177 



recognized by our modern writers as inseparable 

 from agriculture, and the principle of the system 

 is at least fully admitted on all hands, the only 

 objection occasionally raised against it being 

 that it requires a large supply of manure. But 

 the most enthusiastic admirer of the system 

 in Europe can hardly conceive how universally, 

 and in what high perfection, it is carried on 

 in Japan. 



The Japanese husbandman treats his field as 

 a plastic material, to be turned to account in 

 any way or form he pleases, just as a tailor may 

 fashion, out of a piece of cloth, cloaks, coats, 

 trowsers, or vests, and occasionally makes the one 

 out of the other. To-day we find a plot of ground 

 covered with a wheat crop ; eight days hence the 

 wheat is reaped, and half the field is transformed 

 into a swamp thoroughly saturated with water, in 

 which the farmer, sinking knee-deep, is busy 

 planting rice ; whilst the other half is a broad 

 and dry plot, raised two or two-and-a-half feet 

 above the rice-swamp, and ready to receive cotton, 

 or sweet-potatoes, or buck-wheat, or anything else 

 the farmer chooses to grow. It often happens also 

 that a square plot in the centre is turned into a 

 dry bed, surrounded by a broad rice-swamp ; and 

 as the water must cover the surface of the latter 

 only slightly, it is evident the levelling must have 



23 



