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.