Horse Fair at Kushiro

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 438, 14 November 1947, Page 19

Horse Fair at Kushiro

There was laughter from the crowd; auctioneers were. the same in any language, we decided, and we laughed, too, because we could imagine the jokes.

It was the horse fair at Kushiro, where in three days 2000 horses were sold for 52 million yen. The whinnying of the several hundred young horses, the smell of the branding irons, the machine-gun bursts from the auctioneers, the jostling crowd, the buyers with their breeches and eight-inch cigarette holders were all exciting. The average price for these light, young horses was about £150, and as many of the buyers had travelled from as far as southern Kyushu, about 1000 miles away, the eventual selling price to farmers would be much higher. We were told that the horses were two-year-olds, but to me they looked no more than yearlings and it is probable that the Japanese have the same custom for their animals as they have for their children-counting them as one-year-old at birth. Near to the fair was a Government stud, with 65. stallions. Originally horses in Japan were of Mongolian stock (from China) and some years ago there was Arabian and Persian blood introduced. Now most of the stallions are Anglo-Norman and _ Percheron thoroughbreds. The light, strong horses of this mixed breed are especially suitable for the paddy fields, in which a Clydesdale, for instance, working in six inches of water and mud would create havoc. It would be a most indignant

Clydesdale, too, that had to exist on the tough rice straw and soya beans that are the feed of the usual Japanese horse. Our three weeks in Hokkaido were ended. Our journeying through farms that varied from holdings of linen flax and sugar beet to dry land rice and lily bulbs had been intensely interesting; the mountains and forest lands, with their bears and black foxes, had been magnificent. With some of the countryside we had been reminded of home-and, such is sentimentality, the pleasure of greeting a Japanese cook in one of the hotels who had been a prisoner-of-war in New Zealand for two years was mutual. We had enjoyed. the hospitality of the men of the 11th U.S. Airborne Division, and after attending one of their jumps we had no doubt that they earned their money the hard way-just before. hitting the ground 600 men had been caught in a ground wind and 25 per cent of them had been injured. We had not minded when a young Japanese child had come running, saying (our interpreter said) "Hello, American man." We wished the best of luck to their 12-year development plan and hoped that never again would "troubles" break out to rouse more interest in some other land "as a finer reclamation country than Hokkaido, where cold is intense."