One Day the Shadow Passed Page 10

  I was so overwhelmed by emotion that at first all I could do was shake my head and smile until eventually I managed to muster a few words.

  “I am so glad to see you. I am so happy that it has all worked. I can hardly believe my eyes.”

  The farmer clasped me by the arm.

  “And I am glad you have returned. At last I can show you the fruits of your labour! But come. First, I must show Masumi what I have found!”

  “Masumi is here?”

  The farmer smiled and turned to the children and speaking gently in English he said: “Children, where is your mother?”

  Then he spoke to them in Japanese and at once they scampered across the yard and disappeared through the door of the farmhouse. He turned back to me.

  “The barley harvest was successful. We married in the spring the year after you left. The little boy is called Akira and the little girl is called Aiko.”

  I stood speechless in the middle of the farmyard scarcely able to take on board all that was happening. The farmer took me gently by the arm.

  “Come. Let us drink some tea together, and then I will show you the farm. It has changed since you last worked here!”

  Shaking my head in wonder I walked beside him to the door of the farmhouse.

  “But how did you know I was going to come?”

  He paused for a moment with his hand on the door and turned to me and smiled.

  “The spiders were here three days ago, for the first time in seven years. I have been waiting for you since then.”

  Inside, the farmhouse had changed. It was set up so that many more people could sit around the hearth together and share their meals, and now that it was clearly used by so many people, it no longer had the austere atmosphere that it had when the farmer and I shared our meals together all those years ago.

  Over by the fireplace stood Masumi. The two children were now hiding behind her legs. She was even more beautiful than I remembered. When she saw me she smiled and said something to the children in Japanese.

  With a grin on his face the happy farmer spoke.

  “Masumi, you remember my old friend. It is to him that we can give thanks, for seven years ago he worked with me in clearing the top orchard, which now has two thousand strong young saplings growing in its bounds, and enough vegetables to feed a small city …”

  Masumi smiled warmly and gestured to me to have a seat by the fire.

  “Of course I remember James …”

  She turned to address me in her soft voice.

  “Takeshi has been hoping for so long that you would come.”

  She poured me peach tea from the kettle that was still suspended from the fire and cleared away the lunch bowls from around the hearth, and then we all sat down together. The farmer sensed that I was overwhelmed by all that I saw and with great affection he gently teased me.

  “James, you seem amazed to find us here today. You needn’t have doubted so much! I told you we would make it …”

  I smiled at him and shook my head.

  “I am amazed. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect to find all this. You have not only survived these seven years but you have created a new world. And I don’t think I will ever be able to explain to you how happy I am to find that you are still here and that your new path has borne fruit.”

  The farmer grinned and shrugged his shoulders.

  “We have a few more people. Some of the old farm workers came back and then some workers joined us from other farms. They prefer the way things are done here. And then there are the students who come from Yokohama and even from Tokyo to learn the natural way.”

  Masumi smiled and raised her beautiful eyes to look me fully in the face.

  “And we have five children living here as well as all the young people from the universities. The children play in the fields and help with the work, and have the perfect childhood.”

  The farmer spoke again. He could no longer hide his pride.

  “And Pilgrim, do you remember when we walked down into the fields and I said that one day my natural rice plants would rival the productivity of the commercial farms? Well, this year we will yield twenty-three bushels per acre in the bottom field, which is more than anyone has yielded in the whole of Ehime, which means, almost certainly, that these fields are the most productive in all of Japan!”

  I could hardly believe my ears. But I had to know the truth.

  “So you never gave up? You never cracked. You have never used pesticides or fertilizer?”

  “Not one single drop!”

  “And you have still never ploughed?”

  The farmer shook his head and smiled. Truly, what had been achieved here by this humble man was a miracle worthy of God himself.

  For the next three hours we talked. I told them of my new life as a teacher and I listened as the farmer and Masumi recounted their story of the last seven years.

  It had not all been easy. Far from it. Even after the successful barley harvest, which had meant that they could finally marry, they had still suffered many terrible setbacks.

  In the first year after their marriage, the neighbours on the huge commercial farms that surrounded them on all sides got together and attempted to sue the farmer, saying that his fields and orchards were the breeding grounds of all kinds of pests and that these pests used the farm as a base from which to attack their own healthy crops. They took the farmer to court in Ehime Capital and told the Judge that the Fumimoto farm was a vermin-infested wilderness.

  The Judge came down in person to inspect the land. He was a very severe-looking man and when he first stepped out of his chauffeur-driven car he seemed most unhappy at having been made to travel so far into the countryside. But as soon as he got out into the fields his whole manner changed and he spent the afternoon sitting in the orchard in the sunshine, with his eyes shut and a smile on his face, surrounded by wildlife.

  He returned to the provincial capital and the next day he threw the case out of court, saying to the commercial farmers: “If you do not like the way Fumimoto-san farms then take your case to God. I will have no part in prosecuting such a paradise.”

  In the second year, they had continued to lose many more trees and at one point things had looked very bleak. The farmer admitted that in those dark days he had experienced, for the first and only time in his life, the treacherous stirrings of doubt.

  But with Masumi’s encouragement he had persevered and by the third year of their marriage the farm was thriving and everyone in the Prefecture had heard of its fabulous success and the mysterious method of “do-nothing” farming. Workers from other farms began to ask to join them and students started to travel from far and wide to find out more about the new way to live their lives.

  Success inevitably led to fame and fame led to outside interest, even from the very authorities who had always sneered at the farmer’s techniques. In the summer of the fourth year the farm received a visit from the Ehime Agricultural Institute. An entire delegation came. They brought all sorts of apparatus with them and squatted in the fields, measuring the strength of the sunlight and the angle of the leaves and taking soil samples back to their laboratory so that they could establish the acidity or alkalinity of the earth. They wandered this way and that through the rice plants and the orchards, scratching their heads and looking positively annoyed. Some of them were carrying big nets to catch insects, others had small briefcases filled with phials of chemical solutions. All of them were dressed in white lab coats and all of them wore dark frowns.

  “Are you sure you haven’t been using fertilizer?” they asked the farmer suspiciously. “Are you absolutely certain that there have been no pesticides sprayed? Something strange is going on … We are not getting the whole picture.”

  They spent two more days conducting experiments. One of the young students from Tokyo said it was as if a supernatural phenomenon had been reported on the farm and that the scientists were determined to find a “logical, scientific” explanation to replace the “
superstitious” belief in nature.

  Eventually, they packed up and moved on, unwilling to admit defeat but managing at least a grudging respect for the farmer’s “good luck”.

  In the spring of the fifth year, just after the barley harvest, a man from Yokohama testing centre itself arrived. He had heard all about the “do nothing” method and he intended to grow rice using the technique, but he intended to do it under laboratory conditions. He began by marching into the fields and measuring the lengths of the straw that had been put back over the harvested field. Back in his laboratory, he announced, he would make sure all the straws were the same length and he would lay them in neat rows. The farmer smiled and chuckled to himself.

  Finally, in the sixth year, the mystery as to who owned the land on the hillside was solved. It all belonged to a wealthy man, the descendant of one of the island’s oldest samurai families. This old aristocrat had learned of what the farmer was doing and he came by horse to inspect the hillside for himself. He was a man of few words, as befitted someone of his station. He had taken one look at the marvellous orchard and immediately turned his horse for home, stopping only to tell the farmer that he would instruct his lawyer to give him not only the orchard but all the wild land up to the banks of the River Sumoda. “You know better than I how to care for our land,” he said as he left.

  As I listened to all these tales I was overcome with joy and hope. Here, all around me on the farm, was the living, growing proof that a new life was possible after all and that the path to this new life ran in exactly the opposite direction to the grey road of economic progress. The efforts of science were all unnecessary and only led to spiritual and physical hunger and pain. The evidence was incontrovertible. The farmer had systematically removed all the props of the modern world and yet his farm was now the most successful in the whole of Japan.

  “Maybe now people can be persuaded to change. Maybe now they will realize that ‘progress’ is not just about more science and technology. Maybe others will even try your method!” I said.

  “Non-method!” the farmer corrected me with a grin on his face. I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “Yes. Non-method!”

  “Well, that is what I sincerely hope.”

  “Perhaps you could write an agricultural handbook – you know, like the handbook that the Ehime Agricultural Co-operative produces for the commercial farmers – only make it for natural farmers.”

  The farmer chuckled.

  “Yes. And I can explain in long scientific phrases that the main technique of my non-method is ‘to do nothing’!”

  He guffawed merrily at this thought, then suddenly went quiet and put on a mock-serious face.

  “My neighbours the commercial farmers are always saying ‘What else can we do?’ ‘What else can we try?’ ‘Maybe we should try doing this or that?’ They sit up at night dreaming up new schemes and worrying about what they might have forgotten to do. They read the literature sent to them by the Co-operative and tumble over one another to adopt the latest technologies.”

  Again, in an instant, his face lit up with a great big grin.

  “I am the opposite. When I get up in the morning I say: ‘What can I not do today? What else can I leave out? Shall I get up early this morning and put pesticides on my crops? Never! The natural predators will be my pesticide. I will have a lie-in. Fertilizer? No need! The straw and chicken manure provide plenty of organic nutrition. I’ll take the afternoon off! Ploughing? Forget it! The worms and microbes will be my ploughmen, they plough for me day and night, even as I sleep they are hard at work …”

  Later that afternoon, the farmer walked me through the fields and orchards and showed me where we had cut the weeds all those years before and where the dead fields used to be. Orchards of strong saplings and fields of healthy rice stood in their place. The natural balance of the land had been restored and nature’s harmony had returned. Then we climbed the slope to the edge of the wood and sitting amongst the long grass we watched the sun setting over the fields below.

  Half to himself, the farmer spoke.

  “The only real natural farmer is the hunter and gatherer. Some happy people around the world still live like that. It is said that they only work a few hours a week and that they are never ill or unhappy. Diseases that are common here or in the West are completely unknown to them. Nature provides for them and they do not need to worry about planting schedules. That’s the real natural farming!”

  I played with a stalk of tall grass and meditated on his words for a few minutes. I thought of the crowds of London and all the other cities of the world.

  “But we can’t go back to that life. It is too late. There are too many people in the world and too many people who know nothing of nature …”

  The farmer studied the horizon and nodded his head.

  “You are right … But at least we can be on our guard against things that are called ‘progress’ but in the end only make us unhappy and unwell. The baboon in the forest – who is, after all, our cousin – is not always trying to improve his life and yet he knows how best to live. When he feels a little unwell, he knows exactly where to turn to find the right herbs to fix his illness.”

  The farmer chuckled to himself and smiled at me.

  “We can’t even decide what to have for breakfast. Some people say we should eat no carbohydrates, others say we should eat no fat. Some say we should eat nothing but fruit whilst others say that meat and seeds are our natural diet. The truth is, we have forgotten, and we have forgotten because we have allowed our so-called intelligence to take over and we have lost our instincts.”

  The farmer smiled and shook his head.

  “Every generation has its theory of nature. Once upon a time, people in the West believed that the whole universe was created by God in seven days. Today they say there was a big bang and that mankind has evolved from apes and before that from bacteria and before that from chemicals floating in the oceans of earth. They say that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity explains everything and that Darwin tells us how we got here, but tomorrow it will all be gone and our view of nature will have changed again.”

  The farmer stood up and surveyed the horizon before looking down at me and smiling, his gentle, kind face bathed by the fading red glow of the setting sun.

  “But nature does not change. Only we change. All our theories are just words and our words are not so different from the songs of the birds and the cries of the animals – except we make the mistake of thinking that our words contain the truth. But look! The first stars are out. Come. You must be hungry. This philosophizing is very tiring. I think we should stick to farming! Let us go and eat!”

  I stayed for two wonderful weeks on the farm, sleeping in a hut on the mountainside, sharing meals with the farmer and his family and the student volunteers, and then finally the day came when I had to leave.

  It was a far cry from the farewell of my first visit. At the hour of the mid-morning break, the farmer and his family and the farm workers and students all came back from the fields to say goodbye. I had worked with them all at one time or another over the course of my two-week stay and had shared much conversation and laughter, but it was the first time I had seen everyone together in one place, for at mealtimes people ate in shifts and drifted in and out of the main house, some choosing to sit in the garden and others preferring to eat in the fields. And so it was only now, just as I was on the point of leaving, that I was fully able to appreciate the measure of the transformation that had taken place.

  I marvelled at the number of happy, healthy faces that I saw. Akira and Aiko, the farmer’s little children, squealed with delight and played hide-and-seek between everyone’s legs. There were ten, twenty, thirty, thirty-five people or more. One of the farm workers carried a tray out of the farmhouse piled high with deliciously sweet papaya fruit and we all gorged ourselves on this treat. Everyone was laughing and chatting: young and old, seasoned farmhands and novice students fresh from the city.

/>   Then I noticed the farmer. He too was watching the gathering and he too seemed to be overcome by the sight of all the people. Perhaps he had never before seen everyone standing together in one place. It certainly wasn’t his way to call big meetings. He taught by example, that was the only way he knew. I had never seen him call people to him, or demand everyone’s attention. The most he would do was tap someone on the shoulder when they were on their own and offer a few quiet words of friendly advice.

  As he surveyed the crowd of happy people I saw an expression of humble satisfaction cross his gentle face. Then suddenly his head turned. He must have felt my gaze. Our eyes met in recognition. Seven long years flashed by, from that day we had stood together in the top field, scythes in our hands, surveying the enormous labour that waited to be done, to this vibrant scene in the yard, everyone devouring the fruits of the farm, the laughing children, the sense of communal joy.

  The old villager from Fumimoto was waiting for me at the gate. His cart was laden with produce from the farm, destined for the markets and dinner tables of Ehime Prefecture. It was finally time to depart. I could delay no longer. The farmer made his way through the crowd and together we walked over to the cart.

  “Now, old friend, I hope that it won’t be another seven years before we see you again. And I hope this time you won’t be worrying about us. As you can see, we have managed all right in your absence!”

  I smiled and hugged the farmer to my breast and then turned and stepped up onto the cart. I shook my head and laughed.

  “No. It’s not you I worry about any more – it’s the rest of the world. If only other people could see what you have done here then maybe they could be persuaded to change.”

  With his arm around his wife, the farmer joined the crowd in waving me off as the cart slowly rocked into motion and pulled up the gentle incline of the hill. Even today I can remember clearly the last words that the farmer shouted to me before he was lost for ever from my sight and even today, when I am feeling low, his words still echo in my ears and his strength comes down to me across the years.