"Nothing Is So Precious As Soil"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 354, 5 April 1946, Page 6

"Nothing Is So Precious As Soil"

THE third and final article of a series written by the Editor of "The Listener" about his recent visit to Japan

HE police, by the way, are one of the problems of the occupation, and, to the Japanese themselves, one of the puzzles. To the Americans they are simply a necessary evil-a bad lot with whom they would gladly have no truck, but in the meantime indispensable. If a man is wanted, the police will find him. If there is a plant of aims somewhere, they will unearth it as soon as they are sure that the Americans suspect its existence. They know everybody’s past activities, and nearly everybody’s present, and they have always had such miserable pay that blackmail and graft have been their daily occupation. So they stand about with their swords and brass-buttons, ready for an inquiry, a search, or a raid, and afraid of nothing so much as losing America’s protection. When that happens their fate is obscure, but I was told that there are usually so many of their own people waiting for them that they are lucky if they live long. Whether that is true or not they are desperately anxious to retain the favour of the occupation forces, and one of my problems with them was to avoid catching their eye and getting both a salute and a bow; an embarrassing situation when

one is not even, like a padre, an officer by courtesy. The last policeman I saw was guarding the plane on which we finally left Japan about two hours before daylight. How long he had been there when we arrived I don’t know, but he had made himself a little fire in an oil-can and was trying to escape the bitter wind by crouching against the wall of an outhouse. It was pathetic and a little disgraceful, to see how obsequiously he surrendered his place and how selfishly we took it, how he ran about in the darkness looking for more sticks for the fire and how like pukka sahibs we accepted it all. As we moved off to the plane I looked back, and there he was standing in the light of the fire saluting our ‘contemptuous posteriors. * * *

STRUGGLE FOR WARMTH

AM reminded by that policeman’s fire that fuel, after food and clothes, is perhaps the most precious article of .consumption in Japan. If you look at the map you will see that most of Japan is about as far north of the equator as we are south. Roughly, therefore, it has our climate in reverse, with the difference made by the great land-mass of Asia. Its'summers are no hotter: than

ours, but its winters are appreciably colder, especially in the North, which lies under snow for two or three months.

February is not perhaps the coldest month, but it is cold enough to make fires and warm clothing necessary for comfort, and great numbers of the Japanese at present have neither one nor

the other. Thousands have in fact no homes, and it was therefore lucky for them that the first winter after their collapse was relatively mild. But concrete subways and basements are bitter places in the mildest winter, and it may have been because so many were sleeping in such places that I was so painfully aware of their lack of handkerchiefs. In any case, most of the great cities (except Kyoto) are badly. bombed. Most of the bombing was with incendiaries, and so vast areas in some of the biggest cities -- Osaka, for example — are at present just a barren waste. There is neither shelter from the wind nor power nor light nor heat, and although thousands are still living there, they are living miserably. But in February everybody was living miserably everywhere who had no wood or coal for fires, and one of the pictures I shall always have of Japan is groups of people huddled round fires in unexpected places-public streets, wharves, warehouse . floors, and even the decks of ships. The fuel was any worthless thing that would burn, and although I never saw a fire-engine, and must assume therefore that no fire ever got out of control, the risks taken to get warm made one realise what a job the bombers had made of their work, and even wonder whether fires had. any further terrors for people who had come through so many already.

HEWERS OF WOOD

a me — ND fires and fuel recall the timber situation in general in Japan, which, for a country so closely crowded with

people, seemed surprisingly good. The explanation must be that about half the land is too poor to grow anything but trees, and that all the people are too

conscious of the value of wood to waste the smallest stick. Everywhere you go you see women, women oftener than men, carrying

home bundles of brushwood, or men trundling two or three logs on a handcart, or bullock-carts carrying longer lengths to the sawmills. It is astonishing in a civilisation as old as Japan’s that there should be so many mills engaged in the elementary work that most New Zealand mills were doing 50 years ago, but Japan is always astonishing you with these plunges from the modern to the mediaeval. It is one of the explanations of her toughness in war that so many of her people are literally hewers of wood and drawers of water and tillers of the soil and toilers in shallow and deep waters.

JAPAN WILL NOT STARVE

ad ,. _ T is a secret of their toughness in war, and it is a reason why they will get through everything that defeat has now forced them to endure in peace. They will not starve, or sink into apathy, or refuse to work, or surrender their place in the company of Asiatic nations. Even

in this desperate crisis *in their affairs they are feeding themselves, and a day spent in almost any prefecture reveals

why. One person in every two is growing something; one acre in every two is yielding food. Though much of the soil is light and poor, they have contrived, and will go on contriving, to make the best of it produce two crops a year and all of it produce something that, with the harvest of the sea, will maintain life and health. I saw nothing more of their fishermen than the glimpses one gets from the air or skirting the coast in an express train. But I saw fish, smelt fish, could not escape from fish in town or country and in big houses or small. You were conscious of it in railway stations and in trains, you saw people eating it in the streets, you saw it hanging and ripening on house-fronts as often as you see washing in New Zealand drying on the lines. But if I saw few fishermen I saw a great deal of the tillers of the soil. I travelled into the country to see them, I watched them at work wherever there were a few free feet of earth in and around the towns. In the end I came to the conclusion that nothing is so precious in Japan as soil,. nothing so carefully guarded, nothing so generously fed. Everything that is not city or forest or lake or highway or railway line or public park is garden or farm, tended by 20 million people, and fed from the bodies of 70 million. I made a rough count from a railway window of the workers per acre in an area that took about 20 minutes to traverse, and it was not less than three. It was probably far more than three, but I am being careful, and the point is in any case clear. We have

never seen anything in New Zealand comparable with the energy, care, and unflagging devotion accorded to the Japanese soil, and although I was told that the strain is beginning to tell, that farmers’ sons leave home when they can and that an increasing number of eldest sons are defaulting in their duty to marry and stay under their fathers’ roofs, the fact remains that every yard of land is producing rice or millet or barley or wheat or vegetables, and sometimes two of these crops simultaneously. You can’t starve a nation like that, and it will not, like the people of India, starve itself. It will eat, it will survive and keep healthy, and you cannot doubt, in whatever setting you see them, that starvation so far has not come near the Japanese.

TWO LOST SHEEP

COROLLARY to all this of course is that Japan is an uneasy country for New Zealanders, a place without natural rest. No one basks in the sun or loafs or sprawls. I don’t remember seeing anyone lying down, or in the open sitting down. They squat or sit on. their heels, but only at night can they relax and rest. I did see a studént sitting on the ground at the door of a University library: there was a_ sheltered*corner there, with dry grass a foot long, and he sat with crossed legs reading while he waited for the doors to

open. But in general there are no free corners to rest inexcept in public parks-and you find yourself wondering which is more precious in Japan,

time or space. I think space is. Although time is never wasted, it is plant room they value most-a corner for e tree, a ledge for a vegetable, and no place ever to stand and stare. Man is the slave of the earth, or its caretaker: never its possessor. It possesses him. A farm in Japan is an acre of land, or occasionally two or three acres cultivated to the very door of the cottage in which the farmer, and all his animals, live. Only once did I see an animal grazing, and that was a bullock on a short tether on the bank of a dam. It is also unusual, at least in Southern Japan, to see animals pulling a plouga or any kind of farm vehicle. If a farmer has a horse or a bullock he uses them for carting loads to and from the cityespecially the most precious load of all, fertiliser for his soil. But he is his own plough-horse; his hoe, grubber, rake, and arms, his outlay in implements. There are of course no fences, and normally , no hedges. I saw vineyards, and now and again a lonely fruit-tree, but an enclosed home, with flowers and shrubs, is for the very rich only. Crows, to my surprise, were fairly numerous, but I never saw fowls running at large,.or ducks, or geese. And here is the story of my only sheep: I was advised to go to Kyoto to see the cultural life of Japan and in Kyoto to see, among other places of interest, the Art Gallery, the Museum, and the Zoo. But the Art Gallery was not open: so sorry. The Museum-sorry, no museum just now. Later. So there remained only the Zoo, and this we were determined to see. We did. We drove through the gates, got out of our car, and began looking round. We found a horse, old and skinny, in one pen, an Irish terrier in a cage strong enough to hold lions, a really

savage Alsatian in the-bears’ den. There was a pit full of monkeys, amorous and obscene, a pen with two or three young pigs, three cages of domestic fowls, a pelican, two or three cranes, and a really dazzling pheasant. Then we came on them-two decrepit sheep, labelled in Latin, English, and Japanese:-Sheep: Corriedale-New Zealand. It was my most exciting moment in Japan. I remembered Japanese arriving to buy New Zealand sheep, the criticism when any were sold, the head-shakings and solemn warnings. I even spoke to one of the purchasers myself and asked where our New Zealand sheep were going. But. we should have turned over and gone.to sleep, as we later did. If those are the last two Corriedales in Japan, there will be no others. The ram looked so wanly at his mate and at us, the ewe gave him such a watery look in return, that a lamb would be a miracle. If they are still alive when autumn comes they will have forgotten their multiplication tables. But I would have given a hundred yen to be able to drop a matagowri bush over the rails and two live tussocks.

PART OF OUR WORLD

— * be" O it went on for ten days, and so I could go on for ten more pages. But I am not writing a book. I am trying to convey t6 fellow New Zealanders what life in Japan is like at first. Those who stay long enough to see through outward appearances will discover no doubt that

in their first few weeks they were living in a daze. But it is the first weeks I am writing about. Six thousand New Zealanders

will arrive one day at Kure with no more knowledge of the experience ahead of them than strangers who have come to New Zealand with minds full of Maoris and boiling mud. If they think they will be met by geisha girls waving cherry blossoms at them, or bowing so low that the chrysanthemums drop out of their hair, it is common decency to tell them that Kure is not unlike Lyttelton, or not unlike what Lyttelton would be with 50 times as many people and its waterfront battered by bombs. But it is better still to tell them that a geisha is about as interesting to a New Zealander as ‘a performing doll, that Japan as a whole is absorbingly interesting, and that even if it were as dull as ditch-water, no New Zealander who is able to see it can afford not to. New Zealand soldiers are going to Japan because New Zealand is deeply, and even critically, interested in everything that is happening there. We dare not do a second time what we have already done once-play like children on one side of a pond while momentous things are. happening on the other side. Japan has | not disappeared. It has not been elim-_ inated from our world, but made more. obviously a part of. it; and the quickest way to learn that lesson is to spend a few months among the Japanese people. This is the story of a few days among them, with many of the most interesting things left out. I have not described my visit to a brewery, spared by the atomic bomb, and now from the edge of annihilation pouring out thousands of bottles of beer a week at 312d a bottle; or the recreation centre established by the American command in Kyoto,-where any soldier on leave may spend seven days (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) and seven nights free, in a building bigger than the biggest hotel in New Zealand, and with almost everything in it but a kitchen garden and orchard; or the surprise of Niwako, where on the shores of a lake as big as Taupo a luxury hotel housed German and Japanese officers and experts engaged in submarine tests in the lake itself, and bomb launching tests from a near-by mountain. I have said nothing about the Japanese railway system, which the bombers for some reason or other spared and which still works efficiently; about the incredible crowds in the shabby trams, and the use made of bicycles. It has been impossible to linger over the shrines, my visits to a University and two schools, an afternoon in a film-making studio, and our unwelcome inspection of a newspaper office. I have not said what a preposterous sham I thought the Imperial Palace we visited (Kyoto not Tokyo), with the Emperor’s private garden and fishponds; how difficult I found it to feel anything in a Shinto temple; and how little there was to buy, at a price any sensible person would be prepared to give, in a department store we visited that was like five Woolworth stores one above the other. I should like to describe an exclusive shopping street in the old capital city of Kyoto, so narrow that two cars could not pass, but so expensive whether your hobby was lacquer ware or colour prints-or porcelain or silk or brocades that you felt relieved when you found yourself in the street again empty-handed. I could tell you about the strange cooing noises the women in those places made when you admired something but could not quite convey why, about the treatment of Japanese babies who cry, about the national habit of bowing, the freedom of the children and the apparently absolute subjection of wives. But those things fill space and this record is already. too long.

POSTSCRIPT FOR SOLDIERS

+ af 7. CLOSE with a paragraph for soldiers only. From time immemorial men of’ my age have urged men of your age into dangers, difficulties, and discomforts that we have no intention of accepting ourselves. Inevitably I have fallen into | the same trick. I am too old to serve as

a soldier, too far removed from the outlook and mental interests of youth to be able to serve them usefully in any other

capacity. Yet this whole story from beginning to end is an appeal to chem to | volunteer for Japan. My only answer to that, if you choose to attack me for it, is that I have myself made the journey and seen some of the things I am asking you to face. But the point is not whether I have a good or a bad answer to your criticism. It is whether you have a good or bad reason for staying at home. You have ‘| a very good reason if you have already served abroad or are already doing better things in New Zealand. In any case, it is not for me to ask you how good your reason is. But it is for me to tell you, if I can do it honestly, that six months in Japan to a man who has never been out of New Zealand is education made exciting and easy, and patriotism made 90 per cent. pleasant. There will be dull days and some disagreeable experiences, but the experiences as a

whole will be something like dropping in on an absorbing film, going home for a sleep and a meal, and then going back again to a new instalment. I went to Japan with a completely open mind, because it was largely an empty mind. I had read a good deal about the country in my youth, when it was a romantic place, presented in prose by Lafcadio Hearn and in verse by Sir Edwin Arnold. Since then I have read chiefly what you have read -reports by journalists from Pearl Harbour to VJ Day. In other words, the Japan that started the war and carried it on for nearly four years was a closed book to me. I do not pretend that I have now read the book. I claim only that I have read the preface and peeped at some of the illustrations. I know as much as you will know at the end of your first week or two if you volunteer and are accepted for service; and if I have not made you want to know more that is my failure as a writer and not the dullness of the topic. Wherever I went in Japan I was asked by other soldiers-Americans, who are most numerous, Australians, and both soldiers and sailors from the United Kingdom — when the New Zealanders were coming. In every case I said soon, and that I was hurrying back to New Zealand to tell them what interesting days lay ahead of them. Now I have told you,