It looks grey and unattractive, and unfortunately the unprepossessing but valuable outer coat is polished away. This is done in a mortar hollowed out of a section of a tree trunk or out of a large stone. One may see a young man or a young woman pounding the rice in the mortar with a heavy wooden beetle or mallet. Often the beetle is fastened to a beam and worked by foot. Or the polis.h.i.+ng apparatus may be driven by water, oil or steam power. Constantly in the country there are seen little sheds in each of which a small polis.h.i.+ng mill driven by a water wheel is working away by itself. After the polis.h.i.+ng, the _mangoku dos.h.i.+_ is used again to free the rice from the bran. This polished rice is still further polished by the dealer, who has more perfect mills than the farmer.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SCATTERING ARTIFICIAL MANURE IN ADJUSTED PADDIES, p. 20]

The farmer pays his rent not in the polished but in the husked rice.

At the house of a former _daimyo_ I saw an instrument which the feudal lord's bailiff was accustomed to thrust into the rice the tenants tendered. If when the instrument was withdrawn more than three husks were found adhering, the rice was returned to be recleaned.

There are names for all the different kinds of rice. For instance, paddy rice is _momi_; husked rice is _gemmai_; half-polished rice is _hantsukimai_; polished rice is _hak.u.mai_; cooked rice is _gohan_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLANTING OUT RICE SEEDLINGS. p. 75]

[Ill.u.s.tration: PUSH-CART FOR COLLECTION OF FERTILISER (TOKYO). p. 49]

A century ago the farmer ate his rice at the _gemmai_ stage, that is in its natural state, and there was no _beri-beri_. The "black sake"

made from this _gemmai_ rice is still used in s.h.i.+nto ceremonies. In order to produce clear _sake_ the rice was polished. Then well-to-do people out of daintiness had their table rice polished. Now polished rice is the common food. Half-polished rice may be prepared with two or three hundred blows of the mallet; fully polished or white rice may receive six, seven or eight hundred, or even it may be a thousand blows.

FOOTNOTES:

[47] See Appendix VII.

[48] See Appendix VIII.

[49] Family in the French sense.

[50] See Appendix IX.

[51] See Appendix X.

[52] See Appendix XI.

[53] See Appendix XII.

[54] See Appendix XIII.

[55] It was recently stated that the consent of the authorities was awaited for collections to the amount of 20 million yen, of which 13-1/2 million were for the two Hongwanjis.

[56] For yields of new paddy, see Appendix XIV.

[57] See Appendix XII.

[58] It would be from 80 to 100 yen now.

[59] _Hata_ (upland field) is not to be confounded with _hara_ (prairie, wilderness, moor, often erroneously translated, plain).

[60] Rice is grown in every prefecture. The largest total yields are in Niigata, Hyogo, f.u.kuoka, Aichi, Yamagata, Ibariki and Chiba.

[61] See Appendix XV.

[62] The average yield of the three kinds at Government experimental farms--the middle variety yields best and next comes the late variety--is about 2-1/2 _koku_ per _tan_ or roughly (a _koku_ being about 5 bushels and a _tan_ about a quarter of an acre) about 45 bushels per acre. The average yield of ordinary rice in j.a.pan in an ordinary year is 40-3/4 bushels. In the b.u.mper year of 1920 the average yield was 41-1/3 bushels. In the year 1916 (to which most of the figures in this book, apart from the Appendix and footnotes, in which the latest available figures are given, refer) there was produced 58-1/4 million _koku_ of all kinds of rice, the value of which was 826-1/2 million yen. The normal yield (average of 7 years, excluding the years of highest and lowest production) is 54-1/2 million _koku_. See Appendix XV.