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that for a farmer to work a number of oddly shaped bits of land scattered all about the village was uneconomical and out of date.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]