ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of the academic perceptions on Japanese agricultural history over the past decades. It introduces both previous and recent research on agricultural techniques encompassing irrigated rice and showing multiple farming practices. Each type of food acquisition presents its own specific features: Irrigated rice has high yields and produces many calories on a small acreage. Irrigated rice cultivation was transmitted to the Japanese archipelago in the early first millennium bce. The conventional theory of a Japanese "rice-growing civilization" understands irrigated rice cultivation as the foundation of Japanese culture and as a distinctive feature of the Japanese society. Shifting cultivation—and especially swidden or slash-and-burn farming—is an agricultural system in which plots of land are cultivated temporarily. It has long been one of the most widespread forms of agriculture. Slash-and-burn farming consists of cutting down a patch of forest, burning the wood, and sowing the ground for one or more years before abandoning it once more to the forest.
