Отрывок из книги
Sidney Lewis Gulick
Published by Good Press, 2021
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JAPAN has three leading wealth-earning occupations: agriculture, sericulture, and factory work. In each of these women take an important part. In the cultivation of the soil farmers' wives and daughters share equally with men the toil of planting and reaping the crops. For instance, in the cultivation of rice, the most important and the hardest work of the farmer, it is often the women who plant it spear by spear in regular rows, and it is they who "puddle" the paddy-fields with their hands four or five times in the course of the season. In some districts, however, men and women do this work together. The toil and the weariness involved cannot be appreciated by one who has not actually shared it. Fancy, if you can, the fatigue of standing more than ankle deep in mud, stooping all day long as you set out the tiny rice plants in regular lines! And at short intervals of a few days each you must repeatedly puddle the whole paddy-field: that is, stir up the mud with your hands in order to destroy the sprouting weeds and prevent the soil from caking and hardening around the tender rice roots, preventing their best growth. And remember that you must do all this regardless of the broiling summer sun, or the pelting rain, for the planting must be done at exactly the right time, and the successive puddlings must follow in due order. So severe is the strain that, after the planting and each puddling, the whole village takes a rest. My gardener, an ex-farmer, speaking of those summer days of toil in the rice-fields, expatiates on the extreme fatigue and the joy of the rest days, and as women take the brunt of the stooping-work, theirs is the lion's share of the weariness. He says that, during the rice-planting season, the women are so important that those days are called the "women's daimio days," and adds that we must not forget how during that time the regular work of the women must also go on, for they must cook the food and care for the children. For this, indeed, young girls and grandmothers are pressed into service as far as possible, but the responsibility and care rest nevertheless on the wives and mothers.
SEPARATING THE WHEAT HEADS FROM THE STRAW AT THE LOOM
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