its chances with water, and in the
second place because the thing which is known to the housewife as rice
is not really the grain at all but the interior of the grain.

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 appear