Oranges are not the only fruit

Previously I wrote a long rant about farming, small hills, and the choice Japan faces in the future between permanent reliance on other countries for food, or changing its whole countryside in the interests of food security. In short, farmers in Japan are getting older and as they do, country towns are crumbling and the environment around them is becoming moribund. Currently the Japanese countryside is a picturesque collection of terraces for rice paddies, small hills covered in forest (invariably with a shrine on top) and occasional orchards. It really is the picturesque scene from My Neighbour Totoro, if one were to add in a lot of powerlines and a few hills that have been concreted over.

This choice that the Japanese face was brought home to me in a little more detail over the new year, when in the company of the Delightful Miss E I went to visit her friend, Mrs S, in the countryside outside Beppu. We were there to spend a day making rice cakes and soaking in a private hot spring, but while there we were taken for a tour of Mrs S's rather extensive orchard holdings. Mrs S has married a Japanese policeman, and they have together built a large house on a block of land they share with his parents. She has lived in Japan for about 15 years and speaks and reads Japanese fluently, and has essentially absorbed herself entirely in Japanese family life. Family life, unfortunately, comes with an inheritance of 1000 fruit trees, mostly mikans (mandarins) but also yuzu (a type of sweet lemony fruit) and kabosu (a kind of sweet lime-y fruit). Mrs S's parents-in-law have been running this orchard their whole lives, having inherited it from their parents, but have worked full time jobs this whole time. They are now past 60 and still manage the orchards, but they obviously expect that Mrs S and her husband will take on the same task, working in the evenings and weekends to maintain the orchard while they work day jobs. Mrs S is rather doubting her commitment to this project, but has been given to believe that 1000 trees do not turn enough profit to be worked full time. Unfortunately for the good family S, Mr. S works shifts and is often away for days at a time sleeping in a police box (like Dr. Who, only better looking), and Mrs. S has a full time job at the university. So the task of managing these orchards would fall onto her shoulders, mostly, and she doesn't relish it...

So here we see the problem of Japanese agricultural policy as it affects the ordinary lives of real people. Obviously the only thing which will keep the Family S involved in this orchard at present is a highly developed sense of obligation, something which holds a lot of otherwise barely-functional systems together over here, but it doesn't seem like a model on which to base food production for 120 million people. As these farmers retire the work they have done will fall on fewer people, and those people will have to work in what is still - for all Japan's modern industrial economy - back-breakingly hard old-fashioned labour. The full extent of investment in Mrs. S's orchard consists of an electric fence and a shed, primarily because like most orchards in Japan it stretches across a couple of steep hillsides and is completely incompatible with any kind of machinery. It's not quite the state of the art serried ranks of trees one sees in the Cottees adverts...

So what is Mrs. S - and all the other people like her in Japan - to do with this unwanted obligation? Bear up under it for another 40 years and pass it down to her (even smaller) family? Or sell up and leave the hillside to a conglomerate, to industrialise it and finally turn a profit? Such an act would mean significant changes to the area around her house, I'm sure, because in its current state it is not exactly the most productive orchard on earth. The whole joy of Mrs S's house is its position nestled in a forested valley between mountains, and in every direction one sees terraced rice paddies, forest, rivers or orchards. Industrialisation would change it so that the land her husband and children grew up in changes permanently. Should they work this way every weekend to keep it, or should they give in to progress and sell it?

I'm not sure why these decisions have been delayed in Japan compared to the rest of the world, but they are going to have to be faced as the population ages and the food situation becomes more perilous. As that time fast approaches we can think of people like the good Mrs S, wrestling with a lifetime of farming, and wonder how they will manage the conflicting obligations of family past, present and future, and the land they live on...

... but in the meantime I'm going to peel myself a mikan (they really are quite delicious), and think of distant friends, to whom currently my only obligation is to update this blog, and not to forget...