by Alan Weisman
The result is a national ecological snafu. As each of those species matures, it emits increasing amounts of pollen. By 2000, more than a quarter of the Japanese people were itching and sneezing from a hay fever pandemic, due to all the cypress and cedars their government had planted. Each year, with the trees’ advancing age, more eyes redden and more sinuses burn. During the peak month of April, half the country is wearing face masks—and complaining.
But in this cool canyon, too steep for timbering, the air is bracing and fragrant. Leaf detritus and droppings of bears, boar, deer, fox, and monkeys that drink here provide the nutrients for the shiny, heart-shaped wasabi leaves poking up from the terraced streambed. As the rain eases, morning clears the mountaintop fog. The trills of Japanese bush warblers echo off the bedrock, as overhead, a Japanese mountain hawk-eagle, whose own population fell along with the hardwoods that once supported its massive nests, circles on barred wings.
Nevertheless, as the number of people here declines, the numbers of animals have increased. Villagers must fence off potato and cucumber gardens from bears, and hang netting over the stacks of oak logs injected with shiitake mushroom spores to protect them from herons and macaques. To young Yoshio Takeya, his bowl-cut hair rain-plastered to his forehead, it only makes his future more beautiful. He and his girlfriend from agriculture school will soon take over one of Nosegawa’s abandoned wasabi patches for themselves.
As he sloshes his way to the next tier, a cloud of white butterflies circles his head. Their larvae eat wasabi leaves, but he doesn’t mind: the presence of insects is proof that the ton of wasabi this mountain produces each year is unadulterated and organic. His girlfriend is a bit concerned that this isolated village has no supermarket, but here they can have something of their own, and be able to marry and have a child.
Kashitani approves of his protégé’s plans: he and his colleagues, now in their eighties, are still strong enough to keep working for a while. “The air and water are so pure and good, we live longer here.” Yet his own wife’s recent death marked the first of their generation to go, and talk in the village has turned to wondering who will maintain their ancestors’ tombs for them when they’re all gone. For a while, their children will come back during the summer Obon festival to venerate them, but—“Unless more young people arrive, this village will disappear.” He nods at young Takeya. “Maybe now they will come.”
“They should,” says Takeya. “Most of our classmates couldn’t get jobs, because they wanted to stay near the cities, in agribusiness. They should spread out. This,” he says, indicating the river plunging through the green terraces, “is real.”
Which is exactly what economist Akihiko Matsutani, who sees prosperity in population reduction, expects more young people to realize. Right now, metro areas like Greater Tokyo and Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe are magnets for young people. But as today’s workforce ages and becomes less productive, the megalopoli themselves will age. A smaller workforce will be employed in fewer heavy Japanese industries requiring coastal harbors for imported raw materials. By 2030, Matsutani calculates, shrinking Tokyo would need more than 6 million immigrants from elsewhere in Japan to maintain today’s labor levels—an impossibility because, if for no other reason, they couldn’t afford the real estate.
Instead of laborers seeking heavy industries, more nimble industries making lighter consumer goods will go where laborers are, spreading opportunity more equitably across the land. Smaller, more localized markets will take on new appeal, and as prosperity is redefined around shorter working weeks and quality of life rather than relentless accumulation, the hinterlands will be ever more attractive places to live.
The transition to a smaller population with, at least for a while, a higher proportion of older people—a completely new experience in human history—won’t be painless.
“I wish we were wise enough to downsize gracefully and intelligently,” says Matsutani. “The longer people fail to face what is happening, the harsher the adjustment will be.” The part that makes most economists shiver is pensions, which have always been a way to share the fruits of economic growth across generations—“only fair,” Matsutani writes, “since the previous generation laid the economic foundation for the affluence of the following generation.” But in a shrinking, aging economy, when affluence is no longer growing, and with fewer workers paying into pension plans for all those long-lived seniors, people will have to save more for their own retirements, and make do on reduced income.
Like China’s Jiang Zhenghua, now charged with planning how his country will deal with its own aging populace, Akihiko Matsutani sees those savings helping to finance communal public housing, parks, and cultural facilities that seniors will need. He’s heard the scary rhetoric in Europe about how high payroll taxes must soar to meet the pension shortfall if populations fall, and how everyone should pump out more babies, lest their economies crumple beneath a mass of unproductive, gray-haired retirees. In reply, Matsutani reminds people that children, too, can be considered a burden on society, since they don’t work and require their own infrastructure. Smaller populations won’t need as many schools or subsidies for public and private universities. The size of government, too, will shrink along with the body politic: all representing savings that can be reallocated where they’re needed.
“It’s a more peaceful society when a large part of the population is aged,” observes Japanese senator Kuniko Inoguchi, who is also a demographer. “The aged won’t sacrifice health care for guns. Because of the graying populations in most democracies,” she says, “in the twenty-first century there’s hope for us to find a geriatric peace.”
And with less dependence on foreign imports to sustain frenetic levels of production, a country might be less inclined to spend billions defending access to resources overseas, as the United States has done at such great financial and human cost. Without resource wars, there would be that much more available for caring for the elderly, until ages come back into balance, leveling out with each passing generation to a smaller, leaner population, with more breathing room to savor life.
iii. Satoyama
As a boy in the city of Matsumoto in central Japan, Keibo Oiwa would accompany his mother to Genchi no Ido, an artesian well in the middle of town that’s been used for thousands of years. He now teaches anthropology at Meiji Gakuin University in Yokohama, but following a Zen purification retreat in Matsumoto, he’s returned to the old wooden portico that shelters the well. Thirst quenched and ablutions completed, he bows before a statue of a standing Buddha holding an infant, with two other babies tugging at his robes. “Buddha as compassionate mother,” notes Oiwa.
Few Japanese mothers have three children anymore, but Oiwa’s actually headed to see one: his former student Mari Tokuhisa. Oiwa, lean and denim-clad, is the founder of The Sloth Club, a group that promotes the sustainable life he envisioned in his popular book Slow Is Beautiful. His friends Mari and her husband, Kin, recently found an old house in Shiga, a nearby farming village, where, like most of rural Japan, the median age is in the seventies and empty houses rent cheaply—in this case, for ¥10,000 a month, about US$130.
The half-hour drive there climbs through a cypress forest still ribboned with oak, beech, and camellia. Descending, the road crosses a narrow valley of terraced rice paddies, bisected by a small river. On the opposite side, Shiga’s wooden houses fill a mountain pass lined with red pines.
It is very quiet, because few live here now. Mari, in a peasant blouse and long skirt, and her three small boys, Kyusen, Gennosuke, and Yosei, await in front of their new home, the former village chief’s house. The town is now so small that legally it no longer exists.
“It’s beautiful here,” Oiwa says, greeting Mari with a hug.
“Hai.” With the same haircut as her sons, they resemble a family of pixies. The house, about a hundred years old, has curved Japanese eaves. Its interior, carpeted in woven straw mats, has a reed ceiling and window shades. Shoji screens that divide the large s
pace into rooms are open so that afternoon light fills the house. A brick chimney is retrofitted with an iron woodstove made by Mari’s husband, who’s off building stage sets for a theater company. They met as students; disillusioned with the shaky Japanese job market after their first son was born, they escaped to Amami Oshima, a tiny island near Okinawa at the Japanese archipelago’s southern tip, to practice permaculture. So far from the big crowded islands, life there turns around families, which tend to be larger than the rest of Japan, and they soon had two more. “I still want more. My friend just had her fifth.”
Before becoming a mother, she worked in one of the slow food cafés that Keibo Oiwa has sponsored around Japan, which feature local ingredients prepared from scratch. When they decided to return to Honshu, they were committed to becoming as self-sufficient as possible, a decision underscored by the Fukushima earthquake-tsunami-nuclear disaster of March 11, 2011—known evermore in Japan as 3/11.
“Our life here is simple. We grow our food and make our furniture. Our sons’ nursery school meets outdoors. But if we’re not free from nuclear power, it’s not enough. So since 3/11, we’re heating our bathwater with firewood.”
Yes, it takes more time, she says. “But it’s also more fun. When we had a modern life in Yokohama, we would waste time. Now, by putting effort into making things, it’s like we’re regaining time.”
“Hai,” says Oiwa. “Exactly. That is the slow life. People think environmental living means being ascetic. But every culture has a huge storage of fun. Sure, there’s fun technology. But today we see so many sick, unhappy, empty people. Before 3/11, people gave thanks to nuclear power for allowing us to have our lives. But now, post-3/11, we realize that we all die. We who survived aren’t immortal; we’re in the palm of Buddha. Knowing that we die is the first wisdom of human beings, the beginning of philosophy. Every day I wake up still alive, that is happiness.”
They’re having tea around a table hewn by Mari’s husband from cypress slabs. “We humans have a proper speed, and when society speeds beyond our limit, we get social problems,” Oiwa says. “Psychological problems. Things break down. We’ve now contaminated much of this island, but they still say we need economic growth. They act like we’ll live forever. But if we can face the wisdom that everyone dies, we’ll see that we live not because of nuclear power, but because of the sun and the air. Once we realize that, maybe we can turn this around.”
They go next door to see Mari’s seventy-year-old neighbor, Michiko Takizawa. A widow early in life, she raised her two children by growing vegetables and rice and keeping cows, angora rabbits, and silkworms. With pleasure, Oiwa inspects her two-hundred-year-old house: traditional post-and-beam, strong enough to sustain a second story of thick, earthen walls. The main beam, fully a half-meter wide, is from a single Japanese red pine.
They kneel at a low round table, where Michiko-san sets bowls of sliced eggplant, zucchini, green beans, and plums she pickles in sugar and vinegar. “Take,” she says, handing a plum to Mari’s oldest, whose second-grade classroom has just four other students. “And that’s after they combined two schools. After we die”—other than Mari’s family, Michiko’s youngest neighbor is fifty-five—“all these houses will be empty.” Her unmarried son, who works construction, still lives nearby. “But women don’t want to marry men here. Women today would rather have a job than get married.” One man brought a Filipina bride, she says, “But she left. The culture was too different. She said she didn’t like wasabi.”
“Aren’t more city people moving here?” Keibo asks.
“More are still leaving than coming.” She looks sadly at Mari, who just smiles at her until she has to smile back.
“You will see,” Mari tells her. She and her husband have rented one of Michiko-san’s rice paddies, which they will cultivate organically. A discussion ensues about how to keep water in the paddy all winter, despite the snow, to control weeds.
Afterward, they end up in Michiko’s cornucopial vegetable patch. On her hands and knees, she harvests sweet peppers, eggplants, okra, and soybeans for her guests. Oiwa gazes raptly at her bountiful garden, bordered by lilies and filled with dusky blue butterflies. Beyond it are rice paddies latticed with channels of water borrowed from the river, the brilliant green stalks heavy with grains about to turn golden. Past them is a perfect triangular wedge of mountain covered with mixed forest—and farther, more cool mountains dissolving into fog.
This, Oiwa knows, is a blessed remnant of satoyama, the harmonious marriage of human and natural landscapes that for thousands of years defined the Japanese countryside. In these tranquil mosaics of cultivated lands, wildflower meadows, ponds, streams, orchards, and forests, Japanese culture was born. On islands where, since ancient times, humans have shaped and manicured all but the craggiest terrain, satoyama has been the salvation of Japanese biodiversity. For millennia, people dwelling in satoyama landscapes harvested firewood and charcoal, pastured animals, and grew crops with an aesthetic that invited and nurtured fish, frogs, dragonflies, butterflies, fireflies, grasshoppers, songbirds, ducks, storks, and falcons.
But in the 1960s, farmhouse chimneys gave way to oil burners. As synthetic fertilizer took over the fields, coppiced woodlands that once provided warmth, fodder, and leaf mulch for rice paddies were no longer visited daily. Pesticides banished the grasshoppers and caterpillars, and the herons, egrets, and majestic Oriental white storks that fed on them failed to return. Concrete lining for ditches to drain fields wiped out tadpoles, snails, and sludge worms. As cows and beef cattle switched from pasture to imported corn and soy feed, grasslands and meadows that once surrounded Japanese cities disappeared beneath housing developments and golf courses.
Within a half-century, Japan no longer resembled a timeless ink-on-silk painting. But as numbers recede, and as a smaller younger generation seeks alternatives to the corporate soldiering that came to define Japanese work, there is a chance for a slower life to return, along with landscapes to sustain it.
The last wild Oriental white stork in Japan was seen in 1971. In 1989, a stork hatchery at Toyooka, an hour from Kyoto in Hyogo Prefecture, successfully produced offspring using breeding pairs from Russia. But the local rice fields, soaked annually with organo-mercury pesticides, proved too toxic for the fledgling birds to be released. In 2004, a ten-year-old schoolgirl named Yuka Okada learned that storks like the caged birds in Toyooka’s now crowded hatchery had once filled the skies and nested on every chimney. After learning why they no longer did, she went to the mayor and demanded that Toyooka serve organic rice for school lunches.
To do that meant eliminating mercury, inviting back grasshoppers but also making the rice paddies safe for storks. The mayor, hearing the simple truth from a ten-year-old, could only agree. His city’s slogan became “An environment good for storks must be good for humans, too.” The next plantings were pesticide-free. A year later, the first stork was released, and today, wherever they nest, the rice is twice as valuable because the presence of storks guarantees its purity. An economy that had bottomed was rejuvenated, and today tourists flock to Toyooka to watch hundreds of storks do the same.
The value to be reaped from tourists and fancy organic rice is easy to quantify. Harder, but most critical, is calculating the value of nature—what conservation ecologists call natural capital. How much is a grasshopper worth, anyway, if nature always provided them for free? Trees in forests were free. Rivers and the atmosphere were free places to toss wastes. Free, but ultimately costly, when they vanish or can hold no more.
The accounting of nature’s capital has never been included in corporate balance sheets, but every prechemical farmer knew it well. In a Japan with far fewer Japanese, as Japan will inevitably become this century, there is a chance for natural capital to replenish, and for people to enjoy healthier, even happier lives.
The rice fields may yield less, if humans must share the grains with grasshoppers—but with fewer humans, that won’t be such a problem.
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p; CHAPTER 14
Tomorrow
i. Pantheon
Caring for the elderly during the transition as the world comes back down to size will be tricky, Shubash Lohani agrees. And he’s not even talking about people.
Lohani, deputy director of World Wildlife Fund’s Eastern Himalaya Ecoregion Program, is in Lalmatiya, a town in southwestern Nepal just above the Indian border, visiting an old age home—for cows.
Lalmatiya is in Nepal’s Terai, a narrow strip of bottomland at the base of the world’s highest mountains and Lohani’s birthplace. Until the 1950s, the Terai was completely forested. It was also infested with malaria. The only inhabitants, the ethnic Tharu tribe, had an unexplained malaria tolerance—because, some believed, Tharu were direct descendants of Gautama Buddha, who was also born in Terai. In the 1950s, with help from the United States, the entire Terai was sprayed with DDT. As malaria was eradicated from successive areas, they were opened to settlement. Anyone who wanted could clear and claim land for free. Millions did, shearing most of the Terai’s trees, which mostly ended up as railroad ties in India.
Besides children—until recently, Nepalese families averaged seven—Terai settlers brought nearly one cow per human. This was a problem, and not just locally. The multi-chambered digestion of ruminants like cows and sheep involves much belching and flatulence. As the numbers of domestic animals worldwide, like our own, reached into the billions, their burps and farts account for around a quarter of human-related emissions of methane, a gas that traps twenty-one times more heat than CO2.
In Nepal and neighboring India, it’s even worse, because cows are considered sacred, and killing them is taboo. (Like India, Nepal is predominately Hindu. After Gautama Buddha’s birth gave rise to his eponymous religion, Nepalese have commonly observed both.) In the Terai, when cows get too old to give milk—the generous gift for which they are revered—owners release them in the forest. There they browse on saplings, their hooves compacting the soil so that little else grows. For World Wildlife Fund, this is serious: tigers, rhinos, and elephants are native to the Terai, as well as leopards, peacocks, macaques, and langurs, and what’s left of the forest is where they live.
