Japanland by Karin Muller

Author:Karin Muller [Muller, Karin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The days slip by in a blur of snapshot images as I am passed from hand to hand through the web of Yuka’s friends and acquaintances.

Watanabe-san is a full-time farmer. He grows a variety of produce—tomatoes, mushrooms, and other vegetables in low-slung plastic greenhouses that sprawl across his fields like fattened caterpillars. He uses the most technically advanced fertilizers and pesticides to coax the highest possible yield out of every inch of his carefully tended acreage.

“Just fifty years ago,” he tells me over green tea and sugar cakes, “over half of all Japanese were full-time farmers. Today we’re only 3 percent.” After the war, Japan put all its resources into modernizing its manufacturing and exports. The rural sector was completely ignored. Eventually the government established farming subsidies, just to keep them from going broke. Tariffs were set up to kept out foreign competition. Farmers prospered, but they got less and less competitive: rice in Japan now costs 600 percent more than it does in the United States.

“If the tariffs were lifted,” I ask, “what could you grow to make a profit?”

He sits silently for several minutes. “Gravestones,” he finally says.

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