42 AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY. 



the rich low-lands in Mino, the rice-land did not lie fallow, and its 

 winter crops, especially barley and rape-seed, are not harvested 

 till June, so that the field cannot be got ready for young rice-plants 

 before the middle or end of this month. 



By far the greater part of the rice-land of Japan lies fallow all 

 winter and, covered in part with water, forms a kind of swamp, the 

 rendezvous of wild ducks, geese, and snipe. This is especially the 

 case where the ground is not adapted to producing two crops a 

 year, either because the winter is too long and the season of 

 vegetation limited to a few months, or because the soil is com- 

 posed mostly of the less fertile products of disintegration, — old 

 schists and crystalline rocks, — and therefore requires an occasional 

 rest. But this is the only sort of rotation thought of in the rice- 

 land of Eastern Asia. It has served the same purposes every 

 summer for many centuries. 



In other countries rice-fields are worked with the plough, drawn 

 by buffaloes or oxen. In Japan and China this work is generally 

 done by hand. The labourer goes about it barefoot and clothed 

 only in coarse, hemp-linen drawers, reaching to the loins. His 

 usual implement is a long-handled, three-pronged hoe, or a small 

 spade. Thus one seldom observes draught animals used in rice 

 farming — in the neighbourhood of Tokio and Nagasaki, for in- 

 stance. In certain other districts, however, as at Ozaka and in the 

 province of Mino, the land is ploughed. 



The dams about old rice-fields and canals are covered here and 

 there, in early May, with the beautiful blossoms of a kind of creep- 

 ing papilionaceae {Astragalus lotoides) as with a red carpet. At 

 this time the preparation of the fields for the young plants is 

 begun. To improve the ground, rape-straw, lime, and above all, 

 green manure are strewn over it, as in China. But green manure 

 is not produced here, as in China, by raising clover and other 

 plants for this purpose. It is rather a mixture of grass, weeds, 

 and underbrush, as they grow in abundance on the mountain- 

 slopes and in the clearings of forests. As noted on p. 30, women 

 and children gather this manure and carry it in bundles to the 

 field, for which work the women a^^e clad like the men, in home- 

 made light-blue coarse hemp-linen drawers and blouse. When, 

 however, this green manure has to be got higher and farther back 

 in the mountains, it is carried on pack-horses. This vegetable 

 manure is either thrown into the furrows in ploughing or hoeing 

 the ground, or is scattered over its level surface, like powdered 

 quicklime. Being covered with mud and water, it decomposes 

 quickly, so that every trace of it disappears from the surface in 

 a few weeks. I have seen quicklime and hydrate of lime used 

 as manure for rice-land in the most widely different parts of the 

 country, though never for other crops, and generally where the soil 

 consisted of the products of crumbled schist and granite formation, 

 not yet containing much decayed vegetable matter, and seldom in 



