上の田も下の田も穂に穂が咲いて一粒万倍 kami no ta mo shimo no ta mo ho ni ho ga saite ichiryū manbai In the Upper Field and the Lower, Ear upon Ear in Flower: One Grain, Ten Thousandfold

上の田も下の田も kami no ta mo shimo no ta mo is the upper field and the lower field alike. 穂に穂が咲いて ho ni ho ga saite, ear upon ear in flower, is said when rice and the other grains ripen well: a rich harvest. 一粒万倍 ichiryū manbai, one grain, ten thousandfold, is one seed sown returning ten thousand, and so a small beginning that grows great.

The phrase 一粒万倍 ichiryū manbai has its own history in our library, which tells where it comes from. Two dictionaries of proverbs give this line under it, one of 1910 in part and one of 1933 whole. The 1933 one glosses the phrase as a figure for receiving boundless happiness from a small root of good.

Chikamatsu's puppet play Tenko, The Heavenly Drum, opens with the court blessed at the new year by a 萬歲 manzai pair. The singer of the pair names the year, sings the line, and then sings the planting call: into the field, splash, splash … splash, and plant it in.

The scholar Takano Tatsuyuki's book of 1926 says the manzai's planting song, not being used at the palace, is hard to know whole. A dictionary of Chikamatsu's words, of 1930, adds that the manzai did not all sing the same planting song.

In Tenko the planting is answered at once by the number for the streets of Kyoto, where trade flourishes. Then the singer goes to worship the god of the five grains and sends his partner to Ebisu, god of trade. Takano Tatsuyuki judged the rice-planting and the Kyoto streets evidently the numbers the audiences of the day liked best, which Chikamatsu's plays use often.

In another play of Chikamatsu's, the Kyoto manzai ask Osan, who is hiding in inner Tanba: you were fond of the rice-planting; shall we dance one? In Miyamori Asatarō's English retelling, they had danced in her courtyard each New Year. Her house was that of the head of Kyoto's mounters, who held the right to issue the calendar.

The words ho ni ho ga saite also lived apart from the manzai, in songs of the harvest. In a book of jokes of 1681 they are already a happy thing to say. A song of Settsu, in a collection prefaced 1771, sings of a good year: lord and farmer alike will be glad.

A teachers' manual of 1910 quotes a rice-planting song from the primary-school reader: this year a rich harvest, ear upon ear in flower; even the grass by the road bears rice. A geography journal of 2000, read in a search window, gives the words in the Bon dance song of Sōma.

Kyokutei Bakin's picture book with a preface of 1802 turns the harvest to money: ear upon ear of gold in flower, beside a picture captioned the harvest of gold and silver. A song collection of 1898, read in a search window, has gold grows on the grass by the road.

The design sets 一粒万倍 ichiryū manbai apart, as suits the brush. Our history reads the line as one wish: that the fields, high and low, bear so heavily that one grain sown returns ten thousand. In that reading the words are harvest, and the occasion holds harvest and trade side by side. So it is a harvest scroll in its own words, and a scroll for a house of trade by its occasion.

The line is one sentence of the planting number of the New Year 萬歲, the pair of blessing performers who went from house to house at the new year; the earliest texts of it whole found, by the National Diet Library's full-text index and the dictionaries' first examples, are two puppet plays of Kyoto, 宇治加賀掾's 丹州千年狐 (1699, read in quotation) and Chikamatsu's retitling of it, 天皷 (1701 by its editor's reckoning), and the scholars who read those plays call it a part of the 萬歲's own song rather than the playwright's.