[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.