JAPAN: A Rural Tragedy

For many generations Ichiro Ishikawa’s ancestors had lived in Ueno, a remote, semifeudal village in Shizuoka prefecture. Ueno’s rich, black volcanic soil yielded rice, corn, sweet potatoes and garden vegetables. There were nightingales, cuckoos, profusely blooming wild chrysanthemums; and, in summer, gorgeous swarms of red dragonflies. Life in Ueno was good.

Ballots v. Fireworks. Yet Ichiro Ishikawa had troubles. Once he had owned more than three acres of forest land, paddies and dry rice field. The U.S. occupiers had taken his woodland for SCAP’s land reform program. Then, in drinking and gambling on flower cards, Ichiro had lost all but half an acre of the rice land. He had to hire out to other villagers. Still, he had a docile, hard-working wife and three fine daughters, of whom his special pride was the middle one, Satsuki (May Moon). May Moon, plump, smart and 17, was an honor student at the local high school, and read Jefferson, Lincoln, Hawthorne, Goethe, De Maupassant, Wilde and Gide.

Recently, the people of Ueno were called on to vote (in a by-election) for a representative in the upper house of Japan’s Diet. On election day there was also a fireworks display at a nearby Shinto shrine. The local political boss canvassed the villagers, asked those who wanted to see the fireworks to hand over their admission tickets to the polls, so that Ueno might still have a patriotically large number of ballots cast. In one ward a bulletin was circulated demanding that people who did not intend to vote bring their tickets to the ward leader’s house. Some women who voted for the right candidate were allowed to vote five times.

Scandal v. Scorn. Ichiro Ishikawa’s wife Kimiko. who went proudly forth to cast her ballot as one of Japan’s newly enfranchised women, reported these scandalous goings-on to her family. They did not correspond to what May Moon had learned in her civics books. So May Moon wrote an indignant letter to Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s most influential newspaper. Government investigators moved into Ueno.

The people of Ueno felt that dishonor had fallen on the village, but that May Moon, not they, had caused it. The cold silence of mura-hachibu enveloped the family, a severe form of ostracism in which no one will speak to the victims or aid them except in case of fire or funeral. No one would lend Ichiro tools and he could get no work. But he did not blame his daughter, and she did not blame the villagers. “The chiefs had told them that the village should cast many votes and would not be dishonored,” said May Moon. “This is indeed a rural tragedy.”

Added her mother: “It is very difficult. Of what joy are the songs of cuckoos and nightingales when one’s friends are silent and their faces are stiff with scorn?”