ley
for grinding.

Only about one farmer in three has a horse or an ox; in most cases all
the work must be done by hand and with crude tools. {23} It is
pitiful--or rather I should say, it would be pitiful if they did not
appear so contented--to see men breaking the ground not by plowing but
by digging with kuwas: long-handled tools with blades perhaps six
inches wide and two feet long. At the Agricultural College farm in
Komaba I saw about thirty Japanese weeding rice with the kama--a tool
much like an old-fashioned sickle except that the blade is straight:
the right hand quickly cut the roots of the weed or grass plant and
the left hand as quickly pulled it up. With the same sickle-like kamas
about thirty other Japanese were cutting and shocking corn: they are
at least too advanced to pull fodder, I was interested to notice!

With land so scarce, it is of course necessary to keep something on
the ground every growing day from year's end to year's end. Truckers
and gardeners raise three crops a year. Rice, as a rule, is not sown
as with us, but the plants are transplanted as we transplant cabbage
or tomato plants (but so close together, of course, that the ripening
fields look as if they had been sown), in order that the farmer may
save the time the rice plants are getting to the transplanting stage.
That is to say, some other crop is maturing on the land while the rice
plants are growing large enough to transplant. Riding through the
country almost anywhere you will notice the tender young plants of
some new crop showing between the rows of some earlier-planted crop
now maturing or newly harvested.

The crops in Japan are not very varied. Rice represents half the
agricultural values. Next to rice is the silkworm industry, and then
barley, wheat, vegetables, soy beans, sweet potatoes, and fruits.
There is especial interest in fruit growing just now. Sweet potatoes
grow more luxuriantly than in any other country I have ever seen, and
are much used for food. I have seen one or two little patches of
cotton, but evidently only for home spinning, although I hear it said
that in Korea, which has just been formally annexed as Japanese
territory, cotton can be profitably grown. A much {24} cultivated
plant, with leaves like those of the lotus or water-lily, is the taro,
which I also saw growing in Hawaii; its roots are used for food as
potatoes are.

Every particle of fertility of every kind, as I have said, is
religious