THE HARVEST FROM THE MUD
_Toyo-ashiwara-no-chiiho-aki-mizuho-no-Kuni_ (Land of plenteous ears
of rice in the plain of luxuriant reeds).
The vast difference between Far Eastern and Western agriculture is
marked by the fact that, except by using such a phrase as shallow
pond--and this is inadequate, because a pond has a sloping bottom and
a rice field necessarily a level one--it is difficult to describe a
rice field in terms intelligible to a Western farmer. The Japanese
have a special word for a rice field, _ta_, water field, written
[Kanji: ta]. It will be noticed that the ideograph looks like a water
field in four compartments. Another word, _hata_ or _hatake_,[59]
written [Kanji: hata], tells the story of the dry or upland field. It
is the ideograph for water field in association with the ideograph for
fire, and, as we shall see later on, when we make acquaintance with
"fire farming," an upland field is a tract the vegetation of which was
originally burnt off.
Many of us have seen rice growing in Italy or in the United States.
But in Japan[60] the paddies are very-much smaller than anything to be
seen in the Po Valley and in Texas. Owing to the plentiful water
supply of a mountainous land, cultivation proceeds with some degree of
regularity and with a certain independence of the rainy season; and
there has been applied to traditional rice farming not a few
scientific improvements.
There is a kind of rice with a low yield called upland rice which,
like corn, is grown in fields. But the first requisite of general rice
culture is water. The ordinary rice crop can be produced only on a
piece of ground on which a certain depth of water is maintained.
In order to maintain this depth of water, three things must be done.
The plot of ground must be made level, low banks of earth must be
built round it in order to keep in the water, and a system of
irrigation must be arranged to make good the loss of water by
evaporation, by leakage and by the continual passing on of some of the
water to other plots belonging to the same owner or to other farmers.
The common name of a rice plot is paddy, and the rice with its husk
on, that is, as it is knocked from the ear by threshing, is called
paddy rice. The rice exported from Japan is some of it husked and some
of it polished.
[Illustration: A 200-YEARS-OLD JAPANESE DRAWING OF THE RICE PLANT]
Some 90 per cent. of the rice grown in Japan is ordinary rice. The
remaining 10 per cent. is about 2 per cent. upland and 8 per cent,
glutinous[61]--the sort used for making the favourite _mochi_ (rice
flour dumplings, which few foreigners are able to digest). It would be
possible to collect in Japan specimens of rice under 4,000 different
names, but, like our potato names, many of these represent duplicate
varieties. Rice, again reminding us of potatoes, is grown in early,
middle and late season sorts.[62]
Just one-half of the cultivated area of Japan 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 Japanese
farmer labour so hard to grow it[65]. Intensively cultivated though
Japan 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 Japan 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 Japanese 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 assuredly 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 assortment of fields into
hotchpot and then to have the mass 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 Japan 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 surpassing 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 assembling 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
smashing 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 Japan."[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 illustrative of the exacting ways of rice that
not only has it to have a growing place specially fashioned 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 Shinto 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 assistance. 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; Japanese 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 Japanese
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 sunshine,
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."
Threshing 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 threshing 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 threshing machines. After the threshing 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 doshi_, 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 polishing 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 polishing mill driven by a water
wheel is working away by itself. After the polishing, the _mangoku
doshi_ 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.
[Illustration: SCATTERING ARTIFICIAL MANURE IN ADJUSTED PADDIES.]
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 _hakumai_; cooked rice is _gohan_.
[Illustration: PLANTING OUT RICE SEEDLINGS.]
[Illustration: PUSH-CART FOR COLLECTION OF FERTILISER (TOKYO).]
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 saké"
made from this _gemmai_ rice is still used in Shinto ceremonies. In
order to produce clear _saké_ 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, Fukuoka, 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 Japan in an
ordinary year is 40-3/4 bushels. In the bumper 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.
[63] For wheat and barley crops, see Appendix XVI.
[64] A few rice plants may be seen growing at Kew.
[65] The cost of the rice crop and the income it yields are discussed
in Appendix XVII.
[66] See Appendix XVIII.
[67] In Japanese rural statistics the word plain may be said to mean a
tract of land which is neither cultivated nor timbered nor used for
the purposes of habitation. Sometimes it is called prairie, but this
is not always correct as it is very often a barren waste, a tract of
volcanic ash, or an area producing bamboo grass. Some of this land,
however, could be cultivated after proper irrigation, etc. In this
note, plains is employed in the ordinary acceptation of the word. Of
such plains there are several. The plain in which Tokyo is situated is
82,000 acres in extent. The traveller from Kobe to Tokyo passes
through the Kinai plain in which Kobe, Kyoto and Osaka stand. It is
said to feed 2-1/2 million people. Four other plains are reputed to
feed 7-1/2 million.
[68] Rivers supply about 65 per cent. of the paddy water and
reservoirs about 21 per cent. The remainder has to be got from other
sources.
[69] An acreage of a _tan_ is aimed at, but it is frequently larger;
it may even be 4 _tan_ (an acre). The cost ranges from about 8 yen to
50 yen per _tan_. The average increase in yield alter adjustment is
about 15 per cent., to which must be added the yield of the new land
obtained, say 3 per cent. of the area adjusted. The consent of half
the owners is required for adjustment.
[70] Once when a friend in Tokyo had trouble with her servants a maid
informed her that the house was unlucky because a certain necessary
apartment faced the wrong point of the compass.
[71] In the whole of Japan by 1919 two million and a half acres had
been adjusted or were in course of adjustment.
[72] The rent is usually 57 per cent. of the rice harvest in the
paddies and 44 per cent. (in cash or kind) of the crops on the
non-paddy land. Any crop raised in the paddies between the harvesting
of one rice crop and the planting out of the next belongs to the
farmer. (All taxes and rates are paid by the landlord, and amount to
from 30 to 33 per cent. of the rent.) The area under paddy and the
area of upland under cultivation are almost equal.
[73] See Appendix XIX.
[74] See Appendix XX.
[75] In 1920 there were 38,922,437 males and 38,083,073 females.
[76] See Appendix XXI.
[77] See Appendix XXII.
[78] The harvest extends from mid-September in the north of Japan to
the end of October or beginning of November in the south. The harvest
is taken early in the north for fear of frost.
[79] The "210th day" (counted from the beginning of spring), when
flowering commences, is so critical a period that the weather
conditions during the twenty-four hours in every prefecture are
reported to the Emperor.