A small flower I found in a rice paddy at 6 a.m.

At 6:00 a.m., I headed to the rice paddies.

Morning dew still clung to the rice plants, and when I looked closely at the green ears of rice, I could see tiny white flowers peeking out.
They were rice flowers.

They are very small—the kind of flowers you might easily overlook if you weren’t paying close attention—but when viewed in the soft morning light and amidst the sparkling morning dew, they appear truly beautiful.

You can only see these rice flowers for a very brief period at this time of year. These
tiny white blossoms signal that the rice plants are gradually moving toward the harvest season.

Although I gaze at these rice fields almost every day, they reveal slightly different expressions depending on the season and the time of day.

This morning, my usual rice field looked just a little bit special. A small scene I encountered in the rice field on a
quiet summer morning. I hope we’ll have delicious rice

again this year.