Editorial Observer: HARVESTING POVERTY; Who Said Anything About Rice?
All of the 250 or so members of the 1971 class at Kurihara Agricultural High School in Miyagi prefecture — three hours north of Tokyo by bullet train — went into farming upon graduating, but by now, fewer than a dozen are still doing it full time. ”Early on, I was so excited to be producing rice for all those people in Tokyo and other cities. And they in turn felt a connection to the land, because people’s roots, no matter where they lived, were out here,” said Koushi Seiwa, one of the few remaining full-time farmers from his class, in a recent chat in the cafe his wife runs. He pointed emphatically out the window as he spoke, toward the tidy, perfectly irrigated rice paddies. Farmers here are determined to remind anyone who will listen that the sense of order in the Japanese countryside isn’t Mother Nature’s doing. ”Time was when people felt a responsibility to care for the land you received from your parents and they from their parents, and this was central to Japanese culture,’
