RICE GROWING
VIII. THE BREAD OF NOGI, WUNG FOO AND MANUELO
If you should ever go to japan, one of the very first things you would want to buy is a fat little image that is to be found in all the curio shops. It will remind you of Billikens, the comical little "god of things as they ought to be." A jolly fellow is this Japanese Dai Goku. He always sits like a well-fed miller on a pile of grain bags. If you cannot remember his name, just try asking for Oryza San. That means Honorable Mr. Rice God. Dai Goku is the deity of good fortune who brings big rice crops, and gives everybody plenty to eat. No wonder he is popular. His image is in thousands of low, thatch-roofed, wooden houses, in the farm villages of Japan.
The Japanese are such hard workers, and such wonderfully clever farmers, that Dai Goku really cannot have much to do but sit in a little niche and grin, and make the toilers feel cheerful. But that helps wonderfully. "A merry heart goes all the day," you know. In japan, the day begins early and ends late, and everybody but much-beloved, honorable grandmother and the baby-who-never- cries, has to work. From every farm village a procession of men, women and children marches to the rice fields at dawn. They all wear single, short garments of blue cotton, and butter-bowl shaped straw hats, as big as a little girl’s Sunday parasol. Their legs are bare to the knees, for rice is a flood crop, and they have to slop around in mud and water all day.
In swamps? No, indeed. Rice doesn’t like sour marsh land that is always flooded. Japanese rice farms are just as likely as not to be perched up on a steep mountain slope. Japan is nearly all rough country, with deep valleys and high mountains. But so many millions of people are crowded into the country, that every little bit of good land has to be made use of. Fortunately there is plenty of water. Hundreds of sparkling brooks tumble and foam down the rocks, bringing good soil with them. The Japanese dam these streams high up, and lead the water down through ditches that wind from one little farm to another, and drop from level to level. They cut the slopes, too, into broad shelves or terraces, and bank
