The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

Some consider it the proverb that most describes the Japanese mindset, and it was quoted to me more than once during my 10 days in Japan. The words came to me as I stood overlooking the broad sweep of a mountainside 10 miles outside Nichinan City, sister city to Portsmouth, N.H. In the early 1930s, the inhabitants had cultivated a rice paddy in that amazingly inhospitable environment. Imagine bringing water for irrigation from a valley a mile away.

"It shows our attachment to rice," Takenori Okamoto of Nichinan City's Board of Education told me on the second day of a tour of the area he conducted with great kindness and insight.

The tiered rice paddies are no longer cultivated for the crop they provide -- growing rice doesn't pay, Okamoto told me -- but for the camaraderie and community they provide. 

"Many volunteers come here to plant and harvest," Okamoto said.

The fields are divided by 9-foot piles of stone put there by the original farmers, who built the walls in exchange for use of the land. It brought to mind the walls constructed by New England settlers who found a practical use for the rocks that filled their fields.

Some believe that rice cultivation promotes wa, or harmony. Wet rice cultivation, practiced 2,000 years in Japan, is a labor-intensive task. To survive, families have to pool their labor. They also share their water resources and irrigation facilities. Now that Japan buys much of its rice from abroad, rice cultivation has become a form of weekend spiritual renewal for some. Families travel from the city to the country to work in the rice paddies together.

In the fall the dry fields were dotted with scarecrows and scented with the Obi cedars that grow in improbably straight lines from the sides of the surrounding mountains.  A brochure given to me by Mr. Okamoto showed families holding cookouts and watching traditional dancers at a cultural festival in the fields. 

The nail that sticks up gets hammered down ... working ankle-deep in water alongside your neighbor for a common cause definitely promotes human connection. Perhaps the neighbor irritates you, but you know him intimately. Compare this form of cultivation to that in the United States. We each carved out our plots of earth and fiercely guarded our independence and borders. Each cornfield was a family fiefdom. "Good fences make good neighbors," Robert Frost wrote in the poem "Mending Wall," penned at his Derry, N.H., farm almost 100 years ago. 

It explains a lot about the differences between east and west.

I've written an article about the Nichinan tiered rice fields in the Jan. 13 New Hampshire Sunday News. To learn more, go to http://www.city-nichinan.jp/english/enn02.htm