Mechanization of planting, transplanting and harvesting rice in Japan began early in the century and entered a stage of spectacular growth in the 1970s. In less than a generation, traditional labor intensive agricultural methods were replaced by a highly mechanized and capital intensive system. So effective has been this agricultural modernization that government planners now seek ways to reduce the size of the rice crop, thereby bringing it into closer accord with consumer demand. Consequently, large scale transplanting by hand, such as we see at the Festival this summer, has decreased since the late 1960s while examples of small, day-long