I had cataract surgery (right eye 7/13, left eye 7/20), so I will not be able to do peasant work for a while, so I will write this as I remember my eco-friendly life as a child.
episode 1 raw garbage
Garbage trucks did not come and there was no concept of food waste. All human leftovers were supposed to go to livestock and were distributed to pigs, goats, sheep, and chickens.
Now, food waste is collected and incinerated at enormous energy cost. (Could the earth get hotter too?)
I toss my food scraps into the grass under persimmon and plum trees. In no time at all, the decomposers (microorganisms) do their job and return to the soil. It then becomes fertilizer for the trees.
ep 2 Livestock Memories
Chickens
The chickens, one rooster and about 10 hens, were free-range. I was often attacked by the rooster because I was a small child.
1) One day I watched a chicken eat an insect weakened by insecticide. When I ate the eggs a few days later, I could not eat them because of the smell of insecticide. It is a ‘Kyoretsu memory from childhood’ that poisons affect the top of the food chain.
2) Sometimes, my grandfather would mash the chickens and process them neatly. When I opened the chicken’s belly, I found small eggs, medium-sized eggs, and so on. When I was a child, I always looked at them with wonder. It was a very real reminder to me that life is given to us in our daily lives.
sheep
Grandfather shears the round, wool-covered sheep. Suddenly they are transformed into naked sheep. My mother dyed and knitted sweaters for the children from the wool she received from the sheep. As the children grew, the yarn was unknitted and re-knitted to give them multi-colored sweaters. Nowadays, hand-knit sweaters are a hobby, but in the past they were a necessity.
ep 3 well water
(1) Drinking water
There was no running water yet, so it was well water. The water quality was not so good and had to be filtered because of the Shinano River basin. I forgot the order of the filtration system, but gravel, sand, charcoal, and palm bark were used. I think the layers were separated by plam bark.
The bark of the chusan palm was effective in removing kanake (iron) and was used to filter well water in many parts of Japan.
(2) Gas wells
Natural gas was present along with groundwater. The wetlands of the Echigo Plain were rich in natural gas. When digging wells, we used a method called “Kazusabori“.
In summer, groundwater was used as a refrigerator to cool watermelons, tomatoes, etc. In winter, gas stoves were used. In winter, gas stoves were available.
ep 4 Hearth and Bath
It was very important to handle fire (firewood) as well as water in daily life. Children often used fire, and I think there was a lot of fuss over fire.
In the kitchen, there were three cooking stoves, and boiling and cooking was done on them. Generally, one hearth always had a fire going and a large pot of water was simmering. To transfer the fire to the other hearths, we used a “tsukegi,” a wooden block with a sulfur-coated tip. Matches were expensive in those days.
It was the children’s job to fetch water for the bath and to boil water for the bath with firewood. The children boasted to each other that they had heated the bath water with three sticks of firewood. So I knew by heart that the plum tree had the strongest fire power.
ep 5 carrying night soil
When I was a child, there were manure pits all over the fields where human excrement was fermented and used as fertilizer for the fields. I remember that the manure was decomposed into amino acids, and the vegetables absorbed it well, resulting in lush green leaves.
When I was in junior high school, we had to carry a bucket of manure from the school latrine to the field as part of our home economics class. It was a class that is unthinkable today.
Since then, this eco-cycle system has been abandoned and has become a chemical compound fertilizer made from fossil fuels and mineral resources, and I believe the situation is that we are almost entirely dependent on imports.
Eco-friendly living
Just 70 years ago, we were living a near self-sufficient, eco-friendly lifestyle, using mostly firewood for energy. In no time at all, petroleum replaced it, and our lives have changed dramatically and become more convenient. But we have been baptized with hot summers and rough weather in return.
I also hope that Japan will develop policies and technologies for forest utilization, as it has left its forests untouched for 70 years.
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