When you travel between one small town and another in Japan often the panorama is a vast plain of flooded fields or a towering terraced mountain of rice paddies. In early June, up and down the Japanese archipelago, rice has been planted and the glistening paddies are teeming with life. Along with the young rice plants, a whole world of microflora and fauna thrives here.

To watch the tender rice shoots mature is to feel the seasons pass right before your eyes. Early summer fields, speckled with seedlings, look like beautifully sectioned-off ripple-free ponds. In the heat of midsummer, as the rice begins to grow, the plants come to life, whole fields moving in concert, dancing with the wind. As fall approaches, the mature plants begin to bend, heavy with the fruit of a long season of growth.

Just as the Inupiat natives of Northern America have dozens of words for ice and snow, many of Asian peoples have dozens of words to denote rice. In ancient China the words for agriculture and rice cultivation were the same. In many parts of Asia, one of the variations on the word for rice also substitutes for the word for food or meal. Some rice cultures, such as Japan, have large vocabularies for expressing rice in its many stages of growth and preparation.