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Return to Japan.

route lay through a very flat, highly cultivated garden section with cucumbers trained on trellises, many squash in full bloom, with fields of taro, ginger and many other vegetables. Beyond Hamadera considerable areas of flat sandy land had been set close with pine, but with intervening areas in rice, where the growers were using the revolving weeder seen in Fig. 14. At Otsu broad areas are in rice but here worked with the short handled claw weeders, and stubble from a former crop had been drawn together into small piles, seen in Fig. 230, which later would be carefully distributed and worked beneath the mud.


Fig. 230.—Distribution of old stubble and the working of it beneath the water and mud to serve as fertilizer.