For some years I lived in Japan, in the old capital of Kyoto. I had come to study Buddhism, but I couldn’t break myself of walking in the forests and mountains and learning the names and habits of birds, animals, and plants. I also got to know a little about the farmers, the carpenters, and the fishermen; and the way they saw the mountains and rivers of their land. From them I learned there were deep feelings about the land that went below, and from before, the teachings of Buddhism. I was drawn to worship from time to time at Shinto shrines—at the foot of a mountain; by a waterfall; where two rivers come together; at the headwaters of a drainage. Doing this made me feel more at home in Japan, and for the first time I could relate to the forests of sugi and hinoki and pine almost as well as I could to the fir forest of my native Pacific Northwest. In other ways this drawing near to the gods of the earth and waters of Japan only added to my confusion. I was witnessing the accelerating modern Japanese economy, and the incredible transformation of the life of the people, and the landscape that this brought. I had just begun to absorb the deep sense of place and reverence for the forces of nature this fine old civilization had maintained, to see it then turn and begin to devour itself. My literary peers, the avant-garde poets and artists of Tokyo, had no concern for either nature or the Buddha’s teaching; but our minds met when we talked of the exploitation of the People, and sang radical folksongs. The young monks and laymen I meditated with in the temples of Kyoto were marvelous students of Buddhism and true bearers of the fine old manners of earlier Japan, but their sense of nature was restricted to tiny gardens, and they did not wish to speak about the exploitation of the masses at all. When I finally did, by good chance, meet a man I could speak with, about these things, he was neither a monk nor a marxist, but a propertyless vagabond Japanese Air Force veteran of World War II who spent his life walking with the mountains and rivers and farmers and working people of Japan.
We soon realized the questions we were raising about nature, human nature, and Far Eastern civilization have ramifications on a planetary scale. Here I have limited myself to working through the Buddhist teachings, the pre-Buddhist almost universal “old ways,” the information of history, and my own experience of the natural world. Working in this book, with the question, how did the old civilization of Japan end up becoming so resolutely growth and profit oriented? There will be no answer here, but there will be many angles of vision and something about civilization and ourselves. I was with this question that I found myself, one midsummer, in Sapporo, a city of over a million with wide straight streets—in Hokkaido—the northernmost island of Japan; the one place still considered somewhat wild.
The first time I had set foot in Japan was almost twenty years before, straight off the ship Arita Mara; two weeks churning across the Pacific watching the Laysan Albatrosses weave back and forth in its wake. There was a truckload of caged seals on the way through Customs in Kobe, snaking their small heads about. What I saw was the tightness of space: the crowded narrow-gauge commuter train, tens of thousands of tiny tile-roof houses along the track, little patches of vegetable gardens that shake every twenty minutes with the Special Express. Living then in Kyoto, I saw Hokkaido as the picture of cows and silo on a cheese box; I heard it was a sub-arctic wilderness, and my Japanese friends said “it’s a lot like America,” so for years I never went there. Will Petersen had been stationed as a soldier up north after the war; he loved it, he raved about the beautiful walls of snow the trains ran through, like tunnels, in the dead of winter.
But now it’s summer in Hokkaido and really hot and I’m going through the swinging glass doors of the fourteen story Hokkaido circuit-government office building, into the wide lobby with elevators at several ends and sides. Across two walls, taking a right angle bend, is a mural. About eighty feet long, low relief on stone, “Hokkaido’s hundred years.” It starts, as such murals do, with a native person sailing a little boat through great waves; with woods and deer; and then come the early explorers. It goes on to axe men, toppling trees and stumps; then expert advisors arriving on horses (these happened to be Americans), and soon there’s an agricultural experiment station, cows and sheep, a college with a clock tower, a city laid out, a brewery, a pulp mill, a railroad train, and finally—men with air hammers blasting rocks.
One hundred years: since Japan moved in with finality and authority to this island—one fifth the size of all the rest of the country—and decided to leave it no longer to hunters and fisherfolk but to “put it to work” economically.
Through the ground floor lobby, across the back street and down the block is the entrance to the Botanical Gardens, where I am to meet Dr. Misao Tatewaki, a little mustache, big open smile, ponderous walk, suspenders. A large, handsome, friendly, dignified old man. He takes me upstairs in the wood-frame office building of the gardens, a semi-occidental 19th-century house with creaky stairs and fluttering curtains, to an empty meeting-room with an oiled plank floor. At the head of the stairs on the wall is an oil portrait of a Japanese gentleman in the high collar of the Victorian era. Dr. Tatewaki stopped and made a little bow. “Dr. Miyabe, my teacher of Botany,” he says, and, “Dr. Miyabe was a disciple of Asa Gray.” Lineages. Dr. Tatewaki asks for tea to be sent up. I open out two folding chairs and place them side by side at one end of the large table. I tell him only a little of what I hope to do and he leans back, sighs, looks at me and says, “Japan has a sickness. It is a sightseeing sickness. That means people don’t come to see or learn of nature or beauty, but for fad.” And he speaks long and sorrowfully of what has already happened to the mountains and forests of the main island of Honshu, and of what little hope he sees for Hokkaido.
So then we go for a stroll in the wild-looking garden, which is in part a swampy remnant of the original plant community in the heart of the city, with towering virgin birch and elm. “Sapporo” from the Ainu, meaning “Large Plain.”
Later I meet Dr. Tatewaki at his office in the dark cement corridors of the building of the Faculty of Agriculture at Hokkaido University. Books to the ceiling, books in heaps. Cases of boxes of color slides of plants. Hulten, Arctic Flora, Kihara’s three volumes on Nepal, the U.S.F.S. Atlas of U.S. Trees, an old Shanghai Commercial Press book on forestry in China . . . Russian books . . . and he shows me the famous study, Crabs of Sagami Bay by the Showa Emperor himself, with superb color plates. Dr. Toyama, his former student, shows slides and Dr. Tatewaki names off the bushes and plants in Latin. “Those scholars in Tokyo don’t understand the actual state of Hokkaido, they think it’s one with maritime Siberia and east Manchuria . . . it’s right in between warm-temperate Japan and the Siberian sub-arctic . . .”
Age nineteen, he came north hoping to study the plants of Sakhalin and the Kuriles. He has been here ever since. And browsing about the bookshelves, I find a little book of poems by Dr. Tatewaki, published in the late twenties. They are w a k a, the thirty-one-syllable poetic form one size up from haiku. The collection is called Oka, “hill”—and there’s one on the Siberian people called Gilyaks who had a settlement in Hokkaido:
“The misery of the Gilyaks
and the Gilyaks—not knowing their misery—
today they laugh”