July in Ezo Land was warm and bright, almost the finest season of the year, with crisp green and the hope of life everywhere.
In the southernmost Wajin lands, winding canals slowly drew the cold mountain streams along, letting the sun warm them before irrigating the rice paddies where the shoots had just emerged. Rice was the Wajin staple, and also their most cherished "Rice God." Under the careful tending of Wajin farmers, the paddies painstakingly opened up in these warm, narrow lands at the southern edge of the island were the hope every Wajin valued most. So long as they were not affected by cold currents flowing down from the south before the autumn harvest, they could reach an "astonishing" yield of one hundred thirty to one hundred fifty jin per mu, nearly three times that of foxtail millet fields!
"Bodhisattva bless us! This year must be warmer, with more rain... If one mu can bring in one hundred fifty jin, enough to feed one person, then that will be a true bumper year! We will surely burn incense and make offerings to you..."
Yes, a yield of one hundred thirty to one hundred fifty jin per mu was the harvest of the rice paddies along both the north and south shores of the Tsugaru Strait. In Oshu, where the farther north one went the poorer the soil became, this was already an excellent number! Even in the fertile lands of Omi along Lake Biwa, or the fertile lands of Owari occupied by the Oda Clan, rice at this time, one crop a year, yielded only a little over two hundred jin per mu. And throughout all of Wagoku, the most widely planted crop was still foxtail millet, sown broadly for thin returns, averaging fifty to sixty jin per