........夕方に なってやっといままでの分へ一わたり水がかかった。......

...what? Literally:  It became evening and, finally, to the minutes until now it took one crossing water.

What?

I apologize for it being so slow-going recently. These last three weeks haven't been the most conducive towards the translation of farming journals. I wish all of my excuses we legitimate. While work has picked up greatly and my unoccupied office time isn't quite what it used to be, I've also spent my fair share of time reading Marvel comics and watching LOST (now that it's over I've decided to give it a try.) The downtime has been necessary in the struggle towards not getting burned out. Everybody is a little more Shura than Spring once in a while, eh?

Anyhow, below is the latest installment in Kenji's Diary of an Agricultural Student. It needs work. He nailed me again right at the end with the whole "[person] wo tanonde [task]" formation that I really don't know how to concretely nail down. The issue is with Kenji asking Takahashi-kun, the student who had to drop out in order to help out at home, to "manufacture" (koshiraeru or 拵える) the topographical maps. Did he ask Takahashi to make the maps for him? He he making the maps but relying on Takahashi in some way? Until I become a better translator its up to interpretation. I'll get this cleaned up once the entire piece is finished. In the meantime, here are two more entries from Kenji's journal. I'll have to remember to follow up with a small piece about the specifics about things like diluvial and alluvial formations.

October 16^th, 1925

Once the lecture on ethics finished during our first period today there was still some time left over and so we were told we could ask the school headmaster anything we wanted to fill the rest of the block. Everyone remained silent with their heads down, though. There were plenty of things that both I and everyone else wanted to ask, but if we did the teacher would shoot us bad looks we just couldn’t have that.

Why, if he teaches us to believe that the practice of ethics and morals is so important, would he not refrain from judging so clearly the very questions that he made us ask?

October 25^th, 1925

Today we had a soils survey practice. As leader of the second team I carried the drafting board. I couldn’t even express my happiness upon the five of us returning to school with all of our tools in hand: hammers, sampling spikes, litmus paper, and bottles of potassium chloride. Tani-sensei looked really happy, too. Everyone in group six performed their own survey, following whatever course each individual felt like following. I made sure to properly investigate beforehand and drew up an estimated map so that our team wouldn’t be flustered and lost like the others. But I really don’t get it. The district maps were scaled at 1/100,000, so I really only learned from the general outline. We made the flats to the south of the Sarugaishi river by around ten-thirty. So, our biggest questions was whether or not the diluvial formation was hanging over the continuation of the andesite aggregation of the Old King hill as well, but we saw many aggregate rocky outcrops from where we were, near the apex of the hill. Eventually we came to the general estimate that that diluvial formation was under the one-hundred and forty meter line and afterward decided once we’d referenced the condition of the tree development as our teacher had said. I’ll take studying geological features over soils any day. It’s ‘cause as you go along investigating the soils, you mark those locations in different colors according to the quality of the soil and that’s all. Geological formations, on the other hand, you have to think about, and the thought that you have to put into it is much more in depth and satisfying.

We ran into the other groups while in the pine grove, miscanthus reeds, and elsewhere. Everybody was trying to get a peep at our map.

And I can’t even tell you how many pheasants we saw take off from the miscanthus reeds.
It turns out that, thanks to the drought, the rice plants in the areas that are being divided up as arable land were all overgrown with short red weeds. On top of that, the soil was all cracked.

Even on the land that had been utilized, the rice plants didn’t show the slightest offshoots and stood unharvested, seedless and turning red. Those who stood before the task of land consolidation did so for the sake of everyone, but this must have been truly dreadful. We performed a complete survey of the soils there. If we could just get this place a little water I’d wager that, in the future, we could get it to yield as much as around 3 koku (approximately 540 liters.)

Just like we promised, each group met back at the beautiful andesite agglomerate exposure on the bank of the Sarugaishi river at one o’clock in the afternoon. Our teacher told us he had received some konashi (little pears) somewhere and divided it up among the students. From there we all re-drew and corrected our topographical maps. In that place, our teacher didn’t say anything about anybody map, good or bad. We rested there a while. Then, this time around we all went along with our teacher north of the river, studying the soils and geological features like the granite and even third-period mudstone. I decided to finish up a clean copy of my map and pass it in by next Monday.

Once I get my corrected map back from the teacher, next Sunday I’ll ask Takahashi to make them for my whole neighborhood. There’s nothing but diluvial and alluvial land around my neighborhood so it’s so simple. Nevertheless, the way that we apply our fertilizers and such is completely off. It makes me wonder if people aren’t doing it completely opposite of the way they should.