Where a people are strong and upright, their eating habits tend to be modest. Japan's Meiji period (1868-1912) provides a good example. In many families of good lineage, people made it a rule to have only seasonal vegetables and a cup of miso soup with brown rice at each meal. Their dinner tables may not have been lavish, but they mustered from such simple meals the power to transform Japan into a politically and industrially advanced country.
Meiji Japanese did not know nutritional analysis based on modern physiology. They simply trusted the potential of the human body and the nourishment of natural foods and succeeded in making full use of this natural power. Without worrying about dietary supplements, they achieved well-balanced meals by following a traditional diet of brown rice, soybeans, and seasonal vegetables. Modern people should all follow their lead. We face grave concerns for the stability of the world food supply and face deadly diseases caused by the overconsumption of the fats, sugars, and additives in over-processed foods. Eating a natural diet of unpolished grains, soy protein, and local vegetables in season can go a long way to improving our self-sufficiency as well as our physical and mental health.
Japanese Deforestation
Everyone in the world benefits from forests. Even desert-dwelling Bedouins feel most refreshed when they find themselves in the shade of an oasis after a long caravan journey. Japanese people feel a particular affinity for forests, where our forefathers lived long even before rice was introduced to this archipelago. The cleanliness, solemnity, and beauty of Japan's forests; the law of nature in which germination, growth, aging, dying, and rebirth are continually repeated; the ways the space of the forests harbored many animals; and the lives of these animals—these things taught us much about life. The virgin forests of Japan were a sort of mirror reflecting proper human behavior.
Forests richly provide the resources of our daily lives. From houses, furniture, vehicles, farm implements, hand tools, kitchen utensils and tableware to paper and musical instruments, the vast majority of traditional Japanese things were forest products. Japanese farmers not only produced rice and vegetables, but continuously protected and replanted their forests. This traditional attitude toward nature was a virtue of which Japanese can be proud. Seeing how many countries have felled their forests for the pasturage of livestock, the Japanese tradition of conservation offers lessons that not only foreigners but also the Japanese themselves now have to relearn.
Forests do not remain beautiful and healthy merely by being untouched. They need care, as in the pruning of lower branches and the weeding out of diseased trees. For centuries, people gathered firewood from deadfall, harvested nuts and berries, and replanted trees whenever they felled one. These ongoing if invisible labors preserved Japanese forests for centuries. Japanese forests were brutally lumbered during the war, when overseas materials became unavailable; even Japanese airplanes were made of wood. The postwar Japanese government dedicated tremendous funding to reforest its denuded mountains with cryptomeria. Today, forests from Hokkaido to Okinawa are flourishing, and most of Japan's wood is imported, so it need not lumber its own forests. It is thanks to these many conservation efforts that we can enjoy our forests today.
Despite its devastating and indiscriminate logging during and immediately after the war, Japan managed to limit its importation of foreign lumber to 10 percent of its annual consumption until 1960. In Japan's remarkable economic growth of the 1960s, the demand for lumber mushroomed again, and reforestation (which requires roughly thirty years) could no longer keep pace with the speed of logging. Japan's young forests could not provide the volume of broad planking required by its booming construction industry. Following America's example of buying foreign oil rather than depleting its own resources, Japan chose to buy cheap tropical lumber from Southeast Asia rather than razing its own reserves again. Japan began to rely heavily on imports for lumber, plywood, and pulpwood, and began to buy lumber from Canada, the United States, the Soviet Union, and subsequently Southeast Asia. Japanese importation of wood products amounts to 20 percent of the world total, and that of raw lumber amounts to 40 percent.
In 1989 Japan bought the rights to lumber tropical forests in Malaysia. Europeans then staged a boycott of Malaysian trees to protest Malaysia's reckless lumbering practices. After devastating Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia, Japanese logging ventures are now hacking away at the tropical rainforests in the Malaysian state of Sarawak.
According to a 1981 UN survey, tropical forests were disappearing at the rate of 28 million acres annually, and the figure is much larger today. This means that an area half as large as mainland Japan disappears every year. At the present rate of destruction, tropical rainforests will vanish from the earth in the next thirty to fifty years. It is obvious that Japan is the culprit of Asia.
Countries that earlier exported lumber to Japan are now refusing to do so, in order to protect their own forests. Japanese logging companies' destruction of tropical forests in Southeast Asia has become the target of worldwide criticism. While the global trend is to protect greenery, the immorality of the Japanese is questioned. This is indeed ironic in view of Japan's long love and custodianship of its own forests.
Japanese unrecycled waste of building forms, paper, and all manner of disposable wooden and paper products is destroying the tropical rainforests of Asia. The disappearance of greenery due to environmental pollution and human exploitation of forests is concomitant with a new worry about the future of humanity itself. This fact too shows the strength of the relationship between humans and forests.
About eight thousand years ago, when the agricultural revolution led the first humans to establish permanent settlements, 6.1 billion out of the earth's 13 billion hectares of land were covered with dense foliage. Forests today comprise only 2.7 billion hectares. Fifty-five percent of the world's forests have already disappeared. These precious forests are still being destroyed, by indigenous peoples for fuel and pastureland, and by foreign corporations, especially Japanese. We Japanese, who thought we had learned the wisdom of nature, cherished our own beautiful forests, and created a wonderfully harmonious social life by practicing ethics, find ourselves among the killers of the world's forests.
Nature grows at a very slow pace. Ancient people who loved and lived within nature matched their pace of life to nature's. They gratefully used only a limited amount of lumber, which did not damage the life of the entire forest. This amount even contributed to regenerating the forests, and there was complete harmony between forests and humans.
We have no choice but to learn from our ancestors how to protect our forest resources and revive the beautiful greenery of the earth. We must start reforesting the tropics, conserving present forests, prohibiting indiscriminate logging, and finding alternative fuels and incomes for those who live in and around tropical forests.
If we continue to consume paper and lumber at the present rate, the earth will lose its tropical forests in the next generation and almost all its forests in the next century. We must commit ourselves to stop wasting trees and paper. There is already a grass roots movement urging that we carry our own chopsticks and avoid disposable chopsticks when dining out. This is one good way to awaken our consciousness of the deforestation problem.
In our mountains of household wastes, the most conspicuous item is paper. Innumerable junk-mail advertisements, leaflets, and pamphlets are stuffed daily into millions of mailboxes, unsolicited and unread. We can write or call the senders and ask that they discontinue these wasteful mailings. Millions of magazines and comic books are read and discarded every week. We can recycle them rather than throwing them away into landfill. We can use our own cups, chopsticks, and shopping bags instead of consuming new paper every time we go out.
We can find countless examples of the waste of wood and paper in our lives, and for every example we can find a simple alternative. The important thing is to look around us with eyes full of ethical gratitude and to practice ways to avoid unrecyclable waste.
Imported Ores and Energy
It is widely observed that Japan lacks mineral ores and sources of energy. Metals and energy are prerequisites for industrialization, yet Japan has very few of them. Only by dint of its diligent labor and later by high technology was Japan able to industrialize, by adding value to foreign raw materials and reselling