Photo/Illutration Soichi Yamashita (Asahi file photo)

When Soichi Yamashita's (1936-2022) farm work of the day was done and everyone in his family was asleep, he would read works by Osamu Dazai (1909-1948) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) and philosophize about farm villages and agriculture.

That was the favorite moment of the day for farmer-writer Yamashita, for whom a funeral was held July 14. 

“No other farmer would use language so plain to talk about something so deep,” said Yutaka Une, 72, the head of a “research institute of farming and nature,” who had shared discussions on agriculture with Yamashita for half a century.

A native of Karatsu, Saga Prefecture, Yamashita attempted twice, after finishing junior high school, to run away from home out of his resentment for his father. He still took over the family farm, however, and fantasized about modernizing the farm village.

He agreed to reduce his rice acreage in compliance with government policy and set about growing oranges, only to see prices plummet because of overproduction.

“I was so foolish to have believed in national policy,” he wrote in one of his works. “I was a failure as a farmer.”

“Yamashita realized modernization does not resolve agricultural problems and that things that are not modernized are the only things that will survive into the future,” Une said.

Calls are loud these days for turning Japanese agriculture into a growth industry, but Yamashita held there is nothing like “Japanese agriculture.”

He said the only things that exist are the rice paddies and farms, the mountains, his family and the farm village before his eyes, and they all have values that are intrinsically at odds with modernization and a market economy.

“Gentan Jinja” (Acreage-reduction shrine), Yamashita’s short story that was nominated for the prestigious Naoki Prize of literature, portrays how farmers are at the mercy of government policy.

“My dream is to multiply recalcitrant, tough and argumentative farmers in farm villages everywhere,” he wrote in “Kita no Nomin, Minami no Nomin” (Farmer of the north, farmer of the south), a collection of correspondences.

I interviewed Une on a footpath between his rice fields in Itoshima, Fukuoka Prefecture. Dragonflies were seen flitting about over the fresh and green paddy fields, and a lizard was motionless by the wayside.

And we were also there, engaging in endless reminiscences of the late “thinker of the rice paddy.”

--The Asahi Shimbun, July 15

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Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a popular daily column that takes up a wide range of topics, including culture, arts and social trends and developments. Written by veteran Asahi Shimbun writers, the column provides useful perspectives on and insights into contemporary Japan and its culture.