y the time the full heat of summer has died down and fall is in the air, the fields are full of shimmering golden waves of grain. Finally harvest season has arrived. First, the water is drained form the paddies to make the rice easier to harvest. Next, a combine is used to cut the Anyone who takes these peasant customs as a serious source of information and tries
to understand them in their existential aspects and in their intensive use of signs will soon begin to see the seemingly unreasoned procedures as traditional remnants of a prehistoric field organization. The rice farmers who came to the islands in the Yayoi era did not live in a vacuum. The early history of Japan and the establishment of the Yamato state clearly reveal the clashes that took place with other ethnic groups. The Japanese islands at that time comprised many countries and many peoples, as is still the case with parts of the Indonesian archipelago. The various settlers defined their boundaries and accepted certain ordering principles so as to be able to live side by side. The rice rituals have retained some vestiges of these orders.
Historically speaking, it is clear that the centralization that began with the founding of the Yamato state changed these traditonal field orders. Since the fields the peasants cultivated (harita, kakitsuta originally likewise agata) were now regionally surveyed, taxed and given military protection by the officals of the provincial governments (Miyatsuko), the old ritual order lost its purpose, if not its meaning. It was integrated in the central Shinto faith and was - under Chinese influence - theologically interpreted.
We are justified to talking of a rice culture by the philosophical basis of this environmental structure. Its landmarks are concrete: path and place, gateway and house, field and woods, water and soil, mountain and river. It does not plunder nature, but makes only temporary use of parts of it. Man is a guest who receives gifts from nature, and gives some of his own possessions reverently in return. That is no doubt the deeper meaning of the numerous rites and sacrifices of rice and rice wine. They are the modest expression of a local attitude to life which seeks, by harmonizing the opposites of nature and culture, to create the prerequisites of human and humane existence.