One Day the Shadow Passed Page 4

  I still couldn’t believe that a farmer’s son wouldn’t have been over the moon about going to the big city. I thought that that was what all country people dreamed of. Having grown up in a small town myself, I had always yearned to journey to the big city. And I was young and so naturally I assumed that other people’s ambitions would be similar to my own.

  “But you must have liked Yokohama when you got there? It must have been exciting for you?”

  The farmer smiled at me patiently.

  “My first experience of Yokohama was through the train window. I remember for a long time all I could see was little houses. Then after an hour or so the houses were replaced by taller and taller buildings, until finally they became so tall I could no longer see the sky, and by the time the train approached the centre of the city it was sliding in and out of tunnels, under elevated roads, and squeezing its way between enormous tower blocks of steel and concrete. I had never seen anything like it before.”

  The farmer paused for a moment. He seemed to be lost in thought, remembering his first experience of the big city.

  “When I finally found my way to the Agricultural Institute I was given a small room in one of the tower blocks next to Yamate Park, on the bluff that overlooks the harbour. Have you ever been to Yokohama?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, it is a great city with a huge harbour, filled with ships that are constantly bustling about, so the view from my room was magnificent. The room was actually a very peaceful place – perfect for study and thought. But that didn’t mean I felt at home there. Every day I went to the laboratory next to the apartment block to attend classes or to study the infectious diseases of rice through a microscope. As you can imagine, it was quite difficult for me to go from the farm to a lonely life in a tower block in Yokohama, but that is the way of the modern world.”

  “What did they teach you?”

  The farmer sighed.

  “They tried to teach us the modern scientific view of life.”

  I must have looked puzzled. The farmer tried to explain himself.

  “What I mean is that they tried to teach us that it is possible to know nature and that it is possible to break nature down into parts and understand how nature works – just as we can understand how a pocket watch works by taking it to pieces.”

  I listened in fascination as the farmer continued his tale.

  “Even today I still clearly remember the first morning of classes. Professor Mitsubishi, one of the most famous professors in the whole of Japan, came to give an introductory talk about agriculture. Even then Professor Mitsubishi was already a very old man. He looked as if he hadn’t left Yokohama for many years, let alone actually set foot on a farm. The curtains were drawn and the lights were turned off and the Professor’s assistant turned on a slide projector. I had never seen anything like this before. Projected onto the white screen were ten or twelve amoebas. They pulsated with life and they were constantly moving around. They reminded me of jellyfish from the Inland Sea, bobbing on the tide.

  “We watched these little creatures and the Professor talked a great deal about food and energy and the importance of using pesticides and chemical fertilizer, and then he prodded one of the amoebas with the tip of a sharp needle. The amoeba’s skin became very hard and its movement became much weaker. I couldn’t understand what was going on.

  “The Professor – in fact all of the staff at the Institute – liked to use the new words and phrases that had been brought from America and Europe. I remember he kept using the words ‘evolution’ and ‘competition’ and the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, whilst at the same time jabbing at the amoeba again and again. Its rigidity increased still further. Around the amoeba swam its brothers and sisters, beating like hearts. But now the amoeba hardly moved at all. It was like a bee that had survived into the winter; it just lay there and let itself get pushed around until finally it shrank into itself, like a little old village woman who had led an unhappy life. Then it stopped moving at all.”

  The farmer sighed and shook his head at the memory.

  “I left the lecture feeling quite sick. What has this got to do with farming? I thought. What’s more, I was angry. It was the season for mushroom hunting. At the farm they would be missing me, I knew where all the best places were. I should have been there, helping.”

  The farmer paused again and poured himself some water, which he proceeded to sip slowly as he reflected on his past. I was appalled by the story of the amoebas. No wonder the farmer didn’t like Yokohama and the Institute.

  “Did it all get better? Maybe you were just homesick?” I said.

  The farmer put the cup down and, looking me in the eye, he began again.

  “I had no choice but to make the best I could of it. I could not return home. The shame would have been too great. Every day, I sat at my desk at the laboratory window with Yokohama city stretching away beneath me. I worked all the time. On more than one occasion I worked so hard that I actually passed out at my desk. I wasn’t used to spending so much time alone. At the farm there was always someone around.

  “After a month of this lonely existence I finally left the laboratory late one evening and went out into the city night. I have to admit it was exciting. It was the first time I had explored the city and I walked for hours and hours through the neon lanes until finally I followed a crowd into a bar. It was dark and smoky inside and the music was almost deafening. Although I had very little money from my parents, I bought a drink, and sat on my own at a table. I still hadn’t got into the habit of taking off my coat as soon as I was indoors so I received quite a few funny looks.

  “Next to me was a group of four young salary-men. They were about my age, maybe a little older. They were dressed in black suits and they were sitting in big leather armchairs. On the table in front of them were lots of empty beer bottles. I watched them as they drank bottle after bottle and laughed and shouted at each other. They put their feet on the edge of the table and leant back on their chairs. They bought cigars from the waiter. They tried to light them and almost set fire to each other’s hair. That made them laugh even harder. They puffed on the cigars, coughing and pointing at each other. They fell backwards off their chairs. Their black suits were soaked with beer.

  “Accidentally I caught the eye of the loudest of the group. I smiled at him. They all began to look at me and talk about me and then they started to point at me and shout. I continued to smile at them and stood up. One of them leant over to touch me, but instead he fell flat on his face, hitting the floor with a crash of bottles. I turned around and left.

  “Outside, the sky was the colour of a peacock’s neck. I felt tired and lost. Where was the harbour? Where was the bluff? When I finally returned home, I decided not to go out to bars any more. I resolved to devote myself to study instead.

  “The days went by and the routine was more or less the same. We studied aspects of nature and aspects of plants and soil. We broke them down into constituent parts: leaves, roots, seeds and so on. We broke down the list of predators and the list of things that the plants would need: the vitamins, the micronutrients, the sunlight, the carbon dioxide. The teachers seemed to think that dividing nature into parts was the natural thing to do, but I thought that it was wrong.”

  I was confused by the farmer’s words. Yet he smiled and sighed.

  “The goal of our study was to be able to create the perfect rice field, without any pests but still containing the correct amount of nutrients and vitamins. The problem is that you can no more create a perfect rice field by taking the rice plants out of nature than you can create the perfect human by taking a baby from its home and placing it in a heated white room and feeding it synthetic food. Rice plants and humans need their natural environments. They need coughs and colds and seed-blight to toughen them up; they need foods rich in nutrition and soil rich in diverse nutrients; they don’t need a vitamin pill and plain white bread or three tons of nitrogen phosphate every spring.
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  “Studying nature under a microscope and then copying the parts of it that we think are good will never work. The human mind will never be able to understand nature fully – what appears from the outside to be a pest in fact turns out to be a critical part of nature’s process. But nevertheless, day in, day out in the laboratory, that is exactly what we tried to do.

  “I was reasonably good at it but I didn’t like it. It didn’t make sense to me. At the time I didn’t really know why I didn’t like it, I just felt instinctively that it was all wrong and wished that I was back on the farm where I didn’t have to think about anything; where the days went by and I was always busy. But I could never escape the thought that I didn’t fit in.

  “I remember one conversation I had particularly well. It marked a turning point in my life in Yokohama. I was standing in the queue at the Agricultural Institute canteen looking at the food that was on display, trying to decide what to choose for lunch. It was always the same processed stuff and the selection was very limited. It was most unappetizing for a country boy like myself.

  “Nowadays, I know that there are two ways in which a person can starve. I have had time to think about the world and I understand it better. People can starve from lack of calories, for example when the harvest fails, or when there is a war and the food supply is interrupted; or they can starve inwardly, from lack of nutrition. The human body needs many micronutrients that do not appear in city food. The body has to have these tiny amounts of metals and minerals, just as much as it has to have water and energy. It simply cannot function properly without these things and its chemistry becomes unbalanced.

  “When people have a shortage of these things, they become desperate, even violent. They don’t realize what the cause of their problems is because outwardly they look OK. They are not thin and emaciated, but it is the same thing. All around the modern world, people are inwardly starving and it is having a devastating effect on their happiness and peace of mind. It’s no exaggeration to say that inward starvation is causing wars and crime, as hungry people lash out in desperation. At the time I didn’t understand all this, I just instinctively knew that it was not good to eat the same five things every day.

  “On that particular afternoon the chef, who was dressed in smart white clothes like a hospital surgeon, was standing on the far side of the brightly lit stainless-steel serving counter. His arms were crossed over his chest, his face was wearing a stern expression.

  “You have to remember, I was only eighteen and I didn’t really understand how the world worked, so I tried to explain to the chef that there were many other, better kinds of food than those that he was offering. I wasn’t trying to criticize him. I was just being enthusiastic. I was trying to help.

  “‘Not many people know it but even lice and fleas are very good food,’ I began. ‘There are many recipes that I know from home that use lice and fleas. In fact, almost all the insects of the Japanese Archipelago are very nutritious and they often have special medicinal properties, too. Did you know that ground-up lice from the shores of the Inland Sea are a cure for epilepsy and that ladybirds will almost always calm the nerves? At home, if someone is feeling anxious or out of sorts, we give them a little ladybird tea and straight away their feelings of anxiety will pass. Food and medicine are opposite sides of the same coin.’

  “I beamed happily at the chef. I was so glad to finally find someone that I could talk to. ‘And insect larvae are edible too,’ I continued. ‘And they are really filled with goodness. But they have to be alive. The tastiest of all the tiny creatures are silkworms. They are as exquisite as the kimono of a princess. People only think they are revolting. It is the same with the chickens and ducks that are reared in batteries in the dark, like the ones that you serve here. They are force fed and injected with chemicals. People think that they taste good, but they don’t. Their cousins the wild birds – the pheasants and guinea fowl and pigeons – taste much better and they are more nutritious. They have a diverse diet of wild food. The imprisoned birds eat pellets of synthetic matter. It is very sad. And it is the same with vegetables. The vegetables closer to their wild ancestors are richer in flavour and in nutrition. In the lily family, garlic and leek are better than anything, but people prefer the green onion and bulb onion. People are confused. They prefer the flavours of foods that are raised using chemicals, they prefer the tastes of sugar and salt.’

  “I remember, a crowd had gathered by this point. I carried on chattering away. They were staring at me and giggling. The chef watched me in silence. I felt very uncomfortable. Had I spoken for too long? Perhaps I had offended him. I waited to hear what he had to say, but he did not even blink. I bowed quickly and, picking up my tray with its bowl of white rice and vegetables, I turned to face the canteen.

  “At that moment one of my classmates hailed me. What a relief to see a friendly face. The classmate had just finished lunch. He was carrying his tray back to the counter. He had something to say to me.

  “‘Are you coming to the lecture after lunch? It’s by the Minister of Agriculture. It’s about your home prefecture. It’s about Ehime. They have great plans for it. They want to develop it into the most advanced prefecture in Japan.’”

  “I was very eager to hear what the Minister of Agriculture had to say about Ehime. I wolfed down my lunch and hurried along to the lecture. The Minister had a loud, important-sounding voice.

  “‘Ladies and Gentlemen’, he said, ‘let me begin by clearly stating our goals. We will create, in Ehime Prefecture, the perfect modern environment for growing rice. To develop to its potential, rice needs energy. Energy is communication. The sun communicates with the leaves and creates chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is the information that carries life and energy around the plant’s telephone exchange of capillaries …’

  “I stared around the room in bafflement. What strange words the Minister used! He didn’t seem to be talking about farming at all. In fact he didn’t seem to be talking about anything.

  “‘To begin with we must complete our study of rice growing in the Prefecture,’ he continued. ‘We must record every detail about current practices on each and every farm. We must know the exact temperature of the leaves of each plant. We must know at what angle the sunlight strikes the plant, how much sunlight it receives a day, how long it has spent in the flooded paddy before being transferred to the growing field. All this we must know. In addition, we must fully understand the soil conditions: what the salinity is, what the alkalinity is, what nutrients are in abundance and, of course, what nutrients are lacking. With all this information, we will then be able to decide on a dietary programme for our rice. We will then go on to study the predators and the weeds. What kinds of predators are there? What do the predators themselves eat, how much damage do they cause a year? What weeds are there, which predators destroy the weeds, and so on. Finally, we will synthesize this data and create a development plan. The development plan can best be thought of as a healthcare scheme for the crops. We will know their every need and so we will be able to administer the proper specialist care in the form of pesticides, fertilizers and intervention of other sorts. Without all this intervention, our food supplies will forever be vulnerable to the whims of nature and our yields will fall far below those achieved on foreign farms.’

  “By this point I had drifted off. As hard as I tried, I could not follow what the Minister was saying. He didn’t really seem to be speaking in words at all – he spoke in phrases. At home in the village, everyone had their own individual way of talking and everyone used different words and put them together in different ways, but here the Minister sounded just like all the other lecturers. All his words came together in prearranged phrases. These phrases were big and simple, but they were too big to describe my farm and too simple to describe nature. No matter what the Minister measured or how far he looked into his microscope, he would never understand. He was trying to measure the bottomless ocean with a six-foot pole!

  “Besides, I had other th
ings to think about! At the farm, the spinach would be ready by now and for dinner they would be eating the new rice and probably mackerel. And it was of course the time for crabs and squid and gingko nuts… and the time to sow the seeds for the New Year … But the Minister was still talking.

  “‘When we have finally finished, Ehime will be the model prefecture. In one step it will become a utopia for rice farmers. All the needs of the rice plant will be met. All alien material, weeds, insects, animals and so on, will be exterminated. The rice will stand alone in earth purified of all extraneous matter. All that will remain is the rice plant, the soil, the sun and the nourishment that we will provide using the most up-to-date scientific methods. The most modern mechanized equipment will be employed to achieve this goal. We will link Shikoku to the rest of Japan by a brand new sea bridge, made of the newest alloys and strengthened plastoid fibres, and by a revitalized road network that will criss-cross the province like a net, dragging it out of its torpor and backwardness. Ehime Prefecture will become the most modern, and therefore the most developed, prefecture in the whole of Japan. Small-scale, self-sufficient farming will finally be wiped out. It is primitive, inefficient and backward. It must be eliminated as quickly as possible. Too many people still farm in Japan. With large modern machines and bigger farms, we will need fewer people to produce a higher yield. I promise to deliver to Ehime a modern farming environment where only ten per cent of the population work on farms, as in America and Europe.’

  “At this point I was jolted from my daydream. I couldn’t believe my ears. The Minister seemed to think that small farms were a bad idea and that farm workers should be doing something else. In my opinion, all of the people should be farmers. If everyone farmed a quarter-acre each, then the whole country would have plenty to eat and everyone would be happy.

  “The Minister asked, ‘Are there any questions?’