It is not only the Eastern predilection for rice and the wet condition of the country, but the heavy cropping power of the plant [[64]]—500 go per tan above barley and wheat yields—that makes the Japanese farmer labour so hard to grow it[ [65]]. Intensively cultivated though Japan is, the percentage of cultivated land to the total area of the country is, however, little more than half that in Great Britain[[66]]. This is because Japan is largely mountains and hills. Level land for rice paddies can be economically obtained in many parts of such a country by working it in small patches only. There is no minimum size for a Japanese paddy. I have seen paddies of the area of a counterpane and even of the size of a couple of dinner napkins.
The problem is not only to make the paddy in a spot where it can be supplied with water, but to make it in such a way that it will hold all the water it needs. It must be level, or some of the rice plants will have only their feet wet while others will be up to their necks. The ordinary procedure in making a paddy is to remove the top soil, beat down the subsoil beneath, and then restore the top soil—there may be from 5 to 10 in. of it. But the best efforts of the paddy-field builder may be brought to naught by springs or by a gravelly bottom. Then the farmer must make the best terms he can with fortune.
Paddies, as may be imagined from their physical limitations, are of every conceivable shape. There is assuredly no way of altering the shape of the paddies which are dexterously fitted into the hillsides. But large numbers of paddies are on fairly level ground.[[67]] There is no real need for these being of all sizes and patterns. They are what they are because of the degree to which their construction was conditioned by water-supply problems, the financial resources of those who dug them or the position of neighbours' land. And no doubt in the course of centuries there has been a great deal of swapping, buying and inheriting. So the average farmer's paddies are not only of all shapes and sizes but here, there and everywhere.
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that for a farmer to work a number of oddly shaped bits of land scattered all about the village was uneconomical and out of date.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]]
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]]
Planting time arrives in the middle of June or thereabouts, when the paddy has been brought by successive harrowings into a fine tilth or rather sludge. It is illustrative of the exacting ways of rice that not only has it to have a growing place specially fashioned for it, it cannot be sown as cereals are sown. It must be sown in beds and then be transplanted. The seed beds have been sown in the latter part of April or the early part of May, according to the variety of rice and the locality.[[76] ] The seeds have usually been selected by immersion in salt water and have been afterwards soaked in order to advance germination. There is a little soaking pond on every farm. By the use of this pond the period in which the seeds are exposed to the depredations of insects, etc., is diminished. The seed bed itself is about the width of an onion bed, in order that weeds and insect pests may be easily reached. The seed bed is, of course, under water. The seed is dropped into the water and sinks into the mud. Within about thirty or forty days the seedlings are ready for transplanting. They have been the object of unremitting care. Weeds have been plucked out and insects have been caught by nets or trapped. There is a contrivance which, by means of a wheel at either end, straddles the seed bed, and is drawn slowly from one end to the other. It catches the insects as they hop or fly up.