Rice Farming - as promised

Right, once again nearly a month has passed since my last post, but I’ve moved into an apartment now and so hopefully there’ll be a lot more time to type up something quickly.

Of course I don’t have the internet I was promised when I moved in, so I’ll have to type everything at home and then stroll out to park across the road to scab off a neighbour’s unsecured wireless connection.

So before I tell you about what’s happening now, I should probably let you catch up on a few things, starting with the promised depiction of the work on the rice fields.

Rice fields

 Job one – Grass and Weed trimming

The first thing that needed to be done in the rice field was to trim the banks around the edges of the field (my host, a smiley man named Yuhei, did this with a strimmers with a big metal blade that had no guard around it, so I was a bit nervous if he was attacking the grass nearby).  I followed with a rake and flung the cuttings around the field, trying to spread them out as much as possible.  On one of my first days I raked up a snake, who wasn’t best pleased, but Yuhei deftly flicked him into the field with his rake.  He then told me that some of the snakes bite.  I don’t think they were supposed to poisonous though, but I was always wary of them after that, although I didn’t see many after that. 

Once the grass had been cut and distributed around the paddy, Yuhei opened the irrigation channel to the field, redirecting the flow of water and it would start to fill up.

Job two - Cultivating

After the cutting, spreading and flooding of the field Yuhei would go out and cultivate it.  This involved heading down with his tractor to drag a machine with big spinning blades around the paddy, breaking down the grass and weeds and sticking them in the mud under the water.  This was usually done a few days later after the first task, although I’m not sure if this was because of time management or because the weeds needed time to break down.

I never got to drive the tractor.

Job three - Planting

The next mission was to plant the rice.  This could be done with any number of machines, each farmer I saw planting seemed to have their own mad looking contraption, from big beasts of things that could plant twelve or more rows at a time, to more modest ‘drag-along-behind-the-tractor’ affairs which could plant six rows or so.  In our case we had a little push-along yoke that looked like someone had taken the handlebars of a scooter and an outboard motor and stuck them at either end of a device that looked like an instrument of torture, which allowed us to plant four rows at a time.

The procedure for rice planting is as follows:

·   - Load up the planting machine with trays of rice seedlings (perhaps 500 or so seedlings per tray).   One tray is fed into each of the four planting mechanisms at the back of the machine, while others are placed on shelves on the top, as replacements.

·      -   Find a stupid foreigner and give him a fistful of loose seedlings and tell him to follow after you as you push your planter along, sticking the seedlings in the ground wherever the machine has missed.

·      -    Make sure that the machine misses as many places as possible to keep your help bent double for hours, wading through the muck and trying to place the seedlings in line with the machine’s rows.

·       -   When you’re finished planting by machine, grab a tray of seedlings yourself and start filling in the gaps left by the machine as well.  It’s very important that you go two to three times faster than your stupid foreigner, while at the same time seeming to move more slowly.  They'll really feel stupid then.

We also planted rows of seedlings the traditional way (no machines) on two occasions - once to show a group of school kids how it was done and a second time as a day out for families from the city.  This requires several people, each brandishing bunches of seedlings, standing along a length of rope which is pulled taut across the width of the paddy.  This line is has markers (in this case red tape) evenly spaced along it, at about 30cm apart, the idea being that each person takes their seedlings and places one at the points indicated by the marks, thus ensuring that the rice plants are evenly spaced.   Each person might be planting anything between four to six rows or more, depending on how many people you have and the size of the field, etc.  When one row is completed the people on each end of the rope move it forwards (or backwards, it depends which way you are working, as we went forwards the first day and backwards the second day.  I preferred backwards for some reason) 30cm, again to space the seedlings evenly.  It’s quite a simple concept (although I’m not sure how well I’ve explained it), and it doesn’t really take a master mind to catch on – thankfully. 

 BUT...

Both times that I was working in the fields in this way the woman on my left (I don’t know if it was the same woman as they tend to wear big straw hats, sunglasses and towels or handkerchiefs or whatever over the lower part of their face, I think to avoid the heat of the sun or to avoid getting a tan) started planting between the bloody markers.  Now whatever about the lady who did it on the second day (who may or may not have been the same person or otherwise a townie) the woman on the first day was the paddy owner’s wife (not my host, different farmers).  Although the first day annoyed me a bit as it looked like I had made a bit of a mess of my work as well, it wasn’t so bad.

HOWEVER...

On the second day we did it, not only did the spa on my left start planting between the lines, but the guy on my right, who was planting on the marks started planting in my rows, which meant that I started edging towards the left.  Perhaps half way through the work I looked along the field and realised that gradually I’d been landed right in front of the dipshit’s work.  It was SO annoying, honestly I felt like hitting the guy beside me and pushing the stupid woman into the ground at one of the red markers so that she might see how to do it right.  But you can’t really do that kind of thing here.  Well, I suppose you wouldn’t really get away with it at home either.

Anyway, by the time we had reached the end of the field Yuhei had come along and stood between me and the offender on my left, although I’m not sure if it was to correct me in my work, or because he saw that she was in danger of being strangled.  In any case, I felt happier knowing that he could see I wasn’t the one making an absolute hames of the thing, because I was sure he’d thought it was me the last time.  The place was a mess though.  Now I know why traditionally women stayed home and cooked the dinner...

Job Four – Release the Ducks!

Yup, that’s right, ducks.  Not all farms are into this, but, being an organic farmer Yuhei subscribed the ‘Aigamo Method’ of rice farming.   This involves breeding Aigamo ducklings, which you release into the paddy after you have planted it and fenced it off (with nets repaired for hours on end by none other than my good self - a 50m roll of netting takes about three hours to stitch back together, on average and I reckon I did about five or six rolls or so).   The ducks then swim along contently between the plants all day eating all the nasty weeds and insects and fertilising the field a bit at the same time.

For more see http://web-japan.org/trends01/article/021022sci_r.html

And that’s about all I got to do in the world of rice farming, harvesting will take place at the end of the month but I won’t be at that at all.  Shame.

Coming soon...

Hiking in Diasetsuzan

Back to the Real World – Apartment-Hunting, Study and Work in the Sapporo