Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/32

20 great request. Spades of various shapes, harrows, and sickles are. also used, together with an extremely rude type of flail and stamping-trough; but Japanese rural economy knows nothing of wagons or wheelbarrows.

The Chinese and Japanese enumerate five cereals as the staples to which agricultural labour should be devoted. These are rice, barley, wheat, millet, and beans. But rice ranks above all the rest, equal in fact to all the others put together. These others are grown chiefly as winter crops, when the rice-fields have to lie fallow, or else in small patches, or on the higher ground, which want of water or a harsher climate renders unfit for the cultivation of the more important commodity.

The preparation of the rice-fields "paddy-fields," as Europeans often call them—is extremely arduous, involving not only much hoeing, but the construction of perforated mud dams and a whole system of terracing, whereby water from a neighbouring stream is led gradually down from field to field;—for all high-class rice requires flooding, only an inferior sort being grown in the dry. Various manures are employed. The commonest is night-soil, whose daily conveyance all about the country apparently causes no distress to native noses. The seed is sown in small beds about the end of April, and it sprouts in five or six days. Early in June, the young shoots are plucked up and transplanted in rows. The generally lifeless fields may at that time be seen full of men and women standing knee-deep in the water and mud. Then comes the hot summer. What traveller in Japan will not recall, as the most characteristic feature of the summer landscape, those fields of vivid green, separated—chessboard-like—into squares which fill a gradually widening valley flanked by hills that rise abruptly, as if the whole had been cut out by the hand of man, as indeed it has through centuries of terracing?

The rice-plant blossoms early in September, is reaped in October, and then hung up on short poles. Threshing is done