The Harvest

An essay I’m working on. Very rough…grammar police beware

After finishing the Sunday afternoon conference session today we dropped Callan into his stroller and went out to enjoy autumn as it settles in around our little neighborhood.  As we turned off our street onto the main road, the first evidences of fall began to appear around us.  Many people were out with their children or pets enjoying the cool air and the high dark clouds above us that cast a warm evening glow on the green fields of rice. 

All of the neighborhood rice fields were alive with the bustle of the harvest.  Much of the rice farming done on a local level is overseen by elderly couples who work together planting, caring for and harvesting the crops in much the same way their parents did before them, except that most now use miniature rice combines that look a bit like big riding lawn mowers.  It is not uncommon to see a man in his seventies riding one of these miniature rice combines around a small field not much larger than a convenience store parking lot.  Along side him, working the large burlap bags used for collecting the grain, is often an old woman whose back is permanently arched forward from years of rice field labor.

On this day we saw what looked like a granddaughter in her mid twenties working along side her grandparents in the fields.  Together they stacked nearly a dozen burlap sacks full of rice onto the back of a small tractor and drove it down the narrow rice patty road to a farm house for processing.  I imagine that young woman sixty years from now, hunched and weathered, leaning on a rake as she watches the rice roll down the narrow road for processing and I wonder if she’ll ever make it that far.  It seems that Japan is at a cultural impass.  The rice farming generation seems destined to whither away.  Of course the Japanese will always eat rice, but what will become of the fields these old people work in year after year when they die.  Is there another generation prepared to take over?  

One woman we talked with today has lived in the same house for eighty years.  She was born there, raised her own children there and now is a lonely widow there.   Her children visit, but not enough.  “We all live apart,” she said, squatting beside an irrigation ditch with her back to a large patch of incredible red flowers that I am sure she cared for herself. “Japan didn’t use to be this way.  Eight people used to live in this house.  When I got married my husband moved in here.” She gestured towards the derelict house beside her and I noticed bare bamboo from the daub and waddle walls poking out from behind the rusty sheet metal siding.  I tried to imagine eight people living in the small home, working the land and eating what they grew.   “Japan is different now, everything is becoming just like America.” She gave me a look out of the corner of her eye that was halfway accusatory, half way apologetic.  I could tell she wasn’t angry, but perhaps disappointed in her own culture for not being strong enough to withstand western influences.  She was right though.  The Japanese even have a cute English phrase they use to describe the phenomenon.  The old tradition of several generations living under the same roof has been replaced by the very western desire for ‘my home,’ a piece of real estate separate from the in-laws, with its own space, its own rules, and its own mortgage. Thanks in part to western influences ‘my home,’ has become the goal for middle class Japanese families, and as a result, the 80 year old woman I spoke with today is living alone in a shanty next to a rice field and a garden patch that her family has probably worked on for hundreds of years, and no doubt wonders who will tend her flowers when she is gone.

A little farther down that sliver of  asphalt that runs between the houses and rice fields we stopped to talk for a moment with a grandpa pushing a wheelbarrow full of uprooted flowers who was accompanied by his daughter and her one year old son.  The grandpa said he’d lived here for fifty years, and from the looks of it he was doing his part to make sure his grandson would carry on after him.

Still farther down the road, we were greeted by some elementary school kids trying to catch fish in an irrigation ditch.  ‘Haro’ they said, eager to practice the little English they knew.  Sunday is the only day I see kids playing in this country.  It’s the day when they exchange school uniforms and a school issued bicycle helmet for cut off shorts and loose t-shirts printed with unintelligible English.  As I looked at them I thought of the students I work with.  These kids are still young, but as junior high school approaches, they will, like so many of my students spend much of their extra  time in cram schools with tutors like me, trying to get a leg up on the next entrance exam.  

We wished them well and headed home.  The fall is beautiful here.  It’s a rare time in Japan when progress in the western sense is overshadowed for the tiniest moment by the Japanese version of progress that grows in small family owned fields and is harvested into heavy burlap sacks by elderly farmers who may not have a future generation to whom they can pass on their craft.