I don't remember having seen the term satoyama before the NOVA transcript-- drat, it looks like that episode is only available on VHS?-- so I'm not really clear on how it's defined, though it may've been lurking in some of my ref books all this time (unless the English-language authors/translators did something else with it).
I'll def'ly have to find the original kanji for the term, though; assuming that the yama is simply "mountain", I wonder if the sato is the same one as in Kiyosato's name (in contrast to Kenshin's "red village", his means something like "bright town" iirc).
Rice is a very labor-intensive crop that can require the cooperative labor of an entire village to manage properly. The rice-paddy terraces need to be built and maintained, the rice seedlings need to be started in a small garden-type area elsewhere, and then the terraces have to be flooded/drained in a very precise sequence of events to transplant the seedlings into them, which is usually done by a long line of people stretching across the entire field. Samurai 7 had what looked like fairly traditional rice-planting methods scattered in among all the odd futuristic Kurosawa pastiche; it's been long enough since I've seen the original Seven Samurai to recall whether there's any rice-planting shown in there.
Re: KenshinxTomoe
I'll def'ly have to find the original kanji for the term, though; assuming that the yama is simply "mountain", I wonder if the sato is the same one as in Kiyosato's name (in contrast to Kenshin's "red village", his means something like "bright town" iirc).
Rice is a very labor-intensive crop that can require the cooperative labor of an entire village to manage properly. The rice-paddy terraces need to be built and maintained, the rice seedlings need to be started in a small garden-type area elsewhere, and then the terraces have to be flooded/drained in a very precise sequence of events to transplant the seedlings into them, which is usually done by a long line of people stretching across the entire field. Samurai 7 had what looked like fairly traditional rice-planting methods scattered in among all the odd futuristic Kurosawa pastiche; it's been long enough since I've seen the original Seven Samurai to recall whether there's any rice-planting shown in there.