Pathway to Japanese Literature

I

The snow had begun falling again.
Another forty-five centimeters—
My fingers and toes felt like they might snap off.
But I go scavenging for food,
Climbing into mountains alone.
I keep telling myself I'm a man,
Fighting off cold,
Scouring mountain after mountain.

This was published in a newspaper in Aomori Prefecture—a poem by a young man from a village at the foot of Mount Hakkōda.
The merits of this work as poetry are not at issue here.
It is enough if one can vividly envision, from these brief verses, the desperate struggle for survival waged by the farmers of this region—stricken as they were by the great famine.

Especially,

The line—"I always tell myself 'I'm a man, a man' while warding off the cold, desperately scouring mountain after mountain"—with its solitary insistence on masculinity, became pitiful rather than admirable through its very simplicity, did it not? No—it was wretched.

I too had been born in a poor farming village in Hitachi and had seen the wretched lives of farmers until I could bear no more.
Moreover, since coming to Tokyo, I had witnessed until my spirit sickened the desperate lives of young women teeming through shadowed alleys and vagrants wandering unemployment districts.
And thus through every circumstance and opportunity, I had witnessed what human hunger truly meant and what consequences it wrought.

Yet in this simple, artless struggle manifested through the aforementioned verses—precisely because it existed within this realm of catastrophic crop failures and great famine zones—I could not help but feel a uniquely somber desolation different from what I had previously sensed in observing the life struggles of slum women and vagrant masses: a lonely gloom akin to watching an orphan weep themselves to sleep.

And I couldn’t help but wonder.
Was this truly how the farmers of the famine zone would live until the end?
Would the multitudes of farmers remain equally silent—resenting nothing, appealing to no one—until their food ran out and they finally starved to death?

In Iwate Prefecture—over thirty thousand people; in Aomori Prefecture—a hundred fifty thousand; in Akita Prefecture—fifteen thousand; and across all Hokkaido—two hundred fifty thousand; nearly four hundred fifty thousand farmers in total were said to stand literally on the starvation line, bound by this winter's ice and snow.

I wanted to meet and speak with several of these people and ask these very questions.
In other words, I wanted to know what truly lay in the hearts of those farmers regarding this great crop failure and famine—what thoughts they harbored, what ways of survival they contemplated, and how those thoughts were now taking concrete form. That is why I set out.

It was about ten days ago now—around 1:00 PM on December 27th of last year.
I first made my way into what was said to be the worst affected area in Iwate Prefecture—the hamlet of Midō Village in Iwate.
This was a place reached by riding north from Morioka City for about an hour, alighting at a small station called Numakunai, then proceeding nearly four kilometers on foot into the mountainous foothills.

The sky alternated between clear and cloudy until pale inkstone clouds drifted low from the north, bringing a sudden flurry of powdery snow.
I turned up my overcoat collar and walked along the village path separating rice paddies from vegetable fields—a path thick with mud.
To stand still meant sinking shin-deep into its viscous embrace.

Remembering Manchurian mud roads from years past, I trudged into the foothill village with shoes muddied to their socks.
There under a thatched roof’s eaves crouched four or five children staring at me with raw curiosity.
Having meant to visit the schoolhouse, I attempted asking these children for directions.

“If I go this way, will I reach the school then?”

“…………”

The children exchanged looks and remained silent.
I raised my hand and asked again.

"Is the school this way or that way?"

Then, a boy raised his small hand,

"That way, I reckon," said the boy.

At this moment, I scrutinized the children’s clothing.
It was so utterly black that its original stripes were indistinguishable, and truly in a dreadful state of tatters.
I too grew up wrapped in rags alongside poor farmers’ children, but never in rags as wretched as these.
In winter, I wore shirts and leggings—cotton ones at that.
But even though it was snowing, these children wore no shirts nor any tabi socks.
And the girls were only wearing leggings made of red cloth wrapped around their shins.

I suddenly recalled the raw savages of Taiwan.
This was because the raw savages also wore red cloth leggings around their shins.

This was not all.
Looking at these children's wildly disheveled hair and their hands and feet—so blackened one couldn't tell when they'd last bathed—I couldn't help but think of Taiwan's raw savages.
This seemed attributable not solely to this year's crop failure.
It appeared their way of life up until now must have been like this all along.
And so, I soon visited the elementary school and abruptly questioned the principal.

"Are the farmers in this region living such primitive lives?"

“That’s correct,” answered the Principal while scratching his beard that covered his entire jaw.
“I too was shocked when I first came here.
Most students always have mud-caked hands and feet.
They don’t bathe at all—they don’t even properly wash their limbs.
When I tried correcting this, they started saying ‘This new principal’s strange.’
Telling them to wash in broad daylight—I ended up getting scolded instead.”

“So the education level is also quite low, then?”

“That’s correct. Even when children reach school age, if there happens to be an oversight in notification from the village office, they make no attempt to send them to school even if those children turn nine or ten. Then when farming season comes, they say fieldwork matters more than school—so you’ll find many children rarely show up for classes.”

“Then, what of the villagers’ human feelings and public sentiment?”

“In that regard, they are truly pure-hearted.”
“I think they’re probably the most pure-hearted people in all of Japan.”
“As one example, recently the members of this village’s Youth Training Center held a film screening to collect donations for military personnel stationed in Manchuria.”
“They urged our students to buy tickets at ten sen each for admission—but with this depression and crop failure, the farmers didn’t have a single sen to their name.”
“Out of nearly four hundred students, only six managed to purchase those ten-sen tickets.”
“When it comes to films, the children want to see them so badly they could cry… but there’s no money.”
“So even though they scraped together barely twenty yen from over six hundred households—money that truly came at great sacrifice—they sent every last sen of it to those soldiers in Manchuria.”
“This pure-hearted loyalty and patriotic fervor is extraordinary—the farmers here are all people like Granny Ichitarō-yaa.”

When examining this village’s crop failure conditions this year, against a normal yield of two koku per tan, the yield per tan (three hundred tsubo) was three to four to. Moreover, up to twenty percent of the village’s total cultivated area of two hundred chō reportedly yielded nothing at all. And so the farmers staved off hunger with millet and barnyard grass, while those in mountainous areas reportedly steamed what they call shidami acorns to eat and filled their bellies with starch made from bracken roots. Therefore, of the nine hundred elementary school students in the entire village, up to four hundred were reportedly malnourished. Considering this fact alongside what I had just heard—the story about donations for Manchurian troops—I found myself at a loss for words.

I finally said.

“So, the people in this region are now in a state where they have neither food to eat nor clothes to wear, is that right?”

“Well, that’s about right,” the Principal said with a grim expression.

“Most of the children are wearing terribly tattered clothes.
“Even until now their clothing was quite dreadful, but in this year’s famine, they cannot afford to buy even a single item of clothing.
“Since the snow began to fall, they do come wearing rubber boots, but many of those boots are torn and caked with mud inside.
“Moreover, they wear those mud-covered ones over bare feet, so it’s unbearable.
“If things continue like this, by around February, it’s feared we’ll see not just starvation deaths but freezing deaths as well…”

And then, after a period of silence, the Principal pointed to the "kamasu straw bags" in the corner of the room,

"That is rice harvested from the fields belonging to this school."
“Every year we harvest about three to of rice, so when New Year came, we would make mochi with it to celebrate. But this year we only have about one to of unhulled rice—and since it’s broken rice anyway—we’ve decided not to make mochi this New Year.”

II

In Iwate Prefecture, starting with Iwate County, most of Ninohe and Hachinohe Counties, along with parts of Shimohei, Kamihei, and Waga Counties, had transformed into famine zones.
The total area was said to be approximately 3,000 chōbu.
What was particularly problematic was that these were mountainous areas with poor transportation in Hachinohe and Shimohei Counties.
There were no railways; the roads were uneven mountain paths where many villages could not be properly traversed by trucks, let alone horse-drawn sleds.
This region had almost no rice paddies, so even in normal years they subsisted on field crops—namely millet and barnyard grass. However, this year even those grains yielded scarcely any harvest, and substitute foods like *shidami* acorns and horse chestnuts also reportedly bore poorly. Now their only food was bracken roots, but these too were limited. Moreover, once snow accumulated over a foot deep, they could no longer dig them up. Given the transportation difficulties previously mentioned, if food supplies from other regions proved insufficient at this point, it was said they would literally starve to death.

On the afternoon following my visit to Midō-mura, I entered a mountain hamlet in Kotoriya Village of Ninohe County and spoke with an old man at a charcoal kiln hut situated at the base of a mountain.

The snow that had fallen yesterday lay three to four sun deep in the mountain shadows, while a pale white snow covered the bare earth of the mixed woodland, leaving the surroundings enveloped in silence.
The charcoal kiln was roofed with thatch, and from its rear smoke vent spilled pale yellow smoke that tangled in the branches of nearby trees before disappearing.
The old man huddled tightly by the kiln’s air vent, warming himself at its heat as he wove charcoal sacks.
After sharing various accounts of crop failures, the old man spoke these words.

“When we finally run out of food next, we’ll have to buy it with money—but around here, there’s no way to get that money except by burning charcoal like this.”
“But this charcoal wood’s got to be allocated from government forests, and it’s got to be paid in cash up front—that’s our first big hurdle.”
“Then after finally buying the charcoal wood and burning it in this kiln—a five-kanme bale of top-grade oak charcoal only fetches forty-five sen.”
“And even that—from this single kiln here, you barely get twenty bales, which takes five days.”
“Twenty bales in five days—selling them brings nine ryō, but after subtracting the charcoal wood costs, we’re left with fifty or sixty sen total. That works out to barely ten sen earned per day…”

There, though it concerned a somewhat delicate matter, I resolved to pose the question.

"So, are there households that sell daughters for a mere pittance of money?"

Then the old man said nothing, quietly turned his head, and stared at my forehead. His face—burned reddish-black and deeply wrinkled by the kiln’s heat—shifted into an expression that was neither smile nor sob before he spoke.

“Do you know,” he began, “when blizzards come to mountains, them little birds in them hills don’t chirp a peep. They know when mountains turn mean—fly off somewhere else, they do. Them village birds here’s just the same, see…”

I could no longer bring myself to ask anything further.

This tragic account of daughters being sold was something I both heard about and witnessed firsthand after entering Aomori Prefecture's Tsugaru Peninsula—indeed, I even met and spoke with some of those sold girls myself. But I will recount this later; first, I must describe the horrific conditions I initially encountered in Aomori's famine-stricken areas: Sambongi Town, Shichinohe Town vicinity, and the Uranotate Village region.

This was within Kamikita District, where the historic Sabishiro Coast—launch site of the trans-Pacific Miss Veedol aircraft—formed part of its territory, but the village I entered lay six or seven ri inland from this coast toward Mount Hakkoda, situated on a plain. In Iwate Prefecture, the snow measured a mere three to four sun deep, but here in this region, it had piled up to seven or eight sun—nearly one shaku—and Mount Hakkoda, demarcating the far northern sky, shone pure white down to its base.

To Sambongi Town, there had been a light railway, but from there onward to Shichinohe Town and Uranotate Village, only shared buses operated. However, to inspect each village individually, I hired a young farmer as guide. With puttees wrapped around my trousers, I resolved to walk as far as possible—staying at whatever farmhouse could take me when exhausted—and began trudging forward step by step. That was the morning of December 29th.

I talked with the young man as we walked.

“This region is supposed to be a famous production area for Nanbu horses, but how were the prices this year?”

“They weren’t even worth considering,” the young man dismissed.
“A top-quality two-year-old horse might occasionally fetch around 150 yen, but even then, after subtracting feed costs, there’s no profit to speak of.”
“The rest mostly go for about fifty yen per head—the worst ones barely thirty yen—so everyone ends up losing over a hundred yen per horse.”

“What about sericulture?”

“It’s still not viable.
At prices like one yen per kanme or one yen twenty sen, it doesn’t even cover a third of the mulberry costs.”

“Then, are there no other ways to earn money?”

“There’s nothing around here.
Since we’re not in mountainous areas, we can’t make charcoal, and being far from the sea means no fishing either. So when it comes to money, all we can do is sell rice—but with this year’s harvest being less than a third of normal, forget selling it; we’ve nearly finished eating up what little we had.
With no other choice, every household is making potato cakes to eat, but even that will be gone in another month.
So if there’s no money and we can’t buy imported rice, what will happen then?
Even if we farmers are fools, when there’s truly nothing left to eat, we won’t just sit quietly and die—that’s what us young folks are saying.”

“Aren’t there any relief funds or rice coming from the prefectural office?”

“Nothing’s come yet. Even if it does arrive, they’ll barely keep us breathing at best—it’s not like our lives as farmers’ll be saved from the roots up. When you think what’s ahead, everyone’s hearts turn pitch black.”

On my return journey from this trip, I heard words of similar meaning from a farmer friend in my hometown too, and realized that harboring nothing but feelings of despair toward farmers’ lives wasn’t limited to this young man alone in Aomori’s blighted fields.

Yet when I heard this from the famine-stricken youth, I felt I’d glimpsed one of the questions I’d wanted to answer when setting out—one of the thoughts buried deep in farmers’ hearts.

The natural scenery here was continental in scale and radiant.
Snow over a shaku deep glistened across the expanse, tobacco-brown larch treetops stretched in elegant ranks, and beyond them silver-hued Mount Hakkoda curved gently along the horizon—the words escaped my lips before I realized.

"But the scenery around here is splendid!"

Then, the young man said as follows.

"But even the fields around here had a terrible crop failure this year."

For farmers, beautiful natural scenery must also be land that abundantly yields food.
If that land cannot produce any food at all, then neither its beautiful nature nor its scenery hold any meaning—here too, I could do nothing but remain silent.

By the way, it was in a dim eatery in Shichinohe Town that I heard someone shouting what this young man had been trying to convey in a far more blunt and explicit manner.

He was perhaps fifty or sixty—this old man whose face, long exposed to life’s harsh winds, had become rough and hardened like pine bark.
Before him sat about two sake flasks.
And he was properly drunk.

“There are men who can still drink!”

As I thought this, watching the man with some amusement, he began to shout at the proprietress while brandishing a fist like a gnarled tree burl.
Since he spoke in the local dialect, there were many parts I couldn’t understand, but I could make out most of it.

“Listen here, proprietress—a horse this old man raised for two and a half years fetched a mere thirty-five ryō.
"And what's more—that money from when I handed it over in July still ain't come through."
“With no other choice today went out thinkin’ I’d get my horse back but damn it all—they said if they took the horse me and my three kids’d be left dried bones!”
“They’re cart drivers you see.”
“Even so they take out a single five-ryō note and beg ‘Please endure with this for the year’ right? Hey proprietress—that’s when this old man said it.”
“Alright—if it’s come to this we’re square.”
"I said ‘When we dry up and die we’ll die together’ left two ryō change from that five-ryō note and came back—but proprietress last year was a good harvest and still ended same as famine."
“In other words—they call it ‘bountiful-year famine’ but even at my age first time hearing such rot.”
“Not just hearing—first time living through!”
“Listen—once such things start they keep coming yearly each worse than last.”
“If that’s how it is good years mean shit!... Now this year’s famine atop famine—next year us farmers’ll dry up starve drop dead in fields and when that ain’t enough neck ourselves with rope how it’ll be!”
“Bastards… I tell ya!”
“Proprietress this old man’s got a son soldiering in Manchuria too—wrote him just t'other day.”
“Told him ‘Fight brave for country die honorable death’ that.”
“Then.”
“Hey proprietress—if some payout comes through our family might last winter barely.”
“Them with daughters can sell ’em but since this old man only bred sons thinking ’bout selling mine instead…”

The man shouted these words one by one toward the earthen floor, as if slamming them down.

III

"In All Quiet on the Western Front," there is a passage stating that for soldiers waging war on land, the earth—the ground beneath them, the soil—is a mother’s bosom.
Only the earth protects them.
It is written that none but soldiers on the battlefield can truly comprehend the earth’s preciousness, yet for farmers too—for farmers above all—the earth and soil are a mother’s bosom.
They are everything.
None but farmers can truly understand the soil’s preciousness.

The earth, the soil—this year they yielded no crops whatsoever.
The mother’s bosom had transformed into a corpse’s bosom.
The primary cause was that from the time of rice planting in May until the season when the rice ripened in September, aside from a mere few days, not a single one of the remaining over hundred days reached temperatures typical of an average year.
“Not only that—in August and September alone, they were struck twice by extreme cold and hailstorms.”
Both the rice plants and the field crops managed only to grow their stems, ultimately never having the time to bear satisfactory fruit.
And when October came, winter would descend upon this region whether they willed it or not.
When November came, snow began to fall.
Due to last year's bountiful-year famine, the farmers who had already resented and lamented this society were plunged into complete self-destructive despair by the arrival of this year's famine.
They became fatalists lamenting nature's cruelty, while simultaneously—from their position as the oppressed—coming to resent and curse the lawlessness of the exploiting class arising from the current urban-centered system, the urban commercial-industrial system.

But toward these young people of the countryside—who possessed both the capacity for such critical thought and the will to translate it into action—we could place expectations upon some future and hope; yet when confronted with the simple elderly and mothers who lacked even this capacity, I could do nothing but shed tears in the dark.

I left the eatery in Shichinohe Town and began walking toward Uranodate Village—the epicenter of crop failure in this area—following behind the guiding young man.
It was only around two in the afternoon, yet ink-black clouds spread across the entire sky, casting a twilight-like gloom.
Moreover, the road through the rice fields was churned up by horse-drawn carriages and buses into a river of snow and mud.
In this village reportedly having seventy percent non-taxpayers, not a single sen could be spared for road maintenance, hence these muddy thoroughfares remained as they were.

Here on this muddy road, I found myself walking alongside a farmer’s mother who had been to Shichinohe Town for errands.
The mother carried a child of about two wrapped in a swaddling cloth on her back, and in her hand held a bundle of purchases wrapped in a furoshiki cloth.
And on those feet, she wore large straw boots.
They looked just like skewered taro on bamboo sticks.
Caked in mud, the straw fragments spilled out like a sparrow’s nest, giving the impression not of straw boots but merely of tangled straw clinging about her feet.
In both Nagano and Niigata Prefectures, I had seen what they called snow boots, which were made more skillfully; comparing them mentally, I was astonished to discover not so much the clumsiness of this region’s farmers as a profoundly childlike primitiveness even in these straw boots.
In the hand of the child on her back, a single red balloon floated lightly at the tip of a bamboo stick.
Seeing this, I felt tears well up in my eyes once more.
And so, I spoke.

“It’s bitterly cold, isn’t it?”

In truth, my feet inside my ankle boots were soaked with melted snow, feeling like they might tear away.

“Oh…” The mother responded, then asked in dialect, “How far you headed?”

“I intend to go to Uranodate,” I answered, whereupon she asked if I had relatives there.
When I answered “No,” she pressed further, “Then there’s no inn—where d’you plan to stay?” so I replied, “I mean to have a farmhouse put me up.”
“If you don’t mind sleeping rough by the hearth with pumpkin rice,” she offered kindly, “you’re welcome at my place.”
I accepted gladly.

“That’s perfectly fine. I would very much like to have you put me up.”

Therefore, I decided to have the young man from Sambongi—who had carried my bag all that way while guiding me—return home.
When I offered two fifty-sen silver coins in thanks, he took only one and stubbornly refused the rest.
Here too manifested the artless sincerity characteristic of this region’s people.
To deliver those two coins, I found myself trudging through muddy roads for what felt an age.

After parting with the young man, I followed behind the mother carrying her child and, as dusk fell that day, stepped into the house’s earthen floor with mud-caked feet.

Around this house, snow-covered rice fields and farmlands stretched desolately.
In the garden stood four or five straw stacks forming round towers, while around the house, snowbreak straw fences encircled it.
Beneath the eaves, icicles over a foot long hung in rows with a frigid gleam, while below them, daikon leaves and corn ears to be cooked into meals were bound with ropes and hung in multiple layers.

Inside the house—apparently due to unpaid bills—the electricity had been cut off, leaving only the hearth fire to dimly illuminate the space.
On one side of the hearth stood an ink-black folding screen where children's clothes and sodden diapers hung dripping.
Behind this screen lay an area without a single shoji panel—the multipurpose space serving as living quarters during daytime, dining area at meals, and sleeping place at night.
Opposite this stood a wooden partition marking off the stable.
A mere six-shaku-wide earthen floor separated their living space from this structure—less than nine shaku separating humans from livestock.
The crude partition wall gaped with cracks through which the dark silhouette of a horse stood clearly visible.

For the farmers of this region, horses too were family members.
It must have been precisely because of this that they produced the fine horses known as Nambu horses; however, until then I had never realized people and horses lived and slept in such close proximity.

Fleas, lice, a horse urinating by the pillow

This verse from Bashō's *The Narrow Road to the Interior* came to me that night as I lay by the hearth—I couldn't help thinking how unchanged the farmers' way of life remained, from Bashō's Genroku era right through to our own Showa times.

Now, at the hearthside sat the master of the house, vacantly staring at the fire.
Within a beard of indeterminable last trim, only his eyes gleamed white.
But when the master heard from his wife why I had been brought there, he narrowed those pale eyes and welcomed me kindly.

I took off my muddy boots and held my ice-like feet to the hearth fire. In the pot hung over the hearth, something was simmering thickly. It was what they had eaten at mealtime—a mixture of broken rice and undersized pumpkins. Undersized pumpkins are what get thrown into the rice fields in normal years. They were mushy and utterly tasteless.

The master began speaking haltingly, converting his dialect into standard Japanese as much as possible. Of course, everything he spoke about was bleak. He also spoke of an old father in the same village who had missed out on receiving a letter from his son deployed to Manchuria simply because he lacked a mere six sen.

“The letter got sent back just ’cause he couldn’t pay six sen for the postage tax,”
“So the old man says through his tears,”
“Was a proper thick letter, that.”
“Must’ve had all manner of things written in it.”
“I took it in my hands,” he said, “felt it careful-like, tried to read my boy’s heart through the paper.”
“True or not, they say each Manchuria soldier gets twenty toothbrushes an’ ten caramels apiece—while we here can’t muster six coppers between us.”

A similar tragic tale existed in the family of a deployed soldier from Nakagori Wakatoku Village. The soldier’s sister had died of illness, but they had no money to hold a funeral—nor could they even send a letter informing her brother in Manchuria. The brother learned of this through a newspaper article and wept silently alone. When this came to the captain’s attention, he sent twenty yen for funeral expenses in the unit’s name—finally allowing them to hold the service, it was said.

When mealtime arrived, the master spoke again.
“Even this is broken rice with the husks removed, so it just barely goes down, but soon even this broken rice will run out. Then we’ll have to eat it still covered in husks, mixed with pumpkin and potatoes.”
“In normal years, this is what horses eat,” he said, “but this year, we’re the ones becoming horses.”

Now, it was clear that as they continued subsisting for months on such food, malnutrition would first take its toll on the children’s health.
This was something I heard from the Aomori Prefectural Office’s Agricultural Affairs Section Chief several days later—prefectural circuit doctors had discovered that elementary school students in crop failure areas were already suffering severe health deterioration.
And it was said that if conditions remained unchanged upon entering March and April—when food shortages would peak—child mortality rates from malnutrition would likely surge dramatically.

After finishing the evening meal, with no lamp left burning, there was nothing to do but sleep. The master, the housewife, and the child slept wrapped in a quilt that looked like layered rags stitched together behind the folding screen by the hearth. I slept with a single coverlet thrown over me, curled up like a quail beneath it.
Lying there, I asked.

“Do you only have one child here?”

Then the housewife,

“Well now, there’s another one—she’s seventeen this year,” came the reply.

I wanted to ask where that daughter was now, but here, asking such a thing had come to feel far too cruel.
When I remained silent, the master said with a sigh.

“That daughter is now in Tokyo.
“Many girls from this village go to work at spinning mills, but I sold off my own daughter on a five-year contract.”

To this, I could not even nod in agreement.

The Tokyo newspapers wrote that daughters were being sold off for mere deposits of two or three yen, but that was the newspapers’ falsehood.
No matter how simple the farmers may be, they are not so foolish.
However, cases where their daughters were sold off to either private or licensed brothels for around 100 to 300 yen were all too common.
I witnessed that actual instance in a hamlet near Kameda Village.

To reach there from Aomori City required a three-hour journey by shared bus along a muddy, snow-covered road, with Mutsu Bay visible to the right. This area too was almost entirely a land of no harvest. However, many of the farmers were also fishermen on the side, and through catching sardines and cod, they were reportedly managing to survive for the time being. But that too would last only through January; from February onward, there would be no fishing for the time being. Moreover, until now every year hundreds of fishermen had been recruited en masse from Hokkaido, but this year—it was said—they weren’t coming at all. There too, it was said that life after February would be utterly hopeless.

I was being jolted along, lost in dark thoughts.

It was the afternoon of January 2nd. The snow that had once ceased came pouring down again.
When it began to fall, the sea surface became chained in monochrome gray, and the road ahead grew indistinguishable beyond fifty meters.

“Might turn into a blizzard,” said the man next to me. Sure enough, after advancing about six ri, snow came swirling into vortices and rushed past.
“If three days of blizzard pile onto this famine,” said the old man sitting behind me through chattering teeth, “these farmers’ll shrivel up dead like parched rice stalks.”
He spat into the stove pit before continuing: “Back in Tenmei’s great famine—thirty thousand dried corpses littered these hills. Survivors ate human flesh—said seventeen-year-old girls tasted sweetest.” His gnarled hands mimicked clutching meat bones.
“Waited till starvation sucked ’em dry ’fore devourin’. Mark my words—this winter’ll see same horrors.”
The bus lurched violently as he leaned forward: “Meiji thirty-five? Taisho two? Child’s play compared! This here’s Heaven’s wrath—proof we’re livin’ through end times.”

“So look—if we’re gonna shrivel up dead anyway, I wanna eat real rice until I’m sick—just once before I go.”

“If they get to eat even once, that’s still something."
“Up in Iwate’s deep mountains, they pass a single bowl of rice house to house—just looking at it makes ’em happy.”
“That’s how bad it is. When someone takes ill, they say putting that rice by their pillow cures ’em.”
“Farmers who grow rice reduced to worshipping the stuff they cook—truth so twisted it sounds like lies.”

The bus plowed through the blizzard, and the people fell silent because of it, but at that moment, a bang sounded from the back.

“Damn it! Finally blew out!”

The driver said this as if he’d expected the flat tire all along and stopped the vehicle. It remained one and a half ri to Kameda Village where an inn stood. With no hope of walking through this blizzard, we four from the bus—myself included—took refuge in a farmhouse facing the road.

The gloom and squalor within the house were no different from Uranodate Village's farmhouses.
We stepped into the hearthside of the raised entrance frame and warmed ourselves at the fire.

After some time, the wind subsided slightly.
The two men, claiming their homes were five or six chō ahead, went out into the blizzard that was beginning to calm.
Those remaining were me and an old woman around fifty.
The old woman was from Koguni Village, located nearly one ri further into the mountainous region from Kameda Village.
I spent that night by the hearth with this old woman, and after she told me various stories about her life,

“The truth is... today I left my daughter at a gokeya—a private brothel—in Aomori City.” She began speaking these words in her rural dialect.

Why she had left her daughter in such a place—there was no need to ask that now. When I remained silent again with dark thoughts, the old woman muttered to herself in a hushed voice, saying something to this effect.

“In my village, we could only get about two to of rice from one tanbo of paddy fields.”
“So we’re all buying imported rice to eat, but you need money first to buy that.”
“To get that money, we can only make charcoal, but to make that charcoal, we have to buy the materials.”
“You see, seventy percent of Aomori Prefecture’s mountain forests are state-owned. To burn even one bale of charcoal, farmers must pay cash for those state-owned trees. This is how things stand—our village’s farmers too are now utterly at their wits’ end…”

This old woman, contrary to her appearance, knew that nearly seventy percent of Aomori Prefecture’s mountain forests were state-owned and held a view on the matter.

The old woman also made remarks of this nature.
"The farmers around here can still manage sleeping with proper futons—that's something at least. But go west to Kurumazuka and Inagaki Villages in Kitatsugaru District, or Ainouchi, Uchigata, and Takeda Villages in Nishitsugaru District—those farmers don't own a single thing you could call a futon."
"They all sleep in straw."
"They spread rice straw at the very bottom, then lay a mat-like weave called neshiki made from sedge on top—sleeping right on that."
"And over themselves, they lay Nego—woven from water plants gathered at Lake Jūsangata, also mat-like."
"It's fairly warm, but with all that rustling—no, completely different from cotton futons."

I had been shocked to find farmers in Iwate’s mountain valleys living as primitively as indigenous tribes in uncivilized regions, but now I found myself astonished anew—were Aomori’s farmers truly reduced to such extremity as well?
The previous day, a man who had spoken about farmers sleeping in straw
“We must relieve this famine as famine demands relief, but at the same time seize this chance to expose how Iwate and Aomori’s farmers have been forced into these primitive wretched lives all these years—we must make city consumers see this truth.”
“We must lay bare before those in power this fact—that in His Majesty’s Showa reign, there exist Japanese who eat millet and barnyard grass as staple food, who sleep nestled in straw!” he had shouted. As I listened to the old woman’s account, I found myself compelled to agree entirely.

The old woman concluded her earlier statements by saying:
"This isn't about what we spoke of before—it wasn't just folk from olden times who ate human flesh."
"We're all devouring each other in the end."
"If you try to keep your child alive, you must feed them your own flesh. If you try to keep yourself alive, you must eat your child's flesh."
"And now here I am—trying to stay alive by devouring my own daughter."

I involuntarily stared at the old woman's face.
This old woman appeared to possess the meager earnings from selling her daughter and frequently fretted over them.
That she would occasionally direct guarded looks even toward me, sitting right beside her—this left me rather disconcerted.

Now, on the night of the following day, I entered Aomori City's private brothel district to seek out this old woman's daughter.
Fine snow fell and ceased, fell and ceased again.
The road's snow and ice had frozen rock-hard, and I nearly slipped several times.
This coastal stretch saw winds from Mutsu Bay tearing through the frigid night air.
Three days earlier, walking through Komina Village's famine-stricken lands near Asamushi Onsen, I'd endured body-numbing cold—yet even that paled before this.
That my heart chilled at visiting this woman in the brothel district—the slums—likely contributed too.

The private brothel district, unworthy of its name meaning 'cavern', lined both sides of a wide, barren street in dim twilight. Most structures were two-story buildings divided into separate units—overly large for brothels—which only heightened their air of shabbiness. Many housed three or four women who sat in small entrance parlors, hailing the men prowling outside. Their manner was off-putting, but their dialectal mispronunciation of "disagreeable" as "ekeshikanai"—given the nature of this place—held a grim sort of comedy.

By the way, her house was easy to find. Four women were standing at the entrance. I stated her real name, identified her among them, and immediately went upstairs. The room was a horrifically dilapidated space, identical to every private brothel room across Japan. She was initially highly wary of me, but when I mentioned having met her mother, she suddenly opened up. However, the girl who had grown up solely in a farming village—her appearance, with rouge and white powder caked on thickly—had an almost comically grotesque air.

“When did you come here?”
“It’s been about ten days.”

“When did you start working here?”
“Three days ago.”

From that conversation, she began speaking of things even her mother had not disclosed.
That concerned her father.

Her father had commuted between the village and Aomori City while running a fairly extensive business.
He had been a wholesaler of general goods.
But years of economic depression had rendered it immobilized when met with this year’s crop failure, followed by banks suspending payments.
(Nearly all banks in Aomori Prefecture have suspended payments now,) making monetary circulation entirely impossible and bringing business to an abrupt standstill.
The father had already sunk into half-despair.
Then, leaving his various obligations unattended, he fled alone to Aomori City.

The father became a dockworker.
However, in a place already devoid of connections, even when this unfamiliar father tried to join in, he found no work whatsoever.
The father would spend each day doing nothing but eating his lunch in the shadow of a pier warehouse, battered by icy winds.
And then came the day when he could no longer bring even that lunch.
One day,
Driven by extreme hunger, the father stole his coworkers’ lunch and devoured it.
The theft was immediately discovered, and the father was beaten mercilessly by his coworkers.
He was left so badly injured that he could no longer stand.

The father lay in a flophouse room, abandoned and alone.

“Then on the fourth or fifth day, Pa died.”
“Whether he died from his injuries or starved to death—no one knows…”

The daughter finally said this in Tsugaru dialect.

I shall lay down my brush here.
After having written extensively about people groaning on the brink of starvation, to bring up such a story now would surely be unbearable for the readers—and even more so for me, the one writing it.

At the Aomori Prefectural Office, they were now devising relief measures with every effort and method available.
In fact, at the end of last year, all thirty-three prefectural assembly members had reportedly rushed to Tokyo together to secure relief funds.
I heard that these relief measures would first save the prefectural banks teetering on bankruptcy, then use that foundation to open avenues for loans and rescue local businesses, and only after that deliver salvation to the farmers of the famine zones.
No, that wasn't the case.
I also heard they would directly provide funds to the farmers and distribute food as well.

They say night paths never darken, but the darkness of the famine zone was no ordinary darkness.
This fact was well known to the prefectural authorities, and one of them had in fact made this statement.

“If even a single person in Aomori Prefecture were to die of starvation, that itself would be a disgrace to His Majesty's reign. We must absolutely never bring disgrace upon His Majesty’s reign!”

I resolved to place immense trust and expectations in these words together with the farmers of the prefecture.

(I had intended to document the dire conditions in Akita Prefecture and Hokkaido as well, but due to space constraints, I must omit them here. I ask that you infer the dire conditions from the above account.) January 10, 1932

(February 1932)