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BETTER AND WORSE

The farmers are beginning to till the flooded rice fields. When we first moved here, this being one of Japan's ancient rice-producing areas all the fields on the mountainside followed the topography of the land as they always had. This had posed considerable difficulty for generations of local farmers. For example, right across the road from us was a sizeable ridge of land, itself untillable, that when we moved here was covered with trees where the egrets used to come and settle of summer evenings, the undergrowth being pretty much pheasant city. As a result of that ridge, though, some of the farmers had to practically pirhouette to till their fields, the topography dictating that many landowners had to have several small and oddly shaped parcels to make up their piece of land.

Then one day a couple of years ago all the farmers came up and cut down the trees on the ridge, carted them away and burned all the undergowth. Not long after came the Public Works folks (who pave Japan's rivers and concrete her mountains and seacoasts) and with their armies proceeded to organize pretty much the entire mountainside, paddy-wise (which did not please all the farmers, who had perforce to pay a good part of the cost themselves, some benefiting more than others from the resulting changes, many opposing change of any kind for various reasons). The huge machines plowed away the ridge and symmetrized all the fields as systematically as possible, not making too bad a job of it actually, using minimal concrete and walling with in situ stones where possible. They have clearly learned something from all the years of complaints that they don't know how to make their changes fit the locality.

Now the farmers who like their forebears had had to struggle all those years with their several tiny teardrop-shaped fields are clearly enjoying the ease and precision of tilling their newly symmetrical and much larger properties; the pheasants have moved to the bamboo groves in front of our house and the forests up behind; with the ridge gone, on a clear day we can now see all the way to the end of the Lake, and the rice fields still gracefully follow the greater contours of the mountainside. The egrets don't come around much anymore, though, leaving the local crows with one less bunch of birds they can tease of a summer night.