Since I posted an article on the growth of manufacturing in Japan, this seems to be the other side of the coin... and I thought it is worth reading.




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Rice in Japan

You are what you eat

Dec 17th 2009 | TOCHIKUBO
From The Economist print edition

Can a country as modern as Japan cling onto a culture as ancient as rice?

Excerpt:

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But Japanese agriculture is paralysed, the farmers unable to think clearly, as if fearing that if market forces were unleashed, paddies would be forever lost, changing both the landscape and the traditional orderliness of the Japanese psyche. It need not be like that. Hearteningly, in villages such as Tochikubo a small flame of private enterprise is being lit. On a Sunday morning in October, 35 students, environmentalists and businessmen, as well as a couple of foreigners, gathered in Tochikubo with sickles in hand to harvest something very rare in Japan: an organic rice field. They cut the stalks, bound them with straw and hung them on iron poles to dry in the autumn sun. Then, adopting the age-old thriftiness common to farmers worldwide, they gleaned every inch of the paddy for the last grains.

It could all have been done much more quickly by combine harvester. And the villagers were bemused to see city folk trying to twist rice into sheaves as if they were 18th-century peasants. But there was a sense of purpose to the shared endeavour, and the farmers sold their rice to the visitors for good prices—as well as charging them for the privilege of toiling.

“It’s rare to find people in their 60s and 70s trying to be entrepreneurs. But there’s only us left,” said Mr Fueki, the co-operative president. That is the sort of spirit rice-growing needs, and there are faint signs of it emerging in parcels of land across Japan. Farmers say that using their initiative lets them bring enthusiasm back to a job that is in danger of becoming as depressingly obsolete as Soviet-style collective farming. If farmers—for so long part of the Japanese bone marrow—recover some self-esteem, perhaps Japan might too."

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Full article

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This is what happens when a nation forgets that it takes all kinds to keep an economy in balance. Some jobs are glamorized and others sold down the river..

For whatever reason, farming is not well respected and that is very sad.

Growing rice in particular is practically an art.  It requires extensive manual labor from the very get go. Rice crop is very sensitive to water levels at various points in time; and yield of rice crop swings greatly with weather conditions that cannot be conditioned to the crop at all.  The best farmers can do is switch the type of paddy they sow for a shorter cycle yield but they sacrifice quality of rice... flavor.. in the process.

With manufacturing on the rice, Japan may need to figure out how to get their youth more interested in basic farming.

In the US, we too have fallen prey to loosing our moorings on importance of agriculture. I hope agriculture swings to a more popular discipline in the colleges in coming years and people take to commercial farming... before all farmers retire and take their knowledge with them.

This is yet another lesson from Japan.