staples.
Sixty years ago there was such a big drought in the American prairie states like Oklahoma that they came to be known as the dust bowl. Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck described this in his Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which was made into a Hollywood movie starring Henry Fonda (1940).
Even if American farming methods can stave off another dust bowl, American farmland is gradually losing fertility due to topsoil erosion, long years of chemical fertilizing, and highly fluctuating weather conditions. The United States Department of Agriculture has issued warnings about the present situation in its report called "Responses to the Challenges and Opportunities Facing American Agriculture."
At the same time, developing countries in Africa, Asia, and even Latin America run short of food because of their population explosions. When upriver communities log virgin forests to make way for croplands, downriver communities face disastrous flooding, which in turn washes away precious topsoil and crops. For example, flood damage in India and Bangladesh has been exacerbated by deforestation in Nepal, Assam, and Kashmir, through which the tributaries of the Ganges and Brahmaputra flow. Similar phenomena can be found in floods of Africa and Latin America.
In the long run, deforestation damages the entire ecosystem, accelerating desertification and diminishing harvests. In addition, global warming, acid rain, ozone depletion, topsoil erosion, salinification, chemical hardpanning, and countless other factors endanger world food production. How should Japanese people and policy makers prepare themselves to face such a predicament? What are our most ethical as well as prudent alternatives?
Returning to Unprocessed Foods
Now is the time to choose and practice a more enlightened and progressive lifestyle. This begins with a diet of unrefined grains and unprocessed foods. Unrefined grains and unprocessed foods naturally rebuild our bodies and promote our health. Our own bodies know that nature puts great nourishment into natural foods; our bodies can manufacture what other elements they need from a balanced diet of natural foods. We can enjoy this blessing in a life of appreciation achieved through our eating habits.
If we follow this message and pass it on to others, we can eventually affect the diet and consumption patterns of the entire country. In this age of overeating, it requires ethical reflection and coordinated action to affect lifestyles and diet on a national level, but this can all begin on an individual level.
Decadent overeating of highly processed foods not only damages our physical health but also numbs our perception, retards our calculation and memory, and ruins our minds. This mental degradation corrupts everyone's lives and ethical judgments and ultimately ruins the culture and the people. The declines of many great cultures were in part connected to decadent eating habits.
Today millions of people in Africa and Bangladesh tragically suffer from malnutrition if not starvation. At the same time, not only the industrial West, but even many developing countries are consuming far more highly processed diets than ever before. This is an ominous sign foreboding danger on a worldwide scale.
Where a people are strong and upright, their eating habits tend to be modest. Japan's Meiji period (1868-1912) provides a good example. In many families of good lineage, people made it a rule to have only seasonal vegetables and a cup of miso soup with brown rice at each meal. Their dinner tables may not have been lavish, but they mustered from such simple meals the power to transform Japan into a politically and industrially advanced country.
Meiji Japanese did not know nutritional analysis based on modern physiology. They simply trusted the potential of the human body and the nourishment of natural foods and succeeded in making full use of this natural power. Without worrying about dietary supplements, they achieved well-balanced meals by following a traditional diet of brown rice, soybeans, and seasonal vegetables. Modern people should all follow their lead. We face grave concerns for the stability of the world food supply and face deadly diseases caused by the overconsumption of the fats, sugars, and additives in over-processed foods. Eating a natural diet of unpolished grains, soy protein, and local vegetables in season can go a long way to improving our self-sufficiency as well as our physical and mental health.
Japanese Deforestation
Everyone in the world benefits from forests. Even desert-dwelling Bedouins feel most refreshed when they find themselves in the shade of an oasis after a long caravan journey. Japanese people feel a particular affinity for forests, where our forefathers lived long even before rice was introduced to this archipelago. The cleanliness, solemnity, and beauty of Japan's forests; the law of nature in which germination, growth, aging, dying, and rebirth are continually repeated; the ways the space of the forests harbored many animals; and the lives of these animals—these things taught us much about life. The virgin forests of Japan were a sort of mirror reflecting proper human behavior.
Forests richly provide the resources of our daily lives. From houses, furniture, vehicles, farm implements, hand tools, kitchen utensils and tableware to paper and musical instruments, the vast majority of traditional Japanese things were forest products. Japanese farmers not only produced rice and vegetables, but continuously protected and replanted their forests. This traditional attitude toward nature was a virtue of which Japanese can be proud. Seeing how many countries have felled their forests for the pasturage of livestock, the Japanese tradition of conservation offers lessons that not only foreigners but also the Japanese themselves now have to relearn.
Forests do not remain beautiful and healthy merely by being untouched. They need care, as in the pruning of lower branches and the weeding out of diseased trees. For centuries, people gathered firewood from deadfall, harvested nuts and berries, and replanted trees whenever they felled one. These ongoing if invisible labors preserved Japanese forests for centuries. Japanese forests were brutally lumbered during the war, when overseas materials became unavailable; even Japanese airplanes were made of wood. The postwar Japanese government dedicated tremendous funding to reforest its denuded mountains with cryptomeria. Today, forests from Hokkaido to Okinawa are flourishing, and most of Japan's wood is imported, so it need not lumber its own forests. It is thanks to these many conservation efforts that we can enjoy our forests today.
Despite its devastating and indiscriminate logging during and immediately after the war, Japan managed to limit its importation of foreign lumber to 10 percent of its annual consumption until 1960. In Japan's remarkable economic growth of the 1960s, the demand for lumber mushroomed again, and reforestation (which requires roughly thirty years) could no longer keep pace with the speed of logging. Japan's young forests could not provide the volume of broad planking required by its booming construction industry. Following America's example of buying foreign oil rather than depleting its own resources, Japan chose to buy cheap tropical lumber from Southeast Asia rather than razing its own reserves again. Japan began to rely heavily on imports for lumber, plywood, and pulpwood, and began to buy lumber from Canada, the United States, the Soviet Union, and subsequently Southeast Asia. Japanese importation of wood products amounts to 20 percent of the world total, and that of raw lumber amounts to 40 percent.
In 1989 Japan bought the rights to lumber tropical forests in Malaysia. Europeans then staged a boycott of Malaysian trees to protest Malaysia's reckless lumbering practices. After devastating Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia, Japanese logging ventures are now hacking away at the tropical rainforests in the Malaysian state of Sarawak.
According to a 1981 UN survey, tropical forests were disappearing at the rate of 28 million acres annually, and the figure is much larger today. This means that an area half as large as mainland Japan disappears every year. At the present rate of destruction, tropical rainforests will vanish from the earth in the next thirty to fifty years. It is obvious that Japan is the culprit of Asia.
Countries that earlier exported lumber to Japan are now refusing to do so, in order to protect their own forests. Japanese logging companies' destruction
