A peasant proprietor expressed the conviction that goodness in a family was “not the result of its own efforts but of the accumulation of ancestral effort.”  The “ancestral merits and good spirit remain in the family.”  On the problem of rich and poor he quoted the proverb, “The very rich cannot remain very rich for more than three generations; a poor family cannot long remain poor.”  He said that he would be interested to know what I found to be “the causes of our villagers becoming good or bad.”  “For ourselves,” he said, quoting another proverb, “‘At the foot of the lighthouse it is dark.’”

THE MOST EXACTING CROP IN THE WORLD

CHAPTER VIII

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.