Toyo-ashiwara-no-chiiho-aki-mizuho-no-Kuni (Land of plenteous ears of rice in the plain of luxuriant reeds).
The vast difference between Far Eastern and Western agriculture is marked by the fact that, except by using such a phrase as shallow pond—and this is inadequate, because a pond has a sloping bottom and a rice field necessarily a level one—it is difficult to describe a rice field in terms intelligible to a Western farmer. The Japanese have a special word for a rice field, ta, water field, written [Kanji: ta]. It will be noticed that the ideograph looks like a water field in four compartments. Another word, hata or hatake, [[59]] written [Kanji: hata], tells the story of the dry or upland field. It is the ideograph for water field in association with the ideograph for fire, and, as we shall see later on, when we make acquaintance with "fire farming," an upland field is a tract the vegetation of which was originally burnt off.
Many of us have seen rice growing in Italy or in the United States. But in Japan[[60] ] the paddies are very-much smaller than anything to be seen in the Po Valley and in Texas. Owing to the plentiful water supply of a mountainous land, cultivation proceeds with some degree of regularity and with a certain independence of the rainy season; and there has been applied to traditional rice farming not a few scientific improvements.
There is a kind of rice with a low yield called upland rice which, like corn, is grown in fields. But the first requisite of general rice culture is water. The ordinary rice crop can be produced only on a piece of ground on which a certain depth of water is maintained.
In order to maintain this depth of water, three things must be done. The plot of ground must be made level, low banks of earth must be built round it in order to keep in the water, and a system of irrigation must be arranged to make good the loss of water by evaporation, by leakage and by the continual passing on of some of the water to other plots belonging to the same owner or to other farmers. The common name of a rice plot is paddy, and the rice with its husk on, that is, as it is knocked from the ear by threshing, is called paddy rice. The rice exported from Japan is some of it husked and some of it polished.
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]].