Pathway to Japanese Literature

Outset

When I traveled to Hyuga last month, I saw a signboard along the railway line in Miyazaki City that read, "Medicine is Toyama’s Kōkandō." Toyama’s medicine employs a unique sales method where salespeople visit households across the country to leave medicine bags, but when I considered that their peddling reach even extended to the southern reaches of Hyuga, my desire to visit their headquarters stirred.

I had taken quite a lot of Toyama’s medicine myself, I must say. I would come down with minor ailments. When Toyama’s medicine bags hang on walls and pillars, it’s only human nature to end up taking them. Cold medicine. I often had stomachaches and abdominal pain, so bear’s gallbladder and red pills. Cumulatively, I had consumed a considerable amount. The salespeople would come once a year to check the bags, refill the medicine, and collect the previous year’s payment—this had become a familiar sight. Given this connection between Toyama’s medicine and my personal history, there was even a time before the war when I happened upon a three-volume set titled *Toyama Medicine Sales Industry Historical Materials Collection* at a used bookstore’s display and purchased it despite having no particular need. However, some years back, the tax office took away those books, so I no longer have them at hand.

Peddling was the most primitive form of commerce.
Even today aggressive peddling remained rampant, but Toyama’s medicine took a different approach—payment came later.
First they would leave medicine bags.
It was a system where they returned the following year to make their rounds and collect payment for whatever portion had been consumed.
The deferred payment system set it apart from ordinary peddling, so every household distinguished it from aggressive sales tactics.
One factor may have been its history.
Much like summer goldfish sellers, they had become an indispensable local custom embraced with familiarity. In Kantō’s rural villages, signs reading “No Entry for Aggressive Peddlers” hung at every hamlet’s entrance—yet Toyama’s medicine sellers and Echigo’s antidote peddlers remained exceptions.
The antidote sellers operated on cash transactions—though this too likely stemmed from their history and the familiarity inherent in their vendors being women.
The antidote sellers possessed a certain refined beauty, and through their legends too they seemed to have become local icons.

I was born in Echigo.
Writing about one’s hometown is difficult—for if you try to speak well of it, there’s no end, and since you know its flaws too well, there’s equally no end to speaking ill of it.
It’s a tricky business to observe or describe without excess or deficiency.
Therefore, I had respectfully kept my distance from this subject in my work, but the moment I thought of Toyama’s medicine, it occurred to me that by also covering Echigo’s antidote sellers, I could conveniently address my hometown.

It is said that women in Echigo work hard.
However, hardworking women are not necessarily Echigo women.
In Japan, women everywhere work like cattle and horses.

Speaking of what made Echigo women exceptional, even in Echigo’s farming villages there were geisha.
Unlike so-called daruma geisha who specialized in menial tasks, they naturally performed those duties but were also fully accomplished geisha who could play the shamisen and dance with skill.
And Echigo geisha universally took pride in declaring, “I was born in Echigo.”
In other regions, people generally avoided becoming geisha or courtesans in their birthplace.
In Echigo, however, only local women could establish themselves as geisha or courtesans.
Generations of mothers and daughters becoming geisha were not only commonplace but even a point of pride.
There was even a sense of honor in becoming geisha in one’s birthplace.

Echigo's sacred mountain was called Mount Yahiko.
There stood Ichinomiya Yahiko Shrine.
In the center of the Echigo Plain along the Sea of Japan's coast rose two consecutive mountains known as Yahiko Kakuta, standing isolated from their surroundings.
On this sacred mountain's backside facing the Sea of Japan lay a place resembling an isolated island—the headquarters of the antidote sellers.
Moreover, on the front side facing the Echigo Plain, the granary belt encircling the sacred mountain's foothills formed nothing less than the base and birthplace of Echigo geisha.
On both back and front sides, the antidote sellers' and geisha's headquarters surrounded the land's sacred mountain as thoroughly as swarming ants leave no crawling space between them.
Echigo Province was called Nishikanbara District.
Here too stood the headquarters of the Echigo lion dance.
This was where historically unique Echigo existed.

“Next month will be Toyama’s medicine and Echigo’s antidote sellers!”

I declared this at an inn deep in the mountains of Takachiho in Hyuga.
Sleet was falling in Takachiho that day.
Winter's Echigo Road.
My train of thought carried a tinge of melancholy.
That marked the beginning of this journey.

However, the end of this journey proved unexpected.
For readers too, it would likely seem equally astonishing.
What I witnessed at my northern journey's conclusion was a southern landscape rivaling Hyuga.
Even those born in Echigo Province remain ignorant of their land's mysteries.

When I arrived in Niigata, I first visited a newspaper company and inquired about the location of the antidote seller communities.
Because I had almost no knowledge.
The vice president of this newspaper was a dyed-in-the-wool Niigata native who, in his youth, had been a notorious delinquent nearly on par with myself, and knew every disreputable spot and local attraction in the area like the back of his hand.
However, even this gentleman’s eyes widened in shock at my question,

“If you gulp down a handful of this antidote, it works wonders for hangovers, I tell ya.
“But I wonder where their headquarters really is.”
“Probably Maki.”

he said.

However, I knew that Maki (the former county office location in Nishikanbara) was not the antidote sellers’ headquarters.

“That’s not right.”
“One thing’s certain—it’s not Maki.”
“Do you know anyone who does?”

“Is that so…”

“Let me look into it.”

The newspaper company’s foremost local expert—a person called the Investigation Manager—appeared, and the matter was finally resolved. It was a place called Kakuta Village. However, there was no one who had actually seen that village. The local newspaper was no exception. Many people visit the geisha headquarters, but no one ventures to the antidote seller communities on its backside. Of course, there are no inns there. Antidote sellers are migratory birds that visit villages across Japan. No one knows where those birds make their nest. People have no need to travel to the migratory birds’ headquarters. And though the migratory birds’ headquarters I reached at this journey’s end proved utterly unexpected, I shall follow the journey’s sequence and begin by speaking of Toyama’s medicine.

Hangontan and Kerorin

Of the over seventy pharmaceutical companies in Toyama, I hear only one or two still produce this Hangontan nowadays, but originally Toyama’s medicine bore the name Hangontan.
Originally, they began selling this single product.

I had heard the name Hangontan in rakugo.
I haven’t heard it mentioned lately, but it’s the story where Takao’s ghost appears.
Upon learning that the ronin living in the neighboring tenement of Yas-san’s row house was carrying on noisily with a beautiful woman night after night, Yas-san went to question the ronin, only to discover that this woman was actually Takao’s ghost.
Having pledged her chastity to the ronin through a mutual vow, Takao was killed by Lord Sendai.
However, there existed Hangontan that Takao had given to the ronin, and if one were to burn a single pill of this in fire, Takao’s ghost would appear and converse with them.
Yas-san didn’t believe it based on the story alone, but when challenged with “Then prove it,” the ronin proceeded to demonstrate.
When a single pill of Hangontan was burned in fire, Takao emerged from the smoke.
When the ronin saw this and theatrically exclaimed, “Why, isn’t this my wife Takao?”—that became the rakugo’s climactic point.
The ghost of Takao, after whispering sweet nothings, said, “Since there’s little Hangontan left to summon souls, please don’t waste it,” and disappeared.
Yas-san, startled, roused the pharmacy in the dead of night and, after inspecting the goods, bought a mountain of Mankintan.
The idea was to meet his deceased wife Oume and converse with her.
There, he burned an entire bag of Mankintan in the fire, but his wife’s ghost did not appear.
Undeterred by billowing smoke, he was desperately fanning the flames when a woman’s voice knocked on the back door.
“Ah! So my wife’s ghost must’ve circled around to the front because the smoke was too much!” Yas-san thought gleefully, sliding open the back door with a clatter.

“Why, isn’t this my wife Oume?”

“I’m Otake from next door. That smoke’s been coming from your place for a while now, hasn’t it?”

That was the punchline.
The punchline was well-crafted.
The contrast between the theatrical declaration “Why, isn’t this my wife Oume?” and the tenement-dweller’s retort “I’m Otake from next door”—coupled with the skillful juxtaposition of Oume and Otake themselves—worked splendidly, and the punchline’s naturalness, free from cheap wordplay, made it particularly effective.
Because I liked this punchline, I consequently loved this rakugo tale and had kept the memory of soul-summoning Hangontan engraved in my mind.
This rakugo story had stayed with me since middle school, but I hadn’t known until reading Toyama’s pharmaceutical history that *Hangontan* was the actual name of a once-popular medicine from Toyama.
Considering this, it appeared this rakugo was created in surprisingly recent times—likely during the period when Toyama’s *Hangontan* had fallen out of fashion and only remedies like *Mankintan* held sway.

The renowned medicine Hangontan of Toyama became known throughout the land during the time of Toyama Castle's second lord, Maeda Masatsune, in the Enpo era (1673-1681). This marked the beginning of its roughly 280-year history. While Lord Maeda was in attendance at Edo Castle, another feudal lord fell critically ill and nearly died within the castle grounds. At that critical moment, Lord Maeda produced Toyama's famed Hangontan—which he had long carried on his person—and had the ailing lord take it. The medicine brought immediate recovery, prompting requests from daimyo across Japan and leading to its distribution throughout the provinces.

However, according to the historical document submitted to the magistrate’s office in the ninth year of Hōreki (1759) by the Matsui family—the head house of Toyama’s Hangontan tradition—the origin of Hangontan was not originally from Toyama. It was originally a medicine possessed by Jōkan, a physician from Bizen Okayama. The people of Toyama received instruction in its production method and returned home, eventually leading to its adoption by the lord and subsequent prosperity, while in its place of origin, Okayama, the tradition perished.

Another theory states that Jōkan of Senshū Sakai Mandai Village moved to Okayama, practiced medicine, and created Hangontan, and later his descendants migrated to Toyama, where they continued manufacturing Hangontan for generations up to the present day. In any case, it remains an unaltered fact that the production methods of Toyama’s medicine originated in Okayama. Of course, “soul-returning Hangontan” did not mean Hangontan that summons ghosts as in rakugo. Hangontan that revives life—it was a name too precious to be lost as it was.

In the commemorative medicine bag I received from Kōkandō, Hangontan lay at the very bottom. Wrapped in a slightly imposing package resembling a formal document wrapper, its exterior did exude historical dignity. Yet nowadays, they said these antique medicines received no orders except from travelers buying them as Toyama souvenirs, and even bear gallbladders and red pills seemed to be fading into obscurity.

Currently, what was being produced in great quantities through female workers’ assembly-line work were penicillin ointments and Salomethyl-like medicines, while among high-class medicines, B12 surpassed even Rokushin-gan. However, it was said that the best-selling products were cold medicine and the analgesic Kerorin.

The mother of Mr. Hotta Yoshie, who had guided us around Toyama,

“Kerorin works well.”
“As for that one, even the people of Toyama are all taking it.”
“At our alumni reunions, there wasn’t a single person who didn’t have Kerorin in their handbag.”

she said.
When she said, “Even the people of Toyama—,” she meant that the people of Toyama were not really taking much of Toyama’s medicine.
It was not that the people of Toyama did not take their own medicine; even though Toyama’s medicines had spread throughout Japan, their proportion within all medicines consumed amounted to little.
It meant not that they avoided Toyama’s medicine, but that they consumed it only at the national average level.
This was not limited to Toyama’s medicines—in this era of freely circulating regional products, the same phenomenon applied to any local product from any area.
Therefore, the fact that Kerorin was taken in Toyama also meant it was taken nationwide.

However, I hadn't trusted solely based on Mr. Hotta's mother's words. I thought Kerorin couldn't possibly be that effective. I figured it must be due to the local climate after all. First and foremost, my sensibilities revolted against the very name "Kerorin." Though curious to try Kerorin myself, I lacked the courage to go to a pharmacy and say, "Please give me some Kerorin." When I returned from my trip, I said to my wife.

“I hear Kerorin’s the top seller among Toyama medicines these days.”
“I wanted to try it out of curiosity, but walking into a pharmacy and actually saying ‘Kerorin please’—I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

Then my wife answered without hesitation.

“We have Kerorin at home.”
“I take it every day.”
“There are plenty of other painkillers, but this one, this one, this one—(pulling out various painkiller boxes from the tea cupboard)—they’re all useless.”
“Kerorin works better than anything.”
“Everyone says so, you know.”

When it comes to wives, it's impossible to guess what they might be doing without their husbands knowing.
I hadn't known she was taking Kerorin every day.
I had thought going to a pharmacy and saying 'Kerorin please' required considerable courage, but women truly must be remarkably bold creatures.
At least among my friends, there isn't a single man who takes Kerorin.
Men might be more concerned with appearances.
However, women's Kerorin-esque substantialism seems to carry a certain bodily unpleasantness that borders on the monstrous.
I will never take Kerorin in my life.
If they were to give Kerorin the name Hangontan, I might drink it.
Patent medicines and superstition are much the same.

Whether people buying Toyama’s medicine like Kerorin at drugstores represented progress for Toyama’s pharmaceutical industry remained unclear.
While most pharmaceutical industries allocated the majority of their expenses to advertising, being able to operate simply by placing medicine bags and collecting payments without needing any promotion at all was fortunate.
Peddling might sound utterly primitive, but depending on perspective, it was no different from town shops’ operations—going around to solicit orders, deliver goods, and sell on credit.
One could think of it as them going nationwide to solicit orders and sell on credit, then collecting payments several times a year.
Considering this, Toyama’s medicine peddling was fortunate compared to ordinary town shops in having no competitors.
At the very least, there were no competitors going around to solicit orders.
With all these advantages, if their business still failed to succeed, one could only conclude there was something seriously wrong.
In short, regarding Toyama’s pharmaceutical advancement, what they needed to research was not so much the medicines themselves but rather their peddling methods.
Regrettably, since Toyama’s solicitors faced no formidable competitors (operators in Yamato and Okayama reportedly engaged in medicine peddling too, though not on a scale threatening enough to concern Toyama), they appeared not to have fully grasped their business model’s essence.
Since they didn’t focus on educating and training their peddlers, despite such advantageous foundations, there were surprisingly many underperforming operators.
They lamented, “The peddlers these days—meaning salespeople in peddling—are utterly useless.”
“They approach it like part-timers, you see.”
“You can’t run a business just leaving everything to the peddlers,” they said.

The fact that Toyama’s pharmaceutical industry—which should have been advantageous precisely because it relied on peddlers (solicitors)—now lamented its poor performance due to that very reliance indicated its foundations had begun to crumble.
That must have been because Toyama’s pharmaceutical industry had lost sight of its own essence.

The Ecology of Toyama’s Pharmaceutical Industry

Until I went to Toyama, I had been mistaken—the peddlers aren’t dispatched by manufacturers after all. In between exists a class called account holders. These are the ones who employ salespeople.

In other words, Toyama’s pharmaceutical manufacturers aren’t directly involved in peddling. It’s the account holders who purchase medicine in bulk from pharmaceutical manufacturers. Then they use salespeople (called peddlers or distributors) to deploy them nationwide for peddling operations. That said, many account holders themselves frequently go out peddling too. The number of account holders stands at seven thousand, with salespeople reportedly numbering twelve thousand. They say the largest account holder employs fifty salespeople.

Salespeople carried ledgers when they went out peddling.
(See photo) In other words, it was a ledger recording how much medicine had been taken by so-and-so in such-and-such town of such-and-such prefecture, how much payment had been received, and which new medicines had been restocked in their bags.
The true owner of this ledger was the account holder.
In other words, they corresponded to shopkeepers in town who employed solicitors.

Becoming an account holder required significant capital.
This was because they first had to purchase large quantities of medicine from pharmaceutical manufacturers in cash.
Moreover, the medicine they purchased would only be distributed throughout that year and would not generate cash until the following year.
Furthermore, at the start of the next year, they had to purchase large quantities again before the medicine distributed the previous year had been converted to cash—having salespeople distribute this new stock—and only then could they finally collect payment for last year’s goods.
In effect, two full years would pass with nothing but outlays before they could recover the first year’s payments.

Since this required so much capital, these ledgers became assets.
In Toyama, they were considered property equivalent to farmland and traded at high prices.
A ledger with ¥800,000 in sales would fetch approximately three times that amount—about ¥2 million.
Those who purchased these ledgers to become new account holders would have their salespeople carry them out for peddling in those territories.

Yet among Toyama’s three entities—manufacturers, account holders, and salespeople—the account holders reportedly had the most unstable business model.
They seemed to change hands frequently.
Wealthy individuals would buy someone else’s ledger to try their hand at the medicine trade as new account holders.
But they inevitably failed due to the salespeople’s careless work.
This happened because they focused solely on investing in ledgers while forgetting that nurturing salespeople formed this business model’s foundation.
Account holders themselves had to become salespeople and go peddling—or so it was said.
In short, account holders must have been fundamentally meaningless.

The defining feature of Toyama’s pharmaceutical industry lay in its nationwide network of solicitors—salespeople who directly connected with households—serving as substitutes for advertising expenditures. Had pharmaceutical manufacturers used solicitors directly and had these solicitors been aware they served as substitutes for advertising expenses, they would undoubtedly have invested more money and effort than anything into improving the solicitors’ caliber and striven to expand their sales routes. However, since there were account holders in between who conducted business using solicitors, pharmaceutical manufacturers tended to focus on advertising comparable to that of pharmaceutical manufacturers in other regions and on pushing sales to pharmacies nationwide, thereby forgetting the inherently advantageous foundation of Toyama’s pharmaceutical industry.

Isolated salespeople were nothing but ordinary peddlers.
In this day and age when clamorous refusals against pushy sales rang out nationwide, Toyama’s medicine sellers nonetheless retained unrestricted entry to every household.
In other words, just like newspapers and radio broadcasts reaching every home, Toyama’s salespeople could visit each residence.
No—more than newspapers or radio—they could not only advertise through their living voices but directly lay out their wares within each home.
I couldn’t help thinking it utterly senseless that manufacturers themselves failed to recognize this privilege.

However, in Toyama, this privilege was on the verge of being forgotten.
The president of Kōkandō,

“Toyama’s pharmaceutical industry has been modernized. While we must of course continue to value our traditional peddling system, in recent years we have also been devoting attention to advertising.”

Believing that modernization meant being anti-historical, they considered it natural to advance in that direction.
They were convinced that progress meant precisely this.
And they appeared to overlook the fact that their own salespeople constituted a promotional weapon capable of visiting every household directly with samples.
Salespeople could even serve as promotional vehicles that set up shop directly in front of housewives in every household and extolled their medicines' benefits.
For other pharmaceutical manufacturers, this would likely have been a drool-worthy opportunity.
Other pharmaceutical manufacturers would undoubtedly have wanted to start their activities immediately if they could visit households directly themselves.
This was because even to us novelists alone, pharmaceutical manufacturers incessantly sent samples of new and popular medicines.
Yet Toyama manufacturers had no need to send samples to us.
Because their salespeople could visit every household directly with goods without being disliked, serving as promotional vehicles and mobile shops.

However, just like Toyama’s manufacturers, Toyama’s account holders and salespeople lacked sufficient awareness of their own privilege.
They belittled their own business practices as outdated and could not even find a positive view that their work amounted to nothing more than expanding local solicitation nationwide.

“Medicine sells well in cities.
“It doesn’t sell in rural areas.”
“Because people in rural areas don’t even know about taking medicine.”

And so the Toyama salespeople did nothing but complain.
City dwellers possessed a certain level of knowledge about medicine.
They knew how to diagnose their own illnesses, select appropriate medicine, and take it; when they noticed Toyama medicine bags in their homes during such occasions, there was said to be a high likelihood they would take that medicine.
However, they complained that rural people did not even have the habit of taking medicine when ill.

“There’s a frigid village called Kake in Yamagata District, deep in the mountains near Hiroshima’s border.”
“This was over twenty years ago—I pushed through grass taller than my own height to make sales deep in those mountains.”
“It’s a place where several shaku of snow pile up in winter.”
“But during the coldest part of February, when they let me stay at a farmhouse, there wasn’t a single tatami mat anywhere. They’d laid just one straw mat over the wooden floorboards—that was their bed.”
“They sleep with a single futon as thin as a rice cracker.”
“This shocked me.”
“But Japanese rural areas are generally like that.”
“They’re in no position to buy medicine.”

The salespeople lamented thus.
However, when I returned to Tokyo and opened the newspaper, there was an article about a mysterious Korean aircraft landing—and what do you know—the location was none other than Kake in Yamagata District of Hiroshima Prefecture, deep in those very mountains.
It noted seven feet of accumulated snow.
The area remains bitterly cold mountainous terrain even now.
Just like that enigmatic Korean aircraft, Toyama’s salespeople too would venture into such remote highlands.
A foreign plane had landed there unnoticed for half a year—its pilot lodging in farmhouses while commuting to Tokyo—so desolate were those mountains that society remained oblivious.
At any rate, Toyama’s salespeople still made efforts to reach even such inaccessible regions.

“I used to walk from Hokkaido to Aomori back in the day.”
“This is a story from Aomori’s rural areas. Since there were no inns, I asked a farmhouse to let me stay.”
“However, it just so happened that the farmer had caught a cold.”
“When someone catches a cold, it’s normal to lie down and sweat it out, but this farmer deliberately stripped completely naked even though it was winter.”
“And on his back he’d thrown on a short workman’s coat.”
“He’d built a blazing fire in the hearth and was roasting his exposed belly over it.”
“Since water boiled constantly in the hearth, he would pour it into a large donburi bowl, add a handful of miso, and drink it down eagerly.”
“He claimed this was the ultimate cure for colds.”
“Even though they knew full well I was a Toyama medicine seller, they didn’t even consider buying a dose of my medicine.”
“There I was right before their eyes, and that’s exactly how it was.”

“So you still persist in making your rounds through such areas undeterred?”

“That’s exactly how it is. In such places, special medicines actually sell quite well. They brew homemade rice wine and guzzle it down, so they’re suffering from stomachaches all year round. That’s where a miracle drug called diarrhea remedy comes into play. And then there's the all-purpose medicine Jintan. They cure any illness with Jintan, you see. That’s why medicine just doesn’t work in rural areas. Anyway, it’s cities where people actually take medicine. It’s because knowledge has spread. Because they know you have to take medicine to cure an illness.”

As long as people knew to take medicine when ill, leaving a medicine bag at their home meant they would take that medicine when sickness struck.
This was what they called Toyama’s deferred payment system.
It was Toyama’s salespeople who sustained their livelihoods through this tenuous reliance.
There existed no aggressive sales campaigns backed by major organizations or capital.

In short, manufacturers aspired toward modernization while salespeople clung to antiquated methods—each beginning to tread isolated paths that defined Toyama’s pharmaceutical industry.
And though the manufacturers’ modernization efforts remained modest at best, the salespeople had adopted suits and shoes these days, yet earning enough to cover these new outfits seemed their sole notable achievement.
One could detect no vibrant commercial energy.
At the very least, Toyama’s original deferred-payment model lacked vitality.
Compared to foreign businesses that thrived with a ninefold aggressive drive in their promotional efforts, Toyama’s peddlers might have possessed inner fortitude, but their faces bore somber expressions.

The day I went to Toyama saw a storm rare even for this region.
The train was even delayed due to the blizzard.
After the war, the Sea of Japan was said to have grown calmer, but on this day, the sea raged violently. We had been supposed to visit Yoshitsune’s historic site at Amaharashi Coast near Fushiki Port, but waves washing onto the coastal road temporarily made passage impossible.
The scenery from when those rough waves had begun to subside and passage had finally become possible was captured in a gravure photo of the Sea of Japan.

It was the Sea of Japan off Fushiki Port.
Fushiki had been a superior port to Niigata on the Japan Sea coast.
But having lost its shipping routes to Northern Korea and Karafuto, it now sat utterly idle like a shop open for business with no customers—not a single ship could be found in the harbor.
The same desolation was equally true of Niigata’s port.
Without routes to Northern Korea and Karafuto, these ports served no purpose.
A harbor scene devoid of ships, where cranes stood motionless and not a soul could be seen—such a vista was utterly saturated with unbearable desolation.
The entire vista was suffused with a deathly pallor.
While before the war snow would pile up a full six feet with ease, postwar not even a foot accumulated—yet inversely proportional to this decline in snowfall, the Japan Sea coast had lost its vitality.

“This trip is too desolate, don’t you think?”

Our footsteps grew heavy during the journey. Dragging our heavy feet like this, we headed toward Echigo’s antidote seller villages as planned, but our spirits only sank deeper, making it impossible to conceive of any brightness.

“At least there’s eating.”

At every inn we stayed at, we ordered snow crabs from the Sea of Japan.
We smacked our lips over bowls of cod roe clear soup too.
Winter along this coast brims with culinary riches.
“Tonight I want this dish—no, that one”—at least my mind remained fixated solely on food.

The Utterly Composed Masters’ Village

What I learned about the antidote seller communities was nothing but bleakness. Not only what I heard in Niigata and Maki, but even the knowledge I obtained from the village chief at the antidote seller village office was nothing but bleakness.

Kakuta Village was made entirely of sand.
They were sand dunes.
The village consisted of multiple tiers of towering sand dunes extending four kilometers from the sea.

Yet speaking of sand, most of the Kambara Plain had originally been formed from sand.
According to maps from six hundred years prior, nothing resembling present-day Niigata City had existed.
Save for Numata alone, the sea extended deep inland as far as Niitsu.
That was six centuries ago.

Since it was called Niitsu, Niitsu too must have been a newly formed port, making it impossible to gauge how far inland the original port had extended.
This large bay was naturally filled by sand pushed out from the Shinano and Agano Rivers and sand pushed back by the sea, forming what became the Kambara Plain.
Kakuta Village lay at the reclaimed western edge of this formation.
From there began Mount Kakuta, part of old Echigo.
The Kambara Plain showed dramatic changes on maps in each era even six hundred years later, owing to the clash between its two great rivers—the Shinano and Agano.
At times their mouths had merged over long years, leaving lagoon-like pools across the terrain and thus forming today’s Kambara Plain.

What puzzles me here is that they built a palisade in Numata over a thousand years ago. Even according to maps from six hundred years ago, Numata was a peninsula like an isolated island, making it impossible to determine from which direction or against what threat this palisade was meant to defend. This bears geographical resemblance to the Noshiro Palisade near Akita City’s coast, and I believe interpreting this terrain might help unravel some mysteries of ancient history.

When the sand dunes of Kakuta Village formed and when people began settling there remains unknown today. However, they are exceptionally high sand dunes. As sand dunes go, they could well be called the grandest—so majestic that even now, retaining their mountainous form, they bear watermelon and potato fields all the way to their summits. After crossing about two of these dunes and entering Kakuta Village proper, there stood yet another sand dune beyond which finally spread the Sea of Japan. Across it lay Sado Island. This area marks Sado’s closest point to the mainland, with a submarine cable running from this village.

Since almost the entire village consisted of sand dunes, even now there were only eighty hectares of rice fields in this village.
In the past, there had probably been no rice fields at all.
They were said to supply two bales from these eighty hectares at present, but since supply quotas were determined by individual ownership amounts of rice fields—and of course most villagers owned no rice fields—dividing the eighty hectares among all villagers would provide barely enough rice for two or three months' sustenance, let alone meeting supply quotas.
In other words, though peasants since ancient times, the villagers had never been able to grow the rice they themselves consumed.
While cultivating meager fields on those towering sand dunes, they had no choice but to lead impoverished lives—either buying their staple food or, if lacking the money, surviving without eating rice.

As peasants could not sustain their livelihoods, the village women began peddling antidotes.
This circumstance remains unchanged even today.

A poor village without rice.
Even the village chief explained it this way.
"Since farmers still have to buy rice to eat, if women don't sell antidotes, they simply can't manage," he said.

The village office stood at the entrance to the hamlet, and the first building travelers encountered was this very office.
This too was a filthily ramshackle structure—a decrepit hut that looked ready to collapse at the slightest push.
Therefore, if a traveler were to visit the village office, listen to the chief’s explanation, and return satisfied that they now fully understood the circumstances of the antidote seller community, they would be laboring under a gross misconception.
For in this entire village, if one were to speak of dilapidated huts, they would only be referring to this office and the elementary school building connected to it.

We stepped into the hamlet.
The deeper we ventured in, the more astonishing it became.
Not a trace of poverty-stricken ramshackle huts or seemingly poor farmhouses could be found.
Half of them weren’t even structured as farmhouses.
They should be called mansions.
They boasted gateways, possessed storehouses and granaries, encircled themselves with stone walls, and emerged endlessly one after another like village headman’s manors.

When going to the peripheries of these hamlets, the fields indeed grew increasingly sorrowful.
One couldn’t help but sense the village’s sorrowful history in these steeply sloped sand dunes—all neatly cultivated, with even cat’s forehead-sized plots desperately turned into fields for survival—but this impression held true only if one disregarded those grand mansion-like farmhouses.
The sloped fields dotted with grand private residences could be said to constitute a realm of beauty.
The wealthy masters—having grown dissatisfied with mere artificial gardens—transformed sand dune slopes into fields, creating a realm of refined elegance where they savored these living bonsai-like landscapes.
(See gravure photo) It wasn’t merely parts of the scenery—the entire hamlet was like this.
The further we went, the more it became evident.
There was a tobacco shop.
In what would typically be a rural tobacco shop carrying Bat or Shinsei cigarettes at best, here Peace and Hikari brands stood piled mountain-high at the storefront.

There was a temple at the farthest end of the hamlet, a thirty-minute walk from the village office. A splendid, composed temple with carvings reminiscent of Yōmeimon Gate adorned its mountain gate. It was neither a temple built by impoverished peasants of a destitute village nor one erected by the nouveau riche. This was a temple with composed dignity that could only have been built by a gathering of wealthy masters who had maintained affluent lives over several generations. Behind the temple lay the sea, marking the hamlet's absolute end. At the temple's corner stood a house where they manufactured detoxification powder. Two elderly women were producing detoxification powder there. (See gravure photo) This was the only factory I saw in this hamlet. The master there kindly welcomed us.

“Have your family been making medicine for generations?”

“No.
“It’s been about 120 years.”
"My father said we began using the current machine after purchasing it from Toyama in Meiji 22 [1889], but in the old days, they were hand-rolled."
“We used to produce six tons annually, but now it’s two tons a year.”

The master, fifty-five or fifty-six years old.
With an attitude as familiar toward us first-time visitors as if we were century-old acquaintances, he stoked firewood, poured tea, and spoke intermittently.
He maintained composure.
There was no pretense of hospitality toward guests, nor any particular awareness that he was speaking with travelers from Tokyo.
In other words, one keenly sensed a serenity cultivated through a life that had never required attention to such matters.

Of course,in any other village it would have been a grand mansion,but here in this village it was not particularly grand.I recalled the words I had heard from the chairman of the Antidote Sellers' Union at the village office.This village too had grown luxurious of late;they said only those who were truly destitute still burned firewood now.They said everyone was vigorously stoking their hearths with charcoal.When you considered this,the master here burning firewood might well have been among the village’s poor these days.Even in the union chairman’s account，he had stated that antidote manufacturers had the least profitable business．However，this master remained composed and unperturbed in all matters.He was simply free from all worldly distractions．

“There’s a hamlet called Kakumai much further inland here.”
“It’s a coast directly behind Kakuda Mountain and Mount Yahiko, and even now there’s no proper road to get there.”
“It’s the kind of place where you clamber over mountains while clinging to tree roots.”
“In that hamlet there is a temple called Shōmyōji, and this temple was the originator that began making the detoxification powder.”
“Originally, the people of Kakumai hamlet sold detoxification powder, but now the Kakumai people have stopped, and only those from Kakuta go out to sell it.”
“Hmm, even now it’s a coastal area at the base of mountains without proper roads. Over there, they can’t even have proper fields—I wonder what the Kakumai hamlet people did in the old days.”
“Perhaps long ago it was a pirate village.”

The master murmured quietly while pouring tea.
It was an unprompted account.
I too found myself becoming completely detached from worldly concerns.
The master’s unprompted account continued quietly.

“Since my family served as village headmen, well, we became the chief parishioners of Shōmyōji Temple, received instruction in the antidote’s preparation method, and thus began producing it—though that Shōmyōji Temple is no longer in Kakumai.”
“It has relocated to Maki.”
“This temple too made antidote until two or three years ago, but they’ve apparently stopped now.”
“Gradually, those who make antidote are diminishing.”
“As for its history, there’s nothing but legend-like tales—I don’t know any concrete details about the antidote.”

It was a transcendent statement.
Because he had just speculated aloud—"Might Kakumai hamlet have originally been pirates?"—I too fell into an uncanny mood and found myself desperately wishing that, were I a bird, I could fly to Kakumai.
The accompanying reporter also seemed to share the same thought,
"Let’s go to Kakumai."

With that, he had already begun to stand up when the master quietly restrained him,

“No, no.
“Even now, there’s no proper road.
“Well, there’s no choice but to go by boat, but on the winter sea, even that isn’t possible.”

As for there being no proper road, I too had a single memory that came to mind. Since Yahiko-Kakuda was Echigo’s sacred mountain, elementary and middle school students would have gone on a climbing trip there at least once during their school excursions. As for Mount Yahiko, since there was a small shrine on the mountainside and the summit was considered sacred, it had a proper climbing trail, but Kakuda Mountain had no such path. They had to cling to tree roots and scramble all the way to the summit. Though colloquially and affectionately called Yahiko-Kakuda—the sacred mountain of this land—Kakuda had no climbing trail. The fact that there are no roads in Kakumai hamlet on the mountain’s backside may not be something worth wondering at.

Shōmyōji Temple was founded by a monk who had come from Noto in the first year of Keichō. Of course, there had already been a hamlet in Kakumai. This might well have been a pirate settlement in ancient times. Unlike the sandy Kakuta Beach, this was an ancient, ancient land on the mountain's reverse side—moreover, that mountain enshrined an old sanctuary dedicated to Ōhiko no Mikoto. Furthermore, the area around Teradomari along the mountain's edge had served as an ancient sea route connecting to Sado Island, and considering how even northbound journeys from Naoetsu generally followed maritime routes in those days, it seemed rather perfectly fitting to imagine there having once been a pirate settlement precisely in this Kakumai area. Geographically and topographically, one could almost sense this being exactly the singular such location. These transcendent words from the master also held profound realism.

The antidote seller hamlets too were said to belong to beauty lineages. Moreover, legend held that all villages around Yahiko-Kakuda at the mountain's base were part of these lineages—the very birthplace of Echigo's famed women. Yet the local people insisted further: "Kakumai alone is special." Kakumai was claimed to possess a distinct beauty lineage all its own.

In any case, Kakumai remained even now a land left behind without so much as a proper thoroughfare from days of old. Yet long ago, this very area might have been the primal origin of human settlements.

Needless to say, Kakuta Village—like the plains around Yahiko-Kakuda that were largely formed by Shinano River sediment in later years and subsequently settled by migrants—stood in contrast to Kakumai, where humans were believed to have dwelled since ancient times long before that period.
As evidence of this, during the Keichō era, a temple called Shōmyōji had been established in Kakumai.
However, the villages on the plain became parishioners of this roadless Kakumai's Shōmyōji Temple, with Kakumai itself presenting the appearance of having been a cultural center in antiquity.
The reason Shōmyōji Temple relocated to Maki was due to having more parishioners there.
It was said that Shōmyōji Temple began producing the antidote starting with its founding priest—in other words, from the Keichō era.
This was about 350 years ago.
In fairer weather seasons, I intend to visit Kakumai once more.
This hamlet was said to now make its living by quarrying stone.
Within antidote seller communities, it was not uncommon for masters to build walls using this Kakumai stone.

I traveled through quite a number of Japan's provinces.
However, no matter how pleasant the climate of the southern regions, I had never seen a place where farm households as seemingly prosperous as those in this northern antidote seller community were gathered in such numbers.
Even though it was the depths of winter in a snow country, what I vividly felt in this village was the ambiance of southern regions.
There was not a trace of gloom anywhere at all.
The entire village was pervaded solely by brightness.
Even the fields on the sand dune slopes—said to be symbols of this village’s poverty—appeared as nothing but a bright and refreshing landscape, leaving me at a loss.

This was because of the very buildings that embodied prosperity in each of the hamlet's households. Until I saw them, those same sand dune fields in this snow country had appeared to my eyes as nothing but distinctly sorrowful terrain. Even when listening to the village chief's story in the shack-like town office, this impression had persisted. Stepping into the heart of the hamlet and seeing these mansion-like farmhouses emerge one after another, the same sand dune landscape transformed completely.

In the days when these countless mansions did not yet exist—in the days when there were only sand dune fields—this hamlet must indeed have been a sorrowful place.
And the women of the hamlet must have had no choice but to set out on antidote peddling journeys.
It was to eat rice.
The beginning must have been like that, but now it is far too different.

The antidote seller woman said to me:

“That popular song about antidote sellers.”
“That really gets on my nerves.”
“Thanks to that song, children in towns and villages mock us—chasing after us noisily yelling ‘Need any antidote?’—and then the adults go saying things like ‘Sing us a tune and we’ll buy some!’”
“What’s with this bastard? I think.”
“But since money and friends matter, we just grit our teeth and endure it.”
“Don’t act so high and mighty living in this shabby hut!”
“Even if I’m peddling antidotes—when I go back home, there’s storehouses and granaries where I’m from!”

In her fit of anger, she ended up ranting in dialect toward the end.
"I endure it because money and friends are important—but don't you act so high and mighty living in this shabby hut! What I mean is: when I return home, I've got storehouses and granaries at my place!"
Anyone might want to try unleashing such a retort, but this wasn't the kind of outburst one could casually produce.
Even when we returned to our home regions and found no storehouses or granaries, there was unfortunately nothing to be done about it.
In any case, this was that sort of village.
They emerged from mansions—complete with storehouses, granaries, imposing gates, and stone perimeter walls—to peddle their antidotes.

And for them, the very notion that the popular song about antidote sellers could conveniently serve as advertising for their business was utterly inconceivable.
They were simply vexed.
Because from this small hamlet alone, over a thousand women—every single one between sixteen or seventeen and forty-five or forty-six years old—walked out peddling antidotes.
Every woman who should be out selling antidotes was already doing so, leaving no room for further expansion of their business; moreover, their current trade brought such surplus profits that storehouses and granaries kept multiplying—meaning there was no point in receiving promotional help through things like popular songs.
The state of mind of this village alone could not be gauged by Japanese common sense.

When speaking of Nishikanbara in Echigo, it had been the birthplace of tenant farmer disputes and Japan's most impoverished farming region.
Among these, the hamlet that once resorted to selling antidotes precisely because of its destitute agricultural conditions had now become the village boasting Japan's most imposing concentration of mansions.
And no matter what southern lands one might name, nowhere could you find a village so saturated with southern-style abundance, brightness, and freshness.

The Ecology of Antidote Sellers

While Toyama’s medicine peddlers and Echigo’s antidote sellers appeared similar on the surface, their inner realities differed profoundly.

First, whereas Toyama’s medicine peddlers dealt solely in medicine, for the antidote sellers, the antidote was merely a front.
While calling themselves antidote sellers, they primarily peddled other goods.
They peddled everything from large items like bolts of cloth, diaper covers, and knit shirts to cosmetics such as pomade and face powder, along with all manner of daily necessities—soap, brushes, scissors, knives, hairpins, and more.
They themselves called their operation a mobile department store.

Therefore, whereas Toyama’s medicine found its clientele in urban areas, the antidote sellers specialized in rural regions.
Needless to say, urban areas where goods could be freely purchased in stores left no room for their business.
However, they lodged together in urban areas.
This was because urban areas offered convenient transportation for dispersing into rural areas and commuting back—in other words, cities served as lodging bases but were not places for conducting business.

Toyama medicine peddlers spent 300 yen per night to stay at merchant inns, whereas the antidote sellers did not engage in such waste.
While it was common for several people to rent a small room and lodge together, there were also groups that owned a small house where over a dozen members stayed year-round, using it as their base.

The antidote sellers had an elderly woman serve as each group’s leader.
To one leader belonged several apprentice sellers referred to as “children.”
These formed their own groups—each either owning houses or lodging at bases—commuting daily through rural areas for peddling.
Therefore，their living expenses were kept low.
That they could erect storehouses and granaries stemmed partly from these remarkably low costs contributing to enormous profits.
To them，Toyama medicine peddlers lodging at inns seemed both astonishing and perplexing，

“Women are thrifty, you see—building storehouses and granaries is another strength of women.”

And in reality, they took immense pride in this.
To them, men were beneath their notice.
They continued peddling even after marriage.
Even in the year they married, even immediately after giving birth—in such cases they took their nursing infants along on peddling trips.
They did take them as far as their base, but during the day entrusted them to someone and went out peddling.
They only breastfed them morning and evening.

In the past, they would set out peddling in mid-May and return by October, but now it became a year-round endeavor.
They returned to the village only for New Year, Obon, and the April and October festivals, spending a total of about two months there.
Ten months were spent out peddling.
They all did so without exception.
Individual action was not permitted.
Of course, newlywed wives and older wives alike were no exceptions—they spent ten months of the year traveling.
Since they always formed groups and lived communally, their behavior naturally had few lapses—though there were indeed cases of women who took lovers.
It was said that more wives fell into this category.
Even when husbands discovered this, they endured it silently because their wives’ contributions were substantial—so it was said that cases of household discord rarely arose.
It was truly a peaceful village.
As long as women clutched their chests and endured in silence, it remained a failure.
True peace would never arrive unless men learned to endure in silence.
For when wives endured in silence, it created a bankrupt peace—a peace where storehouses and granaries collapsed rather than rose—whereas husbands enduring in silence brought a peace where storehouses and granaries multiplied.
For the sake of world peace that must arrive at the end of protracted warfare, husbands had to make patience their creed.

As in Kakuta Village.
Truly, the antidote seller village was a model village for world peace.

However, to them, the only real men were those of their own village.
Men from other lands did not count as true men.
A prime example lay in how they never revealed their sales attire to their village men.
Virgins might hesitate to show naked flesh to men, but these women guarded their work outfits from local eyes with even greater fervor.
When leaving or returning to the village, they departed and arrived crisply dressed in Western clothes and high heels—figures so elegant one might mistake them for princesses.
Their hands held nothing but fine handbags.
Having sent all luggage ahead as freight, they always came and went empty-handed through the village gates, their beauty preserved intact.

Toyama's medicine peddlers too once maintained a fixed appearance.
At least until the pre-war period, Toyama still preserved this fixed appearance.
But now they had switched to suits.
Yet the antidote seller women knew they must stubbornly maintain their sales attire—garments they would rather die than show to their village men—precisely for business necessity.
Even while recognizing that this very attire, popularized through their trade song, made them targets of children's mockery and pursuit, they remained acutely conscious of needing to preserve this appearance.
"Because we are friends with money."
This phrase—"Because we're friends with money"—was murmured with perfect composure to me by a thirty-five- or thirty-six-year-old boss woman, a top leader in the community commanding some fifteen or sixteen followers.

In Kakuta Village, the New Year came one month late in February.
I visited this village in mid-January—a time marking their year-end period when they were scrambling to earn every extra coin before returning home.
Though they would come flooding back in another ten days, so few women remained in the village that the union chief struggled mightily to locate any returned antidote sellers.
Yet one group that had returned just the day before reluctantly acquiesced to my desperate pleas to don their sales attire—which they’d rather die than display in the village (see gravure photo)—and as it happened to be agricultural off-season, five or six village youths were holding a gathering in a government office room.
These lads stuck their heads out the window with grotesque curiosity to watch our photo session—unbearable!
The girl let out a genuine shriek, flushing crimson from her nape as she swayed unsteadily.
I found her sensitivity poignantly endearing.
To her mind, only this village’s men counted as real men—this I keenly perceived.
Nowadays one constantly encounters girls at hot springs who think nothing of baring skin before men.
In such an age, this girl’s rebellious shame struck me as both touchingly innocent and uncannily sensual.

However, seasoned as she was through grueling peddling campaigns that could rout a thousand armies, once the photography session ended, she—flushing crimson again—darted beneath the window where the men were sticking out their heads,

“Don’t you need some pomade?”

“Don’t you need some pomade?” she said.
The men simply stood dumbfounded, unable to respond to her humor—but given that this place was an earthly paradise of peace, there was nothing to be done about it.
For men to frequent social circles and play with wit and humor was a custom of the Sengoku period.
When a nation attains absolute peace, both culture and aristocratic spirit become the sole domain of women.
Moreover, the unhurried display of incompetence by the men of the antidote seller community was imbued with a dignity so lofty that someone like me could never hope to attain it.

The village’s tutelary deity being so perfectly matched to the village’s character struck me as fascinating.
It was called Tori no Ko Shrine.

“Tori no Ko—that is, an egg,”
said the village chief.

“Is an egg our deity?”

“The divinity we enshrine is Amaterasu Omikami.”

The village chief’s answer flowed like running water.
Then he laughed alone—a river’s chuckle—*ahaha*.

“But here’s what happens.”
“In this village, we mustn’t eat fowl or eggs.”
“When traveling, they’ll slip bird meat or eggs into dishes where you can’t tell by looking.”
“Eat it unwittingly and realize later—a letter arrives home.”
“‘Beg forgiveness from the god so punishment spares us for accidental egg-eating!’ they demand.”
“Ahahaha!”

I went to visit Tori no Ko Shrine.
Compared to the temples in this area, this shrine was quite small.
On the eaves of the shrine hall, numerous stone roosters offered as votive gifts were lined up.
They were life-sized roosters.
They looked like sacrificial offerings.
Covered with a glass case, they looked just like a restaurant’s display window.
Far from abstaining from eating chicken, they were displayed in a manner that positively whetted one’s appetite.
If one were to draw a straight line in the direction of the shrine hall, directly behind it would lie the summit of Mount Kakuta.
It was such a leisurely scene—with a bonfire in that open field—that it made one want to eat a whole roasted chicken.

Two girls were strolling around the area. They looked utterly idle. They too had just returned from antidote selling. They seemed to have heard about my profession and the purpose of my visit to the village, and shot me a coquettish glare,

“Don’t you go writin’ any weird stuff now!”

she said.
She meant, “Don’t go writing any strange things.”
Since it was everyday wear, she wasn’t wearing high heels.
Sweater and trousers.
And wearing geta.
Leaning against the fence, she kicked sand backward with her geta, like a chicken scratching the ground.

Iwamuro Girls

The antidote seller communities are located on the seaward side of Mount Kakuta, while the plains surrounding Kakuta and Yahiko are so densely packed with Niigata geisha-producing districts that not even an ant could crawl through.
The most representative of these are Iwamuro and Jizodo.
And in the Yamanote area surrounded by geisha-producing districts, there was also the village where Ryokan-sama had lived.
If you go to the souvenir shops in Niigata’s Furumachi district, models of wooden plaques inscribed by Ryokan-sama are sold.

Heaven

Great Wind

were his inscriptions.
In this area, the earthly realm was indeed windless.
Heaven must be in great turmoil.

Jizodo was a town, but Iwamuro was a village.
It was a small village.
Yet there were as many as seventy geisha.
There had once been the term “Iwamuro’s Tambo Geisha.”

“Customer’s here, oh—”

When someone shouted,

“Coming!”

...answered—thus goes the legend of a girl who had been working in rice paddies coming up from fields to change clothes before heading to banquet rooms.
But was this truly just a legend?
Even now—isn't this exactly what still happens?

Behind the inns and geisha houses stretched the Echigo Plain as far as the eye could see, while the opposite side faced mountains.
Scattered about, there are only around a hundred houses.
The gravure frontispiece photograph captures apprentice geishas in their sturdy morning cleaning routine within the field behind the geisha house.
Eight or nine geishas were summoned to take photographs.
They hadn’t come up from the tambo fields, but well, it was much the same.

“Where are you from?”

“This village.”
“Farmer?”
“Barber.”

If not this village, then the neighboring one, or at most the one beyond that.
Because an apprentice geisha whom people were rumoring to be a Niigata-born girls' school graduate had come,

"You, a girls' school graduate?"

"Liar."
"It's a permanent wave school, y'know?"

Every girl was frankness itself.
Because they always answered in dialect, one couldn’t understand them without knowing the local speech.
In Niigata, they pronounce "ta" as "ra."

Until the early Showa period, Iwamuro had been renowned as a birthplace of beautiful geishas—the most striking girls among those who started as apprentice geishas here would be summoned to Niigata to become first-rate entertainers, and from their ranks emerged top geishas in Shinbashi.
They rose from the rice paddies to become top-tier geishas.
Recently though, even the geishas here no longer left this place, and consequently, people said tales of top-tier entertainers emerging from here had completely vanished.
I summoned all the apprentice geishas currently considered representative ones, but found none who could truly be called beauties.
They were simply frank, open-hearted, and pleasant.
The openness of these girls closely resembled that of southern regions—the kind found in places like Hyūga.

The north and south are surprisingly alike. They have no airs about them.

In Niigata Prefecture alone existed this curious phenomenon where geisha could only establish their standing if born within its borders.
This might have stemmed from poverty.
The ability to debut locally as a geisha may have become a mark of chosen pride - circumstances dictating that comely girls were recruited within their home region while plainer ones faced compulsory migration for work.
For geisha alone remained nearly impenetrable to outsiders.
Only native women qualified as first-rate.

However, the notion that Echigo’s farmers are poor has now completely changed.
They have indeed become far from poor.
In the pre-war Echigo Plain, farmland belonged to a small number of large landowners, with nearly all farmers being tenant cultivators.
They were agricultural workers who owned no fields of their own.
Thus there existed nowhere else in the world villages as destitute as these - farmers' dwellings with roofs of crude earthen walls weighed down by stones, tiny and full of holes, worse than horse stables found in other rural areas.
Almost every farming household had been in such condition.
But everything transformed completely from wartime onward.
With post-war agricultural land reform bringing all farm households under owner-farmer status, an even greater change occurred.
Not a single farmhouse resembling those crude-walled stables of bygone days - though "bygone" here means a mere decade past - could any longer be found.
All had come to possess proper farmhouses with tile-roofed walls, and households owning electric refrigerators and scooters were said to be commonplace.

After the war’s end, beginning around 1948 (Showa 23), the winter climate of snow country regions underwent a drastic change. Previously, from mid-October onward, sleet and freezing rain would begin to fall, obscuring the sun until eventually developing into snowfalls several feet deep. But now, even through November and December, the sun continued shining unabated, and it was said that only around January 15th did winter finally assume its former guise. The same applied to the Kanto Plain, where snow began to appear starting around January 15th. In mountainous areas, they indeed observed two to three meters of accumulated snow from around that time, but in coastal plains, snow that had piled up two to three meters until ten years prior now reached at most one shaku. In other words, the Echigo Plain had now been reduced to seeing no more than one shaku of accumulated snow after January 15th. When speaking of one shaku of snow, even Tokyo saw it accumulate once or twice a year. The inland areas of the Kanto Plain were rather colder than the Echigo Plain.

Given this, I thought that double cropping in the Echigo Plain should be possible. In the past, from mid-autumn onward, rain would fall continuously until the rice fields overflowed with water like lakes, and farmers harvested rice using small boats; but since that rain no longer came, even the winter rice fields now lacked water. The conditions for double cropping were all in place. Yet not even a single experimental attempt at double cropping could be observed. I wondered suspiciously whether there was some other adverse condition hindering double cropping, or whether the farmers had resigned themselves to dismissing the climatic changes as temporary and given up on double cropping altogether. I planned to investigate during this trip why double cropping couldn’t be done.

I had intended to consult agricultural specialists, but even before needing to ask such esteemed professors, the local people readily provided the answer.

“Double cropping can certainly be done.”
“It’s just that no one does it.”

“Why?”

“Because life stays comfortable even without double cropping.”
“No—rather, they may privately believe life stays more comfortable by not practicing double cropping.”
“Anyway, farmers have grown wealthy precisely because rice is scarce and regulated—this reality has seeped into their bones. They may have concluded that keeping staple food supplies slightly inadequate actually benefits them.”
“This land was once the heartland of tenant disputes and a Socialist Party stronghold, but now those very same farmers are rapidly converting to Liberal Party allegiance.”
“And farmers in snow country are lazy, you know.”
“If they can live comfortably, they absolutely won’t bother with something like double cropping.”

In the Echigo Plain, they said there was nothing as meaningless as building an agricultural school right in the middle of the plain.
The agricultural school constructed at the farmland's heart was said to stand completely empty of students.

“Several times more students from rural areas go to commercial schools, industrial schools, and high schools in distant towns than to agricultural schools.”
“It’s the idea that what’s the point of farmers studying farming?”
“Farmers know their own business.”
“They don’t need to learn that in school.”
“The idea is ‘To hell with improvements!’”
“In Echigo’s rural areas, if you build a commercial school, there’s no doubt it would be packed to capacity.”
“So unless farmers become poor again like they used to be, there’s no way something like double cropping can be considered.”

And even if they graduated from commerce or industrial schools, it was rare for them to find immediate employment in those fields; most ended up helping out at home and idling around during the agricultural off-season.
When they finally reached marriageable age and needed to establish their own households, they would frantically begin job hunting—but at that age, positions were not easily found. Still, as long as second and third sons contributed their labor, farm households could manage to get by under current conditions.
There was no need for double cropping, they said.

On the other hand, there was no end to the supply of daughters who became geisha.
And those girls were innocently hearty and bright.
As for what in the world the reason for this was, I could no longer even begin to fathom.
Perhaps it was this region’s tradition.
While they had storehouses and granaries, could this be the same mentality or tradition as leaving one’s hometown for ten months a year to sell antidotes?
I thought it was probably much the same sort of thing.

Even newlywed couples parted with their husbands and engaged in antidote selling for ten months a year.
Moreover, their homes had storehouses and granaries.
The rationale that had forced them to squander life's most vibrant years in solitary peddling until their mid-forties should by now have been entirely lost.
Even if Echigo Plain's farmhouses had transformed from rough-walled structures resembling horse stables into imposing tile-roofed buildings, they still fell far short of matching the mansions in the antidote seller communities.
The women of those mansions uniformly spent all their youth in antidote selling yet remained composed.
This might share common ground with the realm of Kamahara geisha in Echigo.
When matters reached this point, one might say ordinary people could no longer fathom it.

As Ryokan-sama said

Heaven

Great Wind

is.

is.