f mattock or spade labour.
There is no question about the severity of the labour of paddy
cultivation. For a good crop it is necessary that the soil shall be
stirred deeply.

Following the turning over of the stubble under water, comes the clod
smashing and harrowing by quadrupedal or bipedal labour. It is not
only a matter of staggering about and doing heavy work in sludge. The
sludge is not clean dirt and water but dirty dirt and water, for it
has been heavily dosed with manure, and the farmer is not fastidious
as to the source from which he obtains it.[74] And the sludge
ordinarily contains leeches. Therefore the cultivator must work
uncomfortably in sodden clinging cotton feet and leg coverings. Long
custom and necessity have no doubt developed a certain indifference to
the physical discomfort of rice cultivation. The best rice will grow
only in mud and, except on the large uniform paddies of the adjusted
areas, there is small opportunity for using mechanical methods.

One day when I went into the country it happened to be raining hard,
but the men and women toiled in the paddies. They were breaking up the
flooded clods with a tool resembling the "pulling fork" used in the
West for getting manure from a dung cart. On other farms the task of
working the quagmire was being done by two persons with the aid of a
disconsolate pony harnessed to a rude harrow. The men and women in the
paddies kept off the rain by means of the usual wide straw hats and
loose straw mantles, admirable in their way in their combination of
lightness and rainproofness. Often, besides the farmer's wife, a young
widow or a young unmarried woman may be seen at work, but, as was once
explained to me, "The old Miss is not frequent in Japan."[75]

Planting time arrives in the middle of June or thereabouts, when the
paddy has been brought by successive harrowings into a fine tilth or
rather sludge. It is illustrative of the exacting ways of rice that
not only has it to have a growing place specially fashioned for it, it
cannot be sown as cereals are sown. It must be sown in beds and then
be transplanted. The seed beds have been sown in the latter part of
April or the early part of May, according to the variety of rice and
the locality.[76] The seeds have usually been selected by immersion in
salt water and have been afterwards soaked in order to advance
germination. There is a little soaking pond on every farm. By the use
of this pond the period in