Vol. 1 Chapter 2.1 – 1566 Agricultural Reforms in Owari Province

Early April, 1566

Autumn passed, winter arrived and another year began. As the seasons turned and early April came around, nearly a full year had passed since Shizuko arrived in this era.

There was still no prospect of returning to her original time. To begin with, she herself had no understanding of how or by what means she had travelled back in time.

Although she had brought several pieces of modern technology with her, she had hardly made use of them thus far.

They were certainly convenient but if they broke before she could develop suitable substitutes, she would be back to square one.

She used her smartphone to obtain information and recharged it using a hand-cranked LED flashlight equipped with a solar charger.

That was about the extent of her regular use of modern technology. As for her other tools, she generally refrained from using them until she had created suitable substitutes.

Otherwise, the burden would ultimately fall entirely on Shizuko, leaving the villagers unable to carry out any work on their own.

While charging her smartphone with the hand-cranked generator, Shizuko reflected on everything that had happened thus far.

Back in autumn, Shizuko had confidently declared to Nobunaga that she would increase agricultural production. Perhaps in response to that declaration, Nobunaga had issued a rather outrageous command.

In exchange for sending her fifty farmers, he ordered her to harvest twenty-five bales of rice.

He had even gone so far as to make a blatantly threatening declaration. For every bale she fell short, he would kill two people.

His complete lack of hesitation had driven home to Shizuko just how thoroughly she was living in the Sengoku period.

She came to understand that modern sensibilities and ethics were worth little more than pebbles lying by the roadside in this era.

A short while after winter began, Nobunaga sent the promised fifty farmers to Shizuko’s village.

Their families accompanied them, making the new arrivals quite a large group.

However, they had not all been brought from a single location. Instead, much like Shizuko’s village before her arrival, they had been gathered from regions suffering from poor harvests.

Having been forcibly uprooted from the land they had long called home and relocated here, the settlers must have been under considerable stress.

However, there was no room to take their circumstances into consideration.

The settlers were surprised to learn that Shizuko was the village chief but not a single voice of protest was raised.

Perhaps they understood that whether they resisted or submitted, there was only one path available to them.

In other words, their only means of survival was to obey Shizuko and produce a harvest exceeding the promised twenty-five bales of rice.

Once the new year began, work commenced in earnest. That said, the first task was preparing the fields and rice paddies.

By mid-January, they had finished preparing two hectares for agricultural crops, one hectare for sugarcane, one hectare for sweet potatoes and eight hectares of rice paddies.

Although it was called preparing fields and rice paddies, if there was no existing foundation to work with, they would first have to clear and reclaim the land. Depending on the scale of the reclamation, such work could take several years or more.

Fortunately, there were already fields and paddies that had been partially developed, including farmland that Daiichi and the others had unsuccessfully attempted to expand before Shizuko’s arrival, as well as abandoned agricultural land. Thanks to these existing foundations, they were able to secure sufficient land for both the paddies and fields.

By late February, it was time to begin preparing the seedling beds. However, the common practice at the time was simply to scatter rice seeds indiscriminately.

Consequently, most of the villagers could not understand the necessity of raising seedlings, and Shizuko ended up spending several days teaching them about it.

Preparing the seedling trays more than a month before planting would allow the soil to reach its optimal condition but the farmers still appeared rather sceptical.

In late March, Shizuko carried out saltwater selection on the rice seeds. Once again, most of the settlers merely looked on with dubious expressions.

Perhaps the very idea of selecting well-developed rice seeds was something unheard of during the Sengoku period.

The process of preparing a saltwater solution with a specific gravity of 1.16 and removing the rice seeds that floated to the surface was rather monotonous.

However, this provided her with the seeds needed for soaking. She placed the selected rice seeds into buckets filled with river water and set them in a shaded location to prevent the water temperature from rising as much as possible.

She explained that this was to allow the rice seeds to absorb sufficient water and ensure that they would all germinate uniformly at the same time but the settlers still did not seem to understand.

‘Even if I explain it as adjusting the accumulated temperature, they wouldn’t understand, would they~?’

However, her work did not end there. Shizuko had several other tasks on her hands as well.

First, before autumn ended, she had to harvest soapberry fruits and process them into powdered soap.

Naturally, since Shizuko was the only person who needed it for the time being, she handled almost all the work herself after harvesting the fruits.

Next, she needed to increase the number of chickens to establish an egg-production industry. Initially, she bred the chickens together to produce fertilised eggs, which she then continued to incubate and hatch.

Among all the tasks involved in incubating fertilised eggs, the most troublesome was egg turning.

As the name suggested, egg turning was the process of periodically rotating the eggs. This was necessary to prevent the white, navel-like part inside the egg, known as the embryo, from adhering to the eggshell.

Regardless of whether an egg was fertilised or unfertilised, it consisted of a yolk, egg white, embryo, and egg membrane. While the embryo of an unfertilised egg was often discarded, the embryo of a fertilised egg was the most important part, as it would eventually develop into a chick.

Because egg white initially possessed a relatively firm structure, one might assume that simply keeping the eggs warm would be sufficient. However, as an egg was warmed, the heat caused the egg white to change into a thin, watery liquid.

This transformation of the egg white into a liquid state occurred approximately three to six days after incubation began. This was because the egg was structured to accommodate variations in warmth even when the parent bird did not incubate it evenly.

Ideally, the eggs needed to be turned ninety degrees every hour to prevent the embryos from adhering to the eggshells. If that was impractical, they would have to be turned ninety degrees at least once every six hours.

Although this was an important task, egg turning had to be stopped around the time the chicks inside began breathing with their lungs. This was to prevent the turning motion from compressing the chicks’ lungs. The generally accepted practice was to stop turning the eggs three days before hatching.

Only after going through all these meticulous procedures would the chicks finally hatch.

However, since Shizuko’s knowledge of chickens was largely limited to butchering them, some chicks died from the cold, while others remained undersized and failed to grow properly.

Furthermore, she had to wait approximately a month before she could distinguish the males from the females, which meant preparing the same feed for all of them until then.

Even in modern times, the ability to determine a chick’s sex was a nationally certified skill, highly valued in the poultry industry. Shizuko came to appreciate just how useful such a qualification truly was.

Naturally, Shizuko was no specialist possessing such a nationally recognised qualification. Thus, despite losing numerous chicks to death or having to cull them, she continued experimenting through trial and error, gradually increasing their numbers.

All the chicks and nearly mature chickens that had died or been culled were mixed into the compost.

Absolutely nothing was thrown away.

Fortunately, after approximately half a year, she managed to increase their numbers to seven roosters and twenty hens, securing a sufficient flock for the time being.

From then on, she planned to divide them into separate breeding groups: one for producing fertilised eggs and another for producing unfertilised eggs.

The fertilised-egg group consisted of two breeding sets, each containing one rooster and five hens, while the unfertilised-egg group consisted of ten hens.

She standardised their feed, using a mixture of vegetable scraps and powdered fish bones, seashells and similar materials.

This was because she recalled once hearing that the egg-laying rate of chickens, regardless of breed, would decline after two years.

With that in mind, Shizuko figured it would be easier to maintain a consistent feeding regimen throughout those two years.

Naturally, newly hatched chicks were given softer feed.

The vegetable cultivation methods she introduced also seemed peculiar to the villagers, although they were able to understand these somewhat better.

Nevertheless, there was no denying that most of the procedures still appeared mysterious and questionable from the villagers’ perspective.

Shizuko divided the two-hectare field, which had already been thoroughly enriched with compost, into sections measuring fifty metres on each side.

This created eight individual plots, completing the groundwork for a system that combined continuous cropping of spring and autumn vegetables with annual crop rotation between the plots.

First, she grouped the plots into four pairs and assigned them the sequential designations I-1, I-2, Ro-1, Ro-2, Ha-1, Ha-2, Ni-1 and Ni-2.

For the spring season, she planted corn in I-1, garlic chives in I-2, pumpkins in Ro-1, eggplants in Ro-2, tomatoes in Ha-1 and daikon radishes in Ha-2. The poultry farm occupied Ni-1 and Ni-2.

Naturally, all of these crops were cultivated using the modern methods Shizuko knew, rather than the agricultural techniques of the Sengoku period.

Once the spring crops were harvested in autumn, she planned to plant the autumn vegetables as follows; green onions in I-1, lettuce in I-2, Taro in Ro-1, Komatsuna in Ro-2, Kintoki carrots in Ha-1, and turnips in Ha-2. Ni-1 and Ni-2 would continue serving as the poultry farm without any changes.

Since the farmland was divided into individual plots and rotated annually, she prepared signboards to make the arrangement easier to understand.

By rotating these signboards whenever spring arrived, everyone could easily identify which crops were currently being cultivated, preventing confusion over the rotation cycle.

Surprisingly, the signboards proved popular among the villagers. According to them,『They make it easy to tell what’s being grown.』

One unexpected development was that several of the newly arrived settlers had experience in sericulture.

Shizuko immediately began preparing an environment suitable for raising silkworms.

Since such an operation could hardly be carried out within the village itself, she established the sericulture facility a short distance away.

Mulberry leaves were essential but fortunately, there were a few mulberry trees growing naturally in an area somewhat farther away.

With that in mind, Shizuko decided to replace all the trees surrounding the sericulture facility with mulberry trees.

Although it could hardly be called a mulberry plantation just yet, both the fruit and timber could also be put to use.

Fortunately, mulberry trees grew quickly, so within a few years, she should be able to harvest both mulberries and the leaves needed to feed the silkworms.

As for cultivation, she could more or less leave the trees to grow naturally. All she needed to do was plant additional saplings each year.

Shizuko then came up with another idea that had not been part of her original plans.

Upon seeing the timber left over from constructing the houses, she wondered whether she could use it to build beehives for harvesting honey.

Although Western honeybees were not present, Japanese honeybees had inhabited Japan since ancient times, so she decided to collect honey from them instead.

Drawing upon her memories, she recreated a beehive design devised by a friend of her grandfather, one that prioritised ease of honey harvesting.

Each tier was approximately 120 millimetres tall, and by stacking four of them together, the resulting structure made it easier to collect honey and locate the queen bee.

However, although Shizuko had learned about beekeeping through books and observation, she did not understand all its finer details.

To begin with, she did not have a queen bee readily available, so whether any bees would actually settle in the hives she installed was practically a matter of divine providence. In other words, once she had placed the hives, all she could do was leave the rest to fate.

She chose locations where wild rapeseed flowers grew abundantly. After installing hives at five locations in total, all that remained was to visit them periodically and check whether any Japanese honeybees had taken up residence.

Although this approach required little effort, it had the disadvantage of producing an inconsistent honey yield. That said, Shizuko had only pursued the idea on a whim, so it would not particularly trouble her even if she failed to harvest large quantities of honey.

It was precisely because she regarded the matter so casually that she had completely forgotten how honey was treated during the Sengoku period.

As for the sugarcane, she used both the plants she had replanted as seedlings the previous summer and those planted in spring as propagation material, establishing a system for even greater mass production.

Naturally, the villagers had no idea what she was growing, so they once again tilted their heads in puzzlement.

‘Sugar is an extremely valuable seasoning in this era. If I can produce it in large quantities and present it to Oyakata-sama, the people of this village should be able to avoid conscription. On top of that, we might receive preferential access to salt and other seasonings.’

She was also able to plant large quantities of sweet potato seedlings right from the beginning this year. However, allowing the fields to lie idle after harvesting the sweet potatoes would be a waste.

Therefore, Shizuko decided to cultivate rapeseed starting in autumn. Since rapeseed could be used to produce rapeseed oil while also providing food for Japanese honeybees overwintering in the area, she considered it a way to kill two birds with one stone.

Originally, rapeseed had been used as a vegetable, specifically for its edible leaves.

It appeared in the Kojiki as Kibi no Aona and in the Man’yoshu as Sano no Kukitachi.

It was not until the Edo period that rapeseed began to be cultivated for extracting vegetable oil. The oil was primarily used as fuel for lamps, making it an essential part of everyday life.

Another crop that could not be overlooked was soybeans.

They were an incredibly versatile crop, serving as the raw material for miso and soy sauce, a source of oil, a medicinal ingredient, and, of course, food.

However, cultivating soybeans was said to be exceptionally difficult.

They were particularly notorious for requiring large amounts of nitrogen fertiliser and for being incompatible with other crops.

Naturally, there was no way to obtain nitrogen fertiliser during the Sengoku period, leaving her with little choice but to produce compost using chicken manure.

She also had to consider measures against insect pests, giving her no shortage of headaches.

That was when Shizuko came up with the idea of employing a cultivation method known as companion planting.

Also known as cultivating mutually beneficial crops, this was a concept in agriculture and horticulture.

It referred to growing different plants alongside one another so that they could positively influence each other’s growth and thrive together.

In the case of soybeans and corn, pests that attacked corn disliked the smell of soybeans, while the pests that attacked soybeans were preyed upon and eaten by the natural enemies attracted by corn pests.

It was truly an excellent technique for controlling insect pests without relying on pesticides.

However, most of these benefits were based on empirical observations and even in modern times, relatively few examples have been scientifically explained.

Shizuko decided to adopt this technique, allocating fifty ares of the hundred-are plot to soybeans and planting corn in the remaining fifty ares.

Lastly, there were the pungent onions, a variety sown in autumn and harvested the following summer.

However, they were not yet ready for mass production and the entire crop was being cultivated solely to obtain seeds.

She would have to wait until the following year before she could begin growing them for consumption.

Since the days of ancient Egypt, onions had been valued as a food effective against fatigue, including chronic exhaustion and muscle fatigue.

Simply eating onions every day could help build up one’s stamina and make the body less susceptible to exhaustion.

They also enhanced the absorption of vitamin B1, making them an excellent complement to soybeans and chicken liver.

However, that was as far as Shizuko intended to take the lead.

She decided to leave the cultivation of millet and other grains that served as the farmers’ staple foods to the villagers’ own discretion.

People would never grow unless they were given opportunities to discuss matters, have their opinions heard, receive approval and be entrusted with responsibilities.

For that reason, Shizuko had no intention of managing every little detail herself.

She would only take the lead when it came to essential infrastructure and agricultural development, such as rice cultivation, which carried both a production quota and tax obligations, farmland improvement, land readjustment and the development of irrigation systems.

Although her days were filled with an overwhelming number of tasks and constant struggles, Shizuko felt that her life was fulfilling in its own way.

That was, of course, if one overlooked the unreasonable demands Nobunaga occasionally appeared to impose upon her.

However, completely unconcerned with such things, Nobunaga once again saddled Shizuko with yet another unreasonable demand.

[1. Taro (里芋 / Satoimo)

A Japanese root vegetable with brown, hairy skin and soft, starchy flesh. Its texture becomes slightly sticky when cooked.,

2. Komatsuna (小松菜)

A Japanese leafy green vegetable, sometimes called Japanese mustard spinach. It has tender green leaves and stalks and is commonly used in soups and stir-fries.

3. Kintoki Carrots (金時人参 / Kintoki Ninjin)

A traditional Japanese carrot variety characterised by its long, slender shape and deep reddish colour. It is particularly associated with Kyoto cuisine and is sometimes called the Kyoto red carrot.]

[1. Kojiki (古事記)

Records of Ancient Matters. Completed in 712 CE, it is Japan’s oldest surviving historical chronicle, containing mythology, legends, genealogies, and accounts of early Japanese history.

2. Kibi no Aona (吉備の菘菜)

Refers to leafy greens associated with the ancient Kibi region, mentioned in the Kojiki. Aona means green leafy vegetables, historically associated here with Brassica greens.

3. Man’yōshū (万葉集)

Literally Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves. Japan’s oldest surviving anthology of Japanese poetry, compiled during the Nara period in the eighth century.

4. Sano no Kukitachi (佐野の茎立)

Refers to leafy Brassica vegetables from Sano, mentioned in poem 3406 of the Man’yōshū.

It is associated with kakina, a traditional Japanese vegetable harvested for its tender stems and leaves.]