Declining Japanese Agriculture
Where do we get the ingredients of the sumptuous food served on the daily Japanese dinner table? The fact is that two-thirds of them are imports; Japan produces less than half of the total calories necessary for its own sustenance. Many countries produce almost all their own daily dietary requirements. Generally speaking, people import only food they cannot produce by themselves on account of their geographical and climatic conditions. For the Japanese, such foods include tropical products like bananas, coffee, and sugar. However, we Japanese depend on imports for most of our staple foods, even for the ingredients of our native dishes.
Hamburgers used to be a trendy fad food among young people, but they have now become a standard in the Japanese diet. The beef used for burgers is almost all imported from Australia. A few burger restaurants use Japanese beef, but the cattle are fed entirely on grain that is imported from America. Of course, the flour for the buns is also imported. So Japanese hamburgers consist almost totally of American and Australian ingredients.
What about a traditionally Japanese food like sushi? The raw tuna comes from the South Pacific, the shrimp from India, Malaysia, or South America, the octopus from the coast of Africa, the sea bream from New Zealand, the dried seaweed from South Korea, the ginger garnish from Taiwan. Wasabi, or Japanese horseradish, is foreign-grown and colored with chlorophyll. Recently even our rice is sometimes imported. Only the water in which the rice is boiled is assuredly Japanese.
Or consider the case of another traditionally Japanese favorite, soba (buckwheat noodles). The Japanese buckwheat plant is indigenous, but today, 70 percent of the ingredients of buckwheat noodles come from Canada or other foreign countries. Because soba is thought to represent Japanese culture, Japanese people find it hard to believe that even its ingredients are now imported. It makes us feel painfully insecure to learn that we entrust foreign countries with manufacturing soba, which used to be a staple unique to the Japanese diet. If we want to retain control of our national food supply, we must produce the staple ingredients of our foods in our own country.
In distancing our food from our culture, we lose an appreciation of our food. We no longer know anyone who raises the crops, and food becomes just another disposable commodity like anything else. Ultimately, we lose all sense of ethical responsibility and throw away uneaten food without compunction. Our dependence on imports even for the ingredients of our traditional dishes like tofu, miso, and soy sauce leads to our loss of control of our culinary culture. At the same time, our ability to buy any food for money alone, without thinking of its origin or the labor that went into producing it, has eroded our ethic of appreciating each food. Poor Japan no longer grows its own food, but only processes and consumes imported ingredients.
Japan's industrial strength and highly valued yen have enabled it to import food from almost everywhere. Even starving countries sell food to surfeited Japan to obtain foreign currency. Japanese markets are indeed full of food, but this opulence is tenuous and superficial. Since we Japanese no longer produce our own food, we are dangerously at the mercy of the world food situation. We must be aware that Japan produces the least food per person of any major country.
Climate Endangers Staple Imports
Staples such as rice, wheat, barley, and soybeans are by far the most important items of the Japanese diet. When we think of the Japanese diet, we first think of cooked rice; the Japanese language uses the same word for rice as for meal. Japanese and Chinese noodles; macaroni, spaghetti, and other pasta; bread, breakfast cereal, crackers, cookies, cakes, candies, and countless other foods made from grain cover the entire gamut of our eating habits. Even meat, and dairy products like milk, butter, and cheese are dependent on grain because they are provided by grain-fed cattle. Cereal grains are an indispensable source of complex carbohydrates, the primary caloric intake of our diet. If unrefined, like brown rice and whole wheat, they also provide important vitamins, minerals, and proteins.
Even though grain is so central to our diet, Japanese produce significant amounts only of rice and depend on imports for almost all other cereal products. Now some people say that Japan has become a leader among industrialized countries, and that a decline in self-sufficiency of grain is inevitable in any highly industrialized country. However, this shows a grave lack of understanding.
Even including rice, Japan produces less than a third of the grain it consumes. By contrast, the United States and Canada produce almost twice as much grain as they consume. France produces 150 percent of its own grain, West Germany and Italy 80 percent each, and even Britain 65 percent. By international comparison, the Japanese rate of self-sufficiency in grain is extremely low.
All the major industrialized countries except for Japan remain big agricultural producers as well. Japan buys most of its grain from such industrial giants as the United States and Canada. This would be no problem if these trade partners continue to provide Japan with wheat and soybeans indefinitely. Recently, however, there is reason to fear that the imbalance of nature could suddenly and adversely affect their crop production. In that case, Japan might be left seriously short of dietary staples.
Sixty years ago there was such a big drought in the American prairie states like Oklahoma that they came to be known as the dust bowl. Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck described this in his Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which was made into a Hollywood movie starring Henry Fonda (1940).
Even if American farming methods can stave off another dust bowl, American farmland is gradually losing fertility due to topsoil erosion, long years of chemical fertilizing, and highly fluctuating weather conditions. The United States Department of Agriculture has issued warnings about the present situation in its report called "Responses to the Challenges and Opportunities Facing American Agriculture."
At the same time, developing countries in Africa, Asia, and even Latin America run short of food because of their population explosions. When upriver communities log virgin forests to make way for croplands, downriver communities face disastrous flooding, which in turn washes away precious topsoil and crops. For example, flood damage in India and Bangladesh has been exacerbated by deforestation in Nepal, Assam, and Kashmir, through which the tributaries of the Ganges and Brahmaputra flow. Similar phenomena can be found in floods of Africa and Latin America.
In the long run, deforestation damages the entire ecosystem, accelerating desertification and diminishing harvests. In addition, global warming, acid rain, ozone depletion, topsoil erosion, salinification, chemical hardpanning, and countless other factors endanger world food production. How should Japanese people and policy makers prepare themselves to face such a predicament? What are our most ethical as well as prudent alternatives?
Returning to Unprocessed Foods
Now is the time to choose and practice a more enlightened and progressive lifestyle. This begins with a diet of unrefined grains and unprocessed foods. Unrefined grains and unprocessed foods naturally rebuild our bodies and promote our health. Our own bodies know that nature puts great nourishment into natural foods; our bodies can manufacture what other elements they need from a balanced diet of natural foods. We can enjoy this blessing in a life of appreciation achieved through our eating habits.
If we follow this message and pass it on to others, we can eventually affect the diet and consumption patterns of the entire country. In this age of overeating, it requires ethical reflection and coordinated action to affect lifestyles and diet on a national level, but this can all begin on an individual level.
Decadent overeating of highly processed foods not only damages our physical health but also numbs our perception, retards our calculation and memory, and ruins our minds. This mental degradation corrupts everyone's lives and ethical judgments and ultimately ruins the culture and the people. The declines of many great cultures were in part connected to decadent eating habits.
Today millions of people in Africa and Bangladesh tragically suffer from malnutrition if not starvation. At the same time, not only the industrial West, but even many developing countries are consuming far