Rice shoots and the torii

 As I walked down the lane, I found a parking spot filed with rice shoots. These are grown in specific sized blocks that are just the right size to fit into the planting machines that can be attached to the general purpose tractors that are used in the rice paddies. These machine are often shared among a group of small farmers. They will get together and form a cooperative that shares the costs of buying equipment and maintaining it. I believe that the cooperative culture that accompanies rice farming accounts for much of Japanese socialist tendencies.

Another fifty meters and I arrived at the entrance to the Jiroku Shrine.