Days and months are milestones of eternity, so are the years that pass us by.

It is hard to explain the transformation that had been wrought within me by going to Japan but on my return home I found that above all else I now wanted to work with people. A new sense of optimism had taken hold of me, a sense of optimism that I was desperate to communicate to others. I had rediscovered hope and I now knew that the world was not always as gloomy as it sometimes seemed.

I got a job as a teacher in a school, a job that I did for seven years. A schoolteacher’s life is busy and I had very little time to think about farming. To tell the truth, I was young and I was experiencing so many new things all the time and I was so full of the impatience and forgetfulness of youth that I didn’t realize the extent to which this change in my outlook on life was the natural flowering of a seed that had been planted during those twenty-four hours spent on a hillside in Japan.

Instead, I set my experiences with the farmer aside and got on with my life. All I knew was that the darkest days had finally passed and that my mood had changed for the better, but in my ignorance I put this down to fresh air and foreign travel in general and not specifically to my experiences at the farm.

As soon as I set foot on English soil again I instantly became caught up in all the normal complications of life that I had been unable to engage in for the past few years. Where was I going to live? What was I going to do with my life? How was I going to earn a living? Some of my friends had already established themselves in their careers and I needed to get going with mine. It was time to start afresh on the road of life.

During that first year after my return from Japan, if I did ever think of the farmer I thought of him as a dreamer, engaged in a brave but probably hopeless struggle against the problems of the world. But mostly, I didn’t think about him at all. I was simply far too busy.

It turned out that teaching was a good choice of career. I felt that I could contribute to the world by having a positive influence on my young students. I taught history and occasionally, when the syllabus permitted, I taught lessons on Japanese poetry.

Life was good but although I was more optimistic than I had been prior to my departure for Japan, deep down I could still never entirely throw off the same old feeling of unease, the feeling of unease that had prompted my original journey.

For what kind of world would the children I taught actually inherit? And what about their peers all around the world? What about the less fortunate children who woke every day into the grim realities of supposedly positive words like “globalization” and “growth”?

And as the years went by I found myself wondering more and more about what might have happened to my friend.

It was in the classroom that memories of the farmer returned most often. Children have a special facility for asking awkward questions and it is the teacher’s lot that he or she has to learn how to answer them. Every teacher finds their own way to respond to such questions as: “If humanity is meant to be progressing then why are we destroying the world around us?” or: “Why are some people starving to death when we have so much food?” or: “If science and technology are meant to improve the world, why is it more dangerous than ever?”

It was at times like this that I sometimes found myself thinking of the farmer and his life, and slowly but surely questions of my own began to work away at the back of my mind. Could he have actually done it? Could he have succeeded or was the farm now nothing more than a stretch of overgrown, weed-covered fields? And was he now a married man, or had the barley harvest failed the following spring?

I wanted to tell the children about the farmer and to urge them not to lose faith in the world. I wanted to explain that there were other ways of living; that the farmer had chosen to walk one of these paths and it had brought him harmony and happiness.

But, as I didn’t know if he had succeeded or not, I couldn’t in good conscience hold him up as an example of a new life. As it was, his existence would have sounded like something out of a fairy tale to them and, until I knew one way or another if he had succeeded, I would have to regard his struggle as nothing more than a dream.

But as time went by I knew that it was becoming increasingly important for me to learn what had become of him. I contemplated going back there, to find out what had happened. But then I always stopped myself – it would simply be too much for me to bear to find out that this brave man’s efforts had been in vain and that the place where I had spent that magical period of time no longer existed at all. I grew to dread the possibility that a commercial farm now stood in its place with its monotonous acres of machine-harvested rice and parade-ground ranks of doctored trees; and that the farmer too had long departed, forced to work with machines on another farm, or worse still to find work in the city itself.

In any case, I was at the beginning of my career and I was far too busy to go and find out what had happened over the ensuing years. Besides, as long as I didn’t know the truth, I could at least still hope.

As is the way with life I found myself slowly climbing the ladder of my chosen career and as every year passed I took on more responsibility and began to grow into a middle-aged man. Life continued in this fashion until at the end of my seventh year at the school I was offered a sabbatical, which I duly accepted. I had some savings and I hadn’t been abroad for many years so I had a great desire to breathe a little pure air. I decided that it would be a good time to return to Japan. Without any preconceived notion beyond that, I struck out again for the ancient Buddhist pilgrimage trail around the Island of Shikoku where I had had the extraordinary experience all those years before.

The country had changed. As soon as I set foot in Tokyo I could see and hear and feel the stirrings of progress all around.

There were many more cars on the streets of the capital and many more people were wearing Western clothes. There were advertising billboards tempting people to buy white goods and new household products, and everywhere I turned traditional buildings were being pulled down and replaced by new structures made from concrete and steel.

In the shops, people could buy things that they would never have thought of owning before: gramophones, vacuum cleaners and even leather armchairs, which was especially strange as Japanese people still, almost without exception, sat on the floor on Tatami mats.

I recognized too that a new Western scale of values was being used by the average Japanese man or woman. People wanted to buy things because they were new and not because they needed them.

Outwardly at least, Japan appeared to be striding happily into a future of Western-style industrialization. The government, which had always in the past been so scornful of the materialism of Western culture, now seemed to have decided actually to hold it up for admiration.

I knew that things weren’t that simple of course. The catastrophic shock that had been dealt to the foundations of the old order by the dropping of the atom bombs, combined with the presence of the victors, living as an occupying force, making laws and refashioning society, had destroyed a lot of the Japanese people’s ancient self-confidence.

The whole place left me feeling bewildered. So many good things were being jettisoned as part of the general clearing out of the old samurai culture and so much bad seemed to be coming into Japan. And of all the things that I held dear about Western society and that I thought would be most worthy of export, none of them seemed to have made their presence felt at all.

When I finally reached Shikoku on my third day in the country I was dizzy with all the changes and all the more eager to get out into the tranquillity of the remote countryside.

My plan was somehow to make my way to the little village of Fumimoto and from there ask directions to the farm. After that, whether the farm existed or not and whether or not I was reunited with my old friend, I would return to the pilgrims’ trail and finish the walk that I had begun all those years ago.

I had assumed that I would have to catch a train to the southern end of the island and then make my way from there, but I found instead that there was now a sophisticated bus network connecting all the outlying regions of the island and that I could catch a bus the following morning and be at my destination by late afternoon. How times had changed: ten years ago, this journey alone would have taken at least three days.

Throughout the night in Matsuyama I was filled with a growing sense of foreboding. What if the farm was no longer there? Whilst this possibility had remained in the abstract I had been able to keep the potential consequences of this eventuality from my thoughts, but now that I was actually going to discover the truth the following day, I became agitated beyond belief and was unable to sleep the whole night long.

Without my realizing it, over the years the farmer’s struggle had somehow gained a great personal significance for me. As long as I knew that there might be one person left in the world who had successfully demonstrated that there was another, better way of living then I could still have hope. But if it now transpired that the farmer and his farm had vanished like a snatch of summer dreams and that there was finally nothing left for me in this world other than the bleak mantras of science and progress, my spirit would be shattered into a thousand pieces.

I seriously contemplated turning back and returning to Europe on the next flight just so that I could maintain my state of ignorance, but when the first slivers of grey light appeared at the edges of the curtains in my little hotel bedroom I realized that I had no choice but to go on. I went to the bus station and got on the bus and found myself a seat at the back by the window where I dozed my way through the first hours of the new day.

By late afternoon we were driving through scenery that I should have recognized from before for we were now approaching Fumimoto and this was the land that I had patiently trodden on foot. But the small farms had almost all disappeared – replaced instead by gigantic acres of machine-farmed land. The hamlets were quieter and some of them even had a noticeably sad air about them. There were fewer children running in the meadows, fewer dogs and horses in the streets everywhere I looked, and there were machines doing the work of men. The workforce itself had been decimated.

I got off the bus at Fumimoto and was struck by the calm of the place. When I had first entered the village on horseback, fresh from the farm all those years ago, it had been buzzing with life, but now it appeared empty and desolate. There were one or two people in the little main street, but none of them seemed to want to meet my gaze.

I took this all to be a very bad omen and as I started to get my bearings a feeling of queasiness began to overtake me. I had come so far and waited so many years and yet now it seemed once more as if all my hopes had been misplaced. I gritted my teeth and made a private vow: this truly would be the last time I would ever allow myself to believe that there could be alternatives to the ever-turning cogs of the modern world. From this day forth I would put my head down and toe the line. If I didn’t like the way the world was going that was my fault and no one else’s: there could be no other way.

Half-way up the street I recognized the track by which I had entered the village all those years ago. I peered into the cool shade of the wood: the track was still in use. That much was for sure. There were fresh hoof marks and cart rucks. But then nothing could be read into that. The track led to other places too, not just the farm.

I adjusted my backpack and looked around. Down the street, past the side of one of the houses, I could see an old villager fitting a bridle to a horse. I took a deep breath and made my way over to him. The villager stopped what he was doing and looked at me whilst with one hand he calmed the horse by stroking its mane.

I greeted him in Japanese. His response seemed friendly enough, though I couldn’t understand his rural dialect. My Japanese was very rusty and I tried in several different ways to ask him about the farmer but he simply grinned back at me and shook his head in incomprehension.

Finally, I delved into my bag and found a pen and a piece of paper and, working as carefully as I could, I wrote out the Japanese characters that spelt the farmer’s name: Takeshi Fumimoto. A look of instant recognition lit up the old man’s face and he immediately pointed back towards the track through the wood and muttered something that I couldn’t understand and then slapped his hand on his horse’s flank and made a gesture that seemed to suggest that he would take me there. He continued to chatter in dialect whilst he finished the job of readying his horse, and then when everything was prepared he motioned for me to climb up onto the cart. I hauled myself onto the single wooden plank that was the seat and slung my backpack into the empty cart. The old villager climbed aboard and with a twitch of the reins we were underway.

What this all meant I did not know. I had already spent so much time speculating about the fate of the farm that I was not going to spend another second trying to read anything into the gestures and actions of the old villager. He had recognized the name of the farmer and that was all. It didn’t mean that the farm was still there, it didn’t mean that the old stone farmhouse was anything other than a derelict ruin, and it certainly didn’t mean that the farmer was living a happy life married to his true love.

Perched on the hard wooden seat, bouncing along the uneven track through the cool wood, with the old villager occasionally muttering something to himself, I tried to relax and put myself into a state of mind where I would be indifferent, no matter what I was about to discover.

But as the cart made its final turn over the brow of the wooded hill I was left speechless with amazement.

Before us on the road, two children were playing, skipping like lambs, back and forth through the farmyard gate. I was so astonished by this unexpected sight that all I could do was stare at them as if they were unicorns.

But when I noticed in the distance that there were three young men walking back from the fields below the house and two further people in the orchard to our right, my astonishment turned to wonder. I spun my head this way and that and saw other figures hard at work on the slopes of the orchard. Five, ten, fifteen people, men and women, young and old, more than I could count. I scanned the far slopes of the hillside, searching for the barren land where all those years ago I had passed the morning, scythe in hand, but all I could see were luscious orchards. I hunted in the fields to the north, expecting to see the black lands where the harvest had failed, but all I saw were swathes of golden rice plants rocking gently in the summer sun.

The farm had been reborn and everywhere I looked nature was in full bloom, everywhere there were people working in the fields and from the chimney of the farmhouse a column of smoke rose into the still morning air. More than any flag could be, it was a declaration of habitation and life.

The villager touched the reins and the cart drew to a halt just up the track from the farmyard gate. The old man pointed ahead with outstretched arm and nodded.

“Fumimoto-san.”

I transferred my gaze from the riot of nature all around me to the farmyard. There I saw for the first time in seven long years my friend the farmer. He was as busy as ever, stooped over a box of freshly picked fruit, sorting it into different sizes. My heart filled with joy and I leapt from the cart, forgetting even to grab my backpack, and bounded down the track.

As I entered the farmyard, the two children began to chatter and laugh. They scampered over to the farmer’s side and tugged his clothes. He looked up from his work to see what all the fuss was about. He had not changed at all. He looked just as youthful and vigorous as when I had first set eyes on him all those years ago.

When he saw me his face lit up in an enormous smile. He wiped his hands on his shirt and without hesitating for even a second he walked straight over. We met in the middle of the farmyard and embraced.

“James! I have been expecting you. I knew you would come …”

I was so overwhelmed by emotion that at first all I could do was shake my head and smile until eventually I managed to muster a few words.

“I am so glad to see you. I am so happy that it has all worked. I can hardly believe my eyes.”

The farmer clasped me by the arm.

“And I am glad you have returned. At last I can show you the fruits of your labour! But come. First, I must show Masumi what I have found!”

“Masumi is here?”

The farmer smiled and turned to the children and speaking gently in English he said: “Children, where is your mother?”

Then he spoke to them in Japanese and at once they scampered across the yard and disappeared through the door of the farmhouse. He turned back to me.

“The barley harvest was successful. We married in the spring the year after you left. The little boy is called Akira and the little girl is called Aiko.”

I stood speechless in the middle of the farmyard scarcely able to take on board all that was happening. The farmer took me gently by the arm.

“Come. Let us drink some tea together, and then I will show you the farm. It has changed since you last worked here!”

Shaking my head in wonder I walked beside him to the door of the farmhouse.

“But how did you know I was going to come?”

He paused for a moment with his hand on the door and turned to me and smiled.

“The spiders were here three days ago, for the first time in seven years. I have been waiting for you since then.”

Inside, the farmhouse had changed. It was set up so that many more people could sit around the hearth together and share their meals, and now that it was clearly used by so many people, it no longer had the austere atmosphere that it had when the farmer and I shared our meals together all those years ago.

Over by the fireplace stood Masumi. The two children were now hiding behind her legs. She was even more beautiful than I remembered. When she saw me she smiled and said something to the children in Japanese.

With a grin on his face the happy farmer spoke.

“Masumi, you remember my old friend. It is to him that we can give thanks, for seven years ago he worked with me in clearing the top orchard, which now has two thousand strong young saplings growing in its bounds, and enough vegetables to feed a small city …”

Masumi smiled warmly and gestured to me to have a seat by the fire.

“Of course I remember James …”

She turned to address me in her soft voice.

“Takeshi has been hoping for so long that you would come.”

She poured me peach tea from the kettle that was still suspended from the fire and cleared away the lunch bowls from around the hearth, and then we all sat down together. The farmer sensed that I was overwhelmed by all that I saw and with great affection he gently teased me.

“James, you seem amazed to find us here today. You needn’t have doubted so much! I told you we would make it …”

I smiled at him and shook my head.

“I am amazed. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect to find all this. You have not only survived these seven years but you have created a new world. And I don’t think I will ever be able to explain to you how happy I am to find that you are still here and that your new path has borne fruit.”

The farmer grinned and shrugged his shoulders.

“We have a few more people. Some of the old farm workers came back and then some workers joined us from other farms. They prefer the way things are done here. And then there are the students who come from Yokohama and even from Tokyo to learn the natural way.”

Masumi smiled and raised her beautiful eyes to look me fully in the face.

“And we have five children living here as well as all the young people from the universities. The children play in the fields and help with the work, and have the perfect childhood.”

The farmer spoke again. He could no longer hide his pride.

“And Pilgrim, do you remember when we walked down into the fields and I said that one day my natural rice plants would rival the productivity of the commercial farms? Well, this year we will yield twenty-three bushels per acre in the bottom field, which is more than anyone has yielded in the whole of Ehime, which means, almost certainly, that these fields are the most productive in all of Japan!”

I could hardly believe my ears. But I had to know the truth.

“So you never gave up? You never cracked. You have never used pesticides or fertilizer?”

“Not one single drop!”

“And you have still never ploughed?”

The farmer shook his head and smiled. Truly, what had been achieved here by this humble man was a miracle worthy of God himself.

For the next three hours we talked. I told them of my new life as a teacher and I listened as the farmer and Masumi recounted their story of the last seven years.

It had not all been easy. Far from it. Even after the successful barley harvest, which had meant that they could finally marry, they had still suffered many terrible setbacks.

In the first year after their marriage, the neighbours on the huge commercial farms that surrounded them on all sides got together and attempted to sue the farmer, saying that his fields and orchards were the breeding grounds of all kinds of pests and that these pests used the farm as a base from which to attack their own healthy crops. They took the farmer to court in Ehime Capital and told the Judge that the Fumimoto farm was a vermin-infested wilderness.

The Judge came down in person to inspect the land. He was a very severe-looking man and when he first stepped out of his chauffeur-driven car he seemed most unhappy at having been made to travel so far into the countryside. But as soon as he got out into the fields his whole manner changed and he spent the afternoon sitting in the orchard in the sunshine, with his eyes shut and a smile on his face, surrounded by wildlife.

He returned to the provincial capital and the next day he threw the case out of court, saying to the commercial farmers: “If you do not like the way Fumimoto-san farms then take your case to God. I will have no part in prosecuting such a paradise.”

In the second year, they had continued to lose many more trees and at one point things had looked very bleak. The farmer admitted that in those dark days he had experienced, for the first and only time in his life, the treacherous stirrings of doubt.

But with Masumi’s encouragement he had persevered and by the third year of their marriage the farm was thriving and everyone in the Prefecture had heard of its fabulous success and the mysterious method of “do-nothing” farming. Workers from other farms began to ask to join them and students started to travel from far and wide to find out more about the new way to live their lives.

Success inevitably led to fame and fame led to outside interest, even from the very authorities who had always sneered at the farmer’s techniques. In the summer of the fourth year the farm received a visit from the Ehime Agricultural Institute. An entire delegation came. They brought all sorts of apparatus with them and squatted in the fields, measuring the strength of the sunlight and the angle of the leaves and taking soil samples back to their laboratory so that they could establish the acidity or alkalinity of the earth. They wandered this way and that through the rice plants and the orchards, scratching their heads and looking positively annoyed. Some of them were carrying big nets to catch insects, others had small briefcases filled with phials of chemical solutions. All of them were dressed in white lab coats and all of them wore dark frowns.

“Are you sure you haven’t been using fertilizer?” they asked the farmer suspiciously. “Are you absolutely certain that there have been no pesticides sprayed? Something strange is going on … We are not getting the whole picture.”

They spent two more days conducting experiments. One of the young students from Tokyo said it was as if a supernatural phenomenon had been reported on the farm and that the scientists were determined to find a “logical, scientific” explanation to replace the “superstitious” belief in nature.

Eventually, they packed up and moved on, unwilling to admit defeat but managing at least a grudging respect for the farmer’s “good luck”.

In the spring of the fifth year, just after the barley harvest, a man from Yokohama testing centre itself arrived. He had heard all about the “do nothing” method and he intended to grow rice using the technique, but he intended to do it under laboratory conditions. He began by marching into the fields and measuring the lengths of the straw that had been put back over the harvested field. Back in his laboratory, he announced, he would make sure all the straws were the same length and he would lay them in neat rows. The farmer smiled and chuckled to himself.

Finally, in the sixth year, the mystery as to who owned the land on the hillside was solved. It all belonged to a wealthy man, the descendant of one of the island’s oldest samurai families. This old aristocrat had learned of what the farmer was doing and he came by horse to inspect the hillside for himself. He was a man of few words, as befitted someone of his station. He had taken one look at the marvellous orchard and immediately turned his horse for home, stopping only to tell the farmer that he would instruct his lawyer to give him not only the orchard but all the wild land up to the banks of the River Sumoda. “You know better than I how to care for our land,” he said as he left.

As I listened to all these tales I was overcome with joy and hope. Here, all around me on the farm, was the living, growing proof that a new life was possible after all and that the path to this new life ran in exactly the opposite direction to the grey road of economic progress. The efforts of science were all unnecessary and only led to spiritual and physical hunger and pain. The evidence was incontrovertible. The farmer had systematically removed all the props of the modern world and yet his farm was now the most successful in the whole of Japan.

“Maybe now people can be persuaded to change. Maybe now they will realize that ‘progress’ is not just about more science and technology. Maybe others will even try your method!” I said.

“Non-method!” the farmer corrected me with a grin on his face. I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Yes. Non-method!”

“Well, that is what I sincerely hope.”

“Perhaps you could write an agricultural handbook – you know, like the handbook that the Ehime Agricultural Co-operative produces for the commercial farmers – only make it for natural farmers.”

The farmer chuckled.

“Yes. And I can explain in long scientific phrases that the main technique of my non-method is ‘to do nothing’!”

He guffawed merrily at this thought, then suddenly went quiet and put on a mock-serious face.

“My neighbours the commercial farmers are always saying ‘What else can we do?’ ‘What else can we try?’ ‘Maybe we should try doing this or that?’ They sit up at night dreaming up new schemes and worrying about what they might have forgotten to do. They read the literature sent to them by the Co-operative and tumble over one another to adopt the latest technologies.”

Again, in an instant, his face lit up with a great big grin.

“I am the opposite. When I get up in the morning I say: ‘What can I not do today? What else can I leave out? Shall I get up early this morning and put pesticides on my crops? Never! The natural predators will be my pesticide. I will have a lie-in. Fertilizer? No need! The straw and chicken manure provide plenty of organic nutrition. I’ll take the afternoon off! Ploughing? Forget it! The worms and microbes will be my ploughmen, they plough for me day and night, even as I sleep they are hard at work …”

Later that afternoon, the farmer walked me through the fields and orchards and showed me where we had cut the weeds all those years before and where the dead fields used to be. Orchards of strong saplings and fields of healthy rice stood in their place. The natural balance of the land had been restored and nature’s harmony had returned. Then we climbed the slope to the edge of the wood and sitting amongst the long grass we watched the sun setting over the fields below.

Half to himself, the farmer spoke.

“The only real natural farmer is the hunter and gatherer. Some happy people around the world still live like that. It is said that they only work a few hours a week and that they are never ill or unhappy. Diseases that are common here or in the West are completely unknown to them. Nature provides for them and they do not need to worry about planting schedules. That’s the real natural farming!”

I played with a stalk of tall grass and meditated on his words for a few minutes. I thought of the crowds of London and all the other cities of the world.

“But we can’t go back to that life. It is too late. There are too many people in the world and too many people who know nothing of nature …”

The farmer studied the horizon and nodded his head.

“You are right … But at least we can be on our guard against things that are called ‘progress’ but in the end only make us unhappy and unwell. The baboon in the forest – who is, after all, our cousin – is not always trying to improve his life and yet he knows how best to live. When he feels a little unwell, he knows exactly where to turn to find the right herbs to fix his illness.”

The farmer chuckled to himself and smiled at me.

“We can’t even decide what to have for breakfast. Some people say we should eat no carbohydrates, others say we should eat no fat. Some say we should eat nothing but fruit whilst others say that meat and seeds are our natural diet. The truth is, we have forgotten, and we have forgotten because we have allowed our so-called intelligence to take over and we have lost our instincts.”

The farmer smiled and shook his head.

“Every generation has its theory of nature. Once upon a time, people in the West believed that the whole universe was created by God in seven days. Today they say there was a big bang and that mankind has evolved from apes and before that from bacteria and before that from chemicals floating in the oceans of earth. They say that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity explains everything and that Darwin tells us how we got here, but tomorrow it will all be gone and our view of nature will have changed again.”

The farmer stood up and surveyed the horizon before looking down at me and smiling, his gentle, kind face bathed by the fading red glow of the setting sun.

“But nature does not change. Only we change. All our theories are just words and our words are not so different from the songs of the birds and the cries of the animals – except we make the mistake of thinking that our words contain the truth. But look! The first stars are out. Come. You must be hungry. This philosophizing is very tiring. I think we should stick to farming! Let us go and eat!”

I stayed for two wonderful weeks on the farm, sleeping in a hut on the mountainside, sharing meals with the farmer and his family and the student volunteers, and then finally the day came when I had to leave.

It was a far cry from the farewell of my first visit. At the hour of the mid-morning break, the farmer and his family and the farm workers and students all came back from the fields to say goodbye. I had worked with them all at one time or another over the course of my two-week stay and had shared much conversation and laughter, but it was the first time I had seen everyone together in one place, for at mealtimes people ate in shifts and drifted in and out of the main house, some choosing to sit in the garden and others preferring to eat in the fields. And so it was only now, just as I was on the point of leaving, that I was fully able to appreciate the measure of the transformation that had taken place.

I marvelled at the number of happy, healthy faces that I saw. Akira and Aiko, the farmer’s little children, squealed with delight and played hide-and-seek between everyone’s legs. There were ten, twenty, thirty, thirty-five people or more. One of the farm workers carried a tray out of the farmhouse piled high with deliciously sweet papaya fruit and we all gorged ourselves on this treat. Everyone was laughing and chatting: young and old, seasoned farmhands and novice students fresh from the city.

Then I noticed the farmer. He too was watching the gathering and he too seemed to be overcome by the sight of all the people. Perhaps he had never before seen everyone standing together in one place. It certainly wasn’t his way to call big meetings. He taught by example, that was the only way he knew. I had never seen him call people to him, or demand everyone’s attention. The most he would do was tap someone on the shoulder when they were on their own and offer a few quiet words of friendly advice.

As he surveyed the crowd of happy people I saw an expression of humble satisfaction cross his gentle face. Then suddenly his head turned. He must have felt my gaze. Our eyes met in recognition. Seven long years flashed by, from that day we had stood together in the top field, scythes in our hands, surveying the enormous labour that waited to be done, to this vibrant scene in the yard, everyone devouring the fruits of the farm, the laughing children, the sense of communal joy.

The old villager from Fumimoto was waiting for me at the gate. His cart was laden with produce from the farm, destined for the markets and dinner tables of Ehime Prefecture. It was finally time to depart. I could delay no longer. The farmer made his way through the crowd and together we walked over to the cart.

“Now, old friend, I hope that it won’t be another seven years before we see you again. And I hope this time you won’t be worrying about us. As you can see, we have managed all right in your absence!”

I smiled and hugged the farmer to my breast and then turned and stepped up onto the cart. I shook my head and laughed.

“No. It’s not you I worry about any more – it’s the rest of the world. If only other people could see what you have done here then maybe they could be persuaded to change.”

With his arm around his wife, the farmer joined the crowd in waving me off as the cart slowly rocked into motion and pulled up the gentle incline of the hill. Even today I can remember clearly the last words that the farmer shouted to me before he was lost for ever from my sight and even today, when I am feeling low, his words still echo in my ears and his strength comes down to me across the years.

“Have faith, Pilgrim! People can always change!”