Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
time reaping begins. The harvesting was done by hand, with sickles, and the rice was cut
low down, to leave long stalks; it was tied into bundles or small sheaves, and if necessary
was stored by piling in circular stacks or hung head downwards to dry from ropes strung
between trees. In the earlier part of the Tokugawa period the grain was stripped (the tech-
nical term is “rippled” or “heckled”) by pulling the plants between two sticks, or even by
striking them against the top of an open tub. Later in the period there developed a toothed
in the West, with a hinged piece of wood at the head of a pole, existed in Japan at the time,
but they were probably used for threshing other grains such as barley or wheat rather than
scooped up in flat baskets and thrown in the air. What was left was the brown rice with the
huskstillon,knownas
genmai,
“blackrice.”Itwasatthisstagethatsufficientwasselected
asseedforsowingnextyear,andputaside.Itwasalsoas
genmai
thatmostofthericewent
to the
samurai,
after it had been sorted over by hand, and packed into barrel-shaped bales,
which were made of rice-straw and of double thickness to minimize spillage.
The other crops were grown either in special fields, round the edges of the rice-fields,
or in raised strips in these fields. The grains other than rice included some that closely re-
sembled wheat and barley as they are known today (used to supplement rice as the staple
food, and in the manufacture of some products, such as soy sauce). Bread was not known
outside Nagasaki, where wheat-flour was used in making
kasutera,
the sponge cake that
presumably came in with the Portuguese, since its name seems to be derived from
castella.
Milletwasalsousedtosupplementrice,andalsotomakecakesanddumplings.Buckwheat
was eaten in the form of noodles. All these were grown in dry fields, in intervals of work
on rice.
