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]