in
the family." On the problem of rich and poor he quoted the proverb,
"The very rich cannot remain very rich for more than three
generations; a poor family cannot long remain poor." He said that he
would be interested to know what I found to be "the causes of our
villagers becoming good or bad." "For ourselves," he said, quoting
another proverb, "'At the foot of the lighthouse it is dark.'"

THE MOST EXACTING CROP IN THE WORLD

CHAPTER VIII

THE HARVEST FROM THE MUD

_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