Probably The Inconvenience Of The National Costume For
Working Men Partly Accounts For The General Practice Of Getting Rid
Of It.
It is such a hindrance, even in walking, that most
pedestrians have "their loins girded up" by taking the middle of
the hem at the bottom of the kimono and tucking it under the
girdle.
This, in the case of many, shows woven, tight-fitting,
elastic, white cotton pantaloons, reaching to the ankles. After
ferrying another river at a village from which a steamer plies to
Tokiyo, the country became much more pleasing, the rice-fields
fewer, the trees, houses, and barns larger, and, in the distance,
high hills loomed faintly through the haze. Much of the wheat, of
which they don't make bread, but vermicelli, is already being
carried. You see wheat stacks, ten feet high, moving slowly, and
while you are wondering, you become aware of four feet moving below
them; for all the crop is carried on horses' if not on human backs.
I went to see several threshing-floors, - clean, open spaces outside
barns, - where the grain is laid on mats and threshed by two or four
men with heavy revolving flails. Another method is for women to
beat out the grain on racks of split bamboo laid lengthwise; and I
saw yet a third practised both in the fields and barn-yards, in
which women pass handfuls of stalks backwards through a sort of
carding instrument with sharp iron teeth placed in a slanting
position, which cuts off the ears, leaving the stalk unbruised.
This is probably "the sharp threshing instrument having teeth"
mentioned by Isaiah. The ears are then rubbed between the hands.
In this region the wheat was winnowed altogether by hand, and after
the wind had driven the chaff away, the grain was laid out on mats
to dry. Sickles are not used, but the reaper takes a handful of
stalks and cuts them off close to the ground with a short, straight
knife, fixed at a right angle with the handle. The wheat is sown
in rows with wide spaces between them, which are utilised for beans
and other crops, and no sooner is it removed than daikon (Raphanus
sativus), cucumbers, or some other vegetable, takes its place, as
the land under careful tillage and copious manuring bears two, and
even three, crops, in the year. The soil is trenched for wheat as
for all crops except rice, not a weed is to be seen, and the whole
country looks like a well-kept garden. The barns in this district
are very handsome, and many of their grand roofs have that concave
sweep with which we are familiar in the pagoda. The eaves are
often eight feet deep, and the thatch three feet thick. Several of
the farm-yards have handsome gateways like the ancient "lychgates"
of some of our English churchyards much magnified. As animals are
not used for milk, draught, or food, and there are no pasture
lands, both the country and the farm-yards have a singular silence
and an inanimate look; a mean-looking dog and a few fowls being the
only representatives of domestic animal life.
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