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August 2007. Kimura was in his orchards on the lower slopes of Mount Iwaki. The faint smell of vinegar lingered in the air in the orchards. It seems he’d been spraying vinegar during the morning. Kimura was sitting on his ladder, on the other side of a thick canopy of apple leaves, intent on his work. It was the ladder he’d been perched on when he looked down and saw a chasm open up under him. For some reason I’d imagined a rickety metal ladder, but the one Kimura was sitting on was a wooden one, worn and softened by time. His wife Michiko was at the base of the ladder, engaged in light-hearted chat. I didn’t want to disturb them, but Kimura had told me there was something he wanted to show me.

‘Take a look at this leaf. There’s a round hole in it. What do you think it is?’

He had a leaf in his hand. There was a hole right in the middle of it. It looked as though it may have been eaten by an insect. When I said so, Kimura smiled, leaning d his head to the side.

‘Nope. This hole was formed by the leaf itself. I thought it was done by an insect at first. But there’re no insects which would make this kind of hole. For years it struck me as strange. Then I came across a leaf with a hole like this, and beside it a typical, brownish, alternaria blotch diseased leaf. Interesting, I thought. So I decided to watch and see what would happen to the alternaria blotch. The diseased area became parched and brittle. The leaf cut off the supply of moisture to those parts, those parts only, as though it was trying to starve them. The diseased leaf then fell, and it had holes. Not only that. Since the time these holes started appearing, the small leaves next to it gradually got bigger. The tree was making up for those leaves that were lost. I used scales to measure them, and found that the size of the holes that developed, and the amount the other leaf increased in size, were about the same. When many more holes appear, and the tree cannot make up for them, new leaves come out at the tips of the branches. When I fertilized the orchards in the past, these holes never developed, even when they were affected by disease. There are only just enough nutrients in the orchards, so I think that the trees relied on their innate, natural vitality. The more you learn about nature, the more amazing it is.

Helping nature, and sharing its bounty. That’s the essence of farming. How farming should be. Unfortunately, agriculture today has lost its way. The point is, we cannot simply carry on like we have been. In the old days, I was attracted by industrial farming methods, but areas where industrial farming methods are practised are rapidly turning into deserts. All you’ve got to do is look at what’s happening in the Corn Belt in the America and to the collective farms in the former Soviet Union. However sophisticated science becomes, human beings cannot live separately from nature.

We’re products of nature too. Being able to ‘help’ nature depends on whether we can feel it from the heart. I believe this is where the future of humanity rests. This is no exaggeration. I simply help apple trees. There’s only so much I can do. But as far as our future is concerned, it can only help. I may be overstating it a little bit, but I’ve come to believe that from the bottom of my heart.’

It is no exaggeration whatsoever. Kimura has achieved something more important than taking off in aeroplanes, or landing on the moon. The apple trees were laden with green fruit. The harvest season lay ahead. Gazing on that peaceful scene, I was reminded that this was where it all happened. These orchards were the stage where, when he was a boy, he planted apple trees with his elder brother, where the four orchards first went pesticide-free, where he saw the shining silver man, where he tied the rope after deciding to try and end it all on the mountain, where only seven blossoms grew, and where he saw the apples in full bloom after nine long years.

It was in these orchards that he and the apple trees had continued to face each other. It was where people had joked about him, made a fool of him, yet whilst suffering in poverty, he had persevered along the long and winding road.

It suddenly occurred to me I’d heard a story like this before. In a place far, far away from the sea, a man built a boat. A flood was not imminent. This is certainly what everyone said, and then didn’t they mock him?

But the man continued building the boat, firm in his belief. Every animal on earth then went in, two by two.

Without pesticides or fertilizers, why are those apple trees not devastated by insects and disease? The riddle is, in part at least, now slowly being unravelled. According to research being done by Professor Shūichi Sugiyama at the Faculty of Life Science at Hirosaki University, it seems that many more microorganisms exist in the soil and on the surface of the leaves in Kimura’s orchards than in other orchards. Conditions in the old growth forests of the Shirakami Mountains and Kimura’s apple orchards seem to be similar. Whilst the types and numbers of insects and weeds have not yet been studied, they are more than likely to prove to be the same. The tugs of war being waged amongst life in all its forms are almost certainly helping to prevent abnormal outbreaks of disease or increases in insects.

This can be looked at from another perspective: Kimura has taken aboard creatures that cannot survive in the other orchards in a boat called The Apple Orchard. In preparation for the day that will surely come …

The lands where ancient civilizations once flourished, such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley, are now deserts. This is a result of the forests being cut down and the land laid waste. Modern man may laugh at the short-sightedness of the ancients. The only reason we can have a giggle, however, is simply that we have the technologies to exploit fossil fuels. We get by without giving the matter a second thought, even though the forests have disappeared: but this is possibly only because we can transport timber from distant forests that have not yet been devastated. We turn a blind eye to what is happening since, even if one area becomes a desert, we can plough up land elsewhere. Even though people today say they couldn’t survive without pesticides and fertilizers, there are few people thinking seriously about what this really means. It’s the same as thinking you can’t grow fruit without the use of pesticides and fertilizers.

We cannot go on like this. Whichever comes first, the depletion of fossil fuels, or the destruction of the environment to the point of no return, the collapse of modern agriculture – with its total dependence on pesticides and fertilizers – is foreseeable. It may be one hundred years from now, it may only be thirty. But the flood will come.

‘So, these orchards are an ark?’

This came out rather abruptly, but Kimura seemed to understand immediately.

‘You could put it like that’, murmured Kimura, hands palms up, head inclined to one side, like a holy man. A gleeful laugh followed.

For many years now, Kimura has been travelling around the country, offering guidance about farming. Not only to apple farmers; he is also talking to rice, vegetable, and tea growers, as well as farmers growing olives and mangoes who come to him for advice about moving to farming methods which do not use pesticides or fertilizers. They are looking for ways to farm that are closer to nature. Farmland where Kimura’s advice has been accepted, whether it is rice fields or orchards, is discernibly more vibrant. As his reputation has grown, he has more recently received invitations to lecture and give his advice about farming abroad as well as at home.

Kimura is now devoting his energy to advising those who are getting a stable crop from pesticide and fertilizer-free farming – whether from rice or vegetables – to reduce their prices as far as they can. Even though he could sell for five times the current price, given how delicious they are and their rarity value, Kimura himself is absolutely against this. If people throughout Japan could, if at all possible, simply eat his apples, this would be enough. He believes they must at least be priced so that everyone can afford them. There are customers of course those who, however expensive they are, will buy them.

It takes a lot of work growing crops without pesticides or fertilizers, and yields are smaller than those obtained by farming with them. It’s only natural for producers to want to sell their produce at the highest price possible. If that happens, says Kimura, such produce will always be a luxury. In so far as pesticide-free produce remains a luxury for the affluent, pesticide and fertilizer-free farming will never be more than a speciality.

Even though the current situation is difficult, sooner or later it will become possible to provide produce we’ve grown using our own methods at the sort of reasonable prices that would make them competitive with produce grown using pesticides and fertilizers. This is Kimura’s dream.

Most people would almost certainly choose to buy pesticide and fertilizer-free farm produce if prices were similar. If pesticide-free apples and apples that weren’t were the same price, most people would surely buy the former.

Only when this happens will farmers in general seriously consider growing pesticide and fertilizer-free produce. This is the most important thing, and it is to this end that Kimura is going everywhere he is invited to talk. When asked, he’s prepared to give his time unstintingly to teach anyone, even though these are methods of apple growing arrived at only after immense effort. He hasn’t given a moment’s thought to the notion of trying to monopolize what he’s done. It’s quite likely that within a few years, there will be orchards like Kimura’s around the country that can produce stable apple crops which are pesticide and fertilizer-free. Whilst it is not in the least unreasonable to expect to profit in some way, having worked so hard, Kimura has no interest in doing so at all. His mouth is, as it’s always been, toothless. The paper on the sliding doors in his house has still not been renewed. This is because he knows there are other, more important things.

Civilization has advanced so quickly, and people have lost touch with their roots. However convenient the Internet, and however easy it is call anywhere in the world on our mobile phones, we must eat to live. An ecologist might say that human beings are plant parasites. Agriculture supports human life. It is where our roots are. If those roots die, we cannot survive.

We all understand this, and yet the phony faces people wear today declare that having such withered roots is normal. Kimura doesn’t say too much about this: he believes the day is coming when we will understand and, with no thought for personal gain, he quietly continues to go about what he has to do.

I was in no doubt I’d met a truly remarkable man.

The apple leaves rustled as they were lifted by the wind. For no reason at all, the words I’d heard earlier came back to me. I got goose bumps when I first heard them. Whispered quietly, with a smile, but Kimura meant it.

‘Join me on my boat.’

It was a hot summer’s day, with temperatures in Hirosaki going over thirty degrees, but there was a cool breeze in Kimura’s orchards. I complained about it being hot back in town, whereupon Kimura laughed.

‘Well,’ he suggested, ‘Better write your book here then?’

For that reason, a large part of this book was written in Kimura’s orchards.

Sitting on the grass, laptop open, the apple trees provided blissful shade. The sea of grass was alive with grasshoppers and moths, and from somewhere there was the sound of a frog. The scene was more wild countryside than orchard. I wonder what von Siebold would have made of these orchards?

‘Well, that’s how it happened, bit by bit, more and more people started buying my apples. For some reason the apples at that time were very sweet. Much sweeter than now. Although it wasn’t really their sweetness. When you cut them with a knife, the apple actually stuck to the blade. I wonder why? Perhaps the apple trees were giving me just a little help. Apples like that would always sell well. But to start with the orchards hadn’t settled down and there were years when the apples weren’t that sweet. There were a lot of spoilt and insect damaged ones too. I had letters saying things like “They weren’t sweet, so we sprinkled a little salt on them”. Anyway, at the end of the day, it was thanks to my customers that I made it through those years. They gave me hope, because they’d eat them, even if they weren’t sweet or if they were marked. They supported me. Apple trees produce apples, and they are supported by nature. But I was supported by people.

When you think about it, even though it’s true that I was rejected by some people around me who said I’d let the family down, and that I was mad, at those times there were others who remained friendly. There were friends who quietly helped me out when I couldn’t pay the electricity or water bills, and I didn’t have to pay the scrap merchant either during that time.

Amongst other things, he took away an engine which was in pretty good nick. Occasionally, the manager of the bank I’d got a loan from wouldn’t take the money I’d scraped together to at least pay the interest. He said to me “If you pay over that money you’ll have nothing to live on will you?” The local tax office had issued me with red tags, but the section chief always encouraged me: “Your time will come”. Once the apples started doing their own thing, the owner of the neighbouring orchard cut down all his trees along the boundary with my orchards. That was Makoto, the son of the Ginzō Takeya who’d told me that the apples were blossoming. He said “If even a small quantity of the pesticides I’m spreading end up in his orchards, it’ll invalidate his pesticide-free status”. Ryū Yamazaki, the chef at a local French restaurant, came to my orchards thinking he might use my apples in his cooking, to help boost sales a little. Somehow I managed to survive, thanks to the help I had from various people. In the days when there were no apples, I simply didn’t have the wherewithal to think about that that sort of thing, but bit by bit things started getting better, and I gradually began to see how it could work out.

In the same way as apple trees cannot survive on their own, people don’t live in isolation. I thought I’d work it out by myself, but if there hadn’t been people around supporting me, there’s no way I’d be where I am today. My mother and father in the Kimura household died shortly after the apples revived. My father had laughed, saying “I never thought you make it this far. I reckoned you give it up after two or three years”. Honestly, it was non-stop graft.

When I read the biography of Seishū Hanaoka[1], I remember thinking that he was just the same as me. In the course of experimenting with anaesthetics, both his wife and mother made personal sacrifices. The use of anaesthesia subsequently became widespread throughout Japan, but did that make his wife and mother any happier? I often think it would have been nice if it had.’

Kimura’s orchards continued to change rapidly. He stopped planting the soy beans he’d been growing for five years since the year he climbed Mount Iwaki. The actinobacteria had stopped growing on the roots. In the first year, dense clumps of actinobacteria formed on the roots of the soy beans. As the second and third years passed, the number of nodules decreased. If there’s insufficient nitrogen in the soil, actinobacteria on the roots – in symbiosis with the soy bean – will fix nitrogen. Conversely, as nitrogen in the soil builds up through actinobacteria activity, this is suppressed. The reason no actinobacteria formed in year five was that the soil was saturated with nitrogen. Nature isn’t wasteful. This was evident in the apples which became healthier as the actinobacteria diminished.

It wasn’t just the apple trees. The orchards were healthier in every sense. The varieties of weeds and insects had increased dramatically. If you included the bacteria living on the surfaces of the soil, trunks, and leaves, there must have been thousands of different types of organisms in the orchards. Thousands of organisms, all competing, all depending on each other, the interlaced fabric of an ecosystem.

Once the soy beans had disappeared from the orchards, grasses that thrive on moisture grew strongly. Those grasses predominated for several years, and then different grasses took over.

Just as different grasses grew, patterns in the orchards changed with the season and the year, like a revolving kaleidoscope.

The same sort of thing was happening in the insect world. As in the past, when the leaves came out, leaf rollers and inchworms thrived, but now, insects which fed on the leaf rollers and inchworms were everywhere.

A little while after the trees started blossoming and producing an annual crop, a huge number of wasps appeared in the orchards. Hornets, yellow jacket wasps, paper wasps, potter wasps … Various wasps made their nests on the apple trees and the ground around the base of the trees. At certain times, dozens of wasp nests hung from a single tree, looking just like apples forming. ‘Something like avant-garde art!’, Kimura jokes, but working it out there must have been several thousand wasp nests in the orchards. It seems that at times there were so many wasps that he couldn’t get into the orchards. Knocking the nests down and opening them, he found they were jam packed with leaf rollers and inchworms.

The great proliferation of wasps lasted for three years. During this period pests vanished from the orchards. This sounds straightforward, but nature is never that simple. In the fourth year, although the number of wasps’ nests decreased to the point that there were only the odd few left here and there in the orchards, Kimura had the impression the decline in the number of leaf rollers and inchworms was not that significant. Where the balance in natural ecosystems is maintained, predators will not decimate herbivore populations.

What probably happened was a sort of tug-of-war in the natural world. Just as powerful winds spiral in to the vortex of a typhoon, something happened in the ecosystem in the orchards, and room was created for a huge number of wasps to grow and fill this void.

Just as the pressure differentials vanish and the wind drops when a typhoon tracks northwards, the void was filled by other entities, and the number of wasps decreased.

This kind of tug-of-war was almost certainly going on in less obvious places too, such as in the soil. Each time the tugs-of-war were repeated, life in the orchard grew more abundant. This was because a wide range of organisms would move into a place occupied by a single species. With a wide variety of organisms living there, the orchard ecology became more robust. If hundreds, or even thousands, of tugs-of-war, rather than just one, happen all over the orchards, the overall chances of major imbalances occurring gets correspondingly smaller. The actions of a wide variety of species were transforming the orchard ecosystem into a healthier one, like waves which endlessly pound the shore, shaping the coastline.

However, this was an orchard, not a wilderness. What Kimura observed in nature helped him grow apple trees. In a sense, he had tried to give his apple trees the vigour he’d seen in the oak tree. To achieve that, it had been necessary to balance the apple trees’ and the orchards’ ecosystems. This had been an important job for Kimura.

Take the grass cutting in autumn. Kimura says ‘I cut the grass to tell the apple trees it’s autumn’. He’d left the weeds to grow ever since returning from Mount Iwaki, but Kimura noticed that if the grass went on growing into autumn like that, the apples seemed reluctant to turn red. The weeds acted as an insulator, keeping the ground warm even when the air temperature dropped.

Thinking there was a connection, one autumn he tried cutting the grass around the trees as an experiment, and found that apple colour improved. Since then he has always cut the grass once at the beginning of autumn.

He’d started hanging buckets from the trees ever since the wasp infestation had died down. The buckets contained liquid obtained when he’d fermented apples, diluted with water. Hung from the apple trees overnight, there could be as many as a hundred or more moths floating in the liquid in the buckets in the morning. These moths were, of course, the parents of the inchworms, leaf rollers, and caterpillars. It was something he’d thought of when he’d seen clouds of moths around fermenting apples. Having studied the moths’ behaviour, he decided to use red, yellow, or other warm-coloured buckets, and hang them at about eye-level, as this seemed the most effective way to catch them. Moths normally fly at just that height. Of course it cannot eradicate pests in quite the same way as pesticides. However, he was able to significantly reduce the amount of work involved in manually removing insects and their eggs. Every year he patiently hung out the buckets, and whilst it was very gradual, the numbers of leaf rollers and inchworms were definitely decreasing.

Kimura was also using his own methods for pruning. The pruning of branches is especially important when growing fruit trees. The shape of the tree depends on how you prune it. The shape of a tree has a profound effect on fruit and leaf formation, its orientation to the sunlight, as well as the occurrence of diseases and pests. The struggles apple farmers had with disease and pests in the Meiji Period was not simply because they didn’t have pesticides: it was also because pruning techniques had not been developed.

Kimura looks at the veins on the leaves when he prunes apples. He says this is because the way the roots spread matches the orientation of the veins on the leaves. If you look at the veins on the leaves and cut the branches to match the root growth, you’ll get an ideal tree shape. This is very much a Kimura technique. Mention it to any other fruit farmer and they’d be amazed. Apples are essentially grafted. The roots are those of the rootstock, the leaves those of the grafted apple cultivar. Why align the roots and the layout of leaf veins? Ask Kimura and he’ll say it’s not his job to ask why. He observed the roots, observed the leaves, and came to this conclusion instinctively. The important point is that when he pruned in the way he felt was instinctively right, the apple tree leaves were much more abundant, and the fruit larger.

‘It’s because I’m a farmer’, says Kimura. As a neighbour had pointedly said, Kimura’s no academic. If he was an academic, then he could well have spent his entire life researching just one species of insect on his apple trees.

‘But there’s no way a farmer could do that. The word hyakushō itself means one hundred jobs. You’d be unfit to be a farmer if you couldn’t cope with a hundred jobs.’

This is not Kimura being sarcastic. Research into a single insect has contributed to the discovery of the century. By and large, however, research into a single insect species ends with research into a single insect. Such research is not a waste of time though. Just as pyramids are constructed from countless stones, the accumulation of minor discoveries no-one hears about supports the giant construct we know as civilization. Kimura is fully aware of this.

But if you took this approach, the fact remains you would be “Unfit to be a farmer”. How does the amount of water taken from the soil by an apple tree vary through the year? What nutrients do grasses growing around the trees take from the soil, and at what time of year? What sort of bacteria are there in the soil, and how do they act? How effective are mating disruption agents at halting the reproduction of moths that gather in the orchards? How is the weather this winter, and the weather next summer, related …?

If I had written them all down, the stories Kimura told me would easily fill more than a couple of books. To be honest, I consulted a number of specialists to help me with my interviews with Kimura. These included agricultural specialists and ecologists. However up-to-date the knowledge gained through such discussions, it was never a match for Kimura. When it came to apple growing there seemed to be nothing he didn’t know. Amazingly, nearly everything he knew he had learned through working in his orchards.

Kimura’s orchards were slowly becoming known to researchers. Apple orchards where pesticides are not used are a goldmine for certain types of researcher. For those studying them, for example, the orchards were a perfect spot to observe hordes of insects. Likewise for researchers studying apple diseases; Kimura’s pesticide-free orchards were an outstanding site for testing the effectiveness of man-made pheromones. These researchers and specialists helped me, but Kimura had tried and tested everything using his own eyes and hands. You might say that his orchards were his field of research, and that the research conducted by academics was overshadowed by it.

To further emphasize the differences between academics and farmers, Kimura – neither ironically, nor out of modesty – says he thinks it’s a difference of methodology.

He wants to point out that academics in the natural sciences try to understand nature by breaking it down into little pieces, whereas what he does is precisely the opposite. Nature cannot be fragmented. This was the important truth he’d realized at the foot of the oak tree. No life exists in isolation. However finely they analyze nature, people will never create a single apple. Rather than chopping it all into separate bits, we need to understand it as a linked whole. Not nature divided into its individual parts by natural scientists, but living nature as a whole faced by farmers, with an infinite number of life forms existing in an intricate web. It must make sense across all one hundred jobs.

This is not easy to express in words. We habitually analyze things when trying to understand them. Thus Kimura will do analyses using dyes to measure resistance to water flow through pathways in the trunks of trees. But he links the knowledge he gains from doing things like this to his instincts in helping apple trees. Whether or not this is right is ultimately determined not by an article published in a scholarly magazine, but by what happens in the apple orchards, and how good the fruit produced on the apple trees is.

Apples are his academic thesis, his finest achievement. Perhaps what he’s saying about being a farmer, not an academic, is more a philosophy. Being a real farmer, I think he is trying to reach beyond the limits of natural science.

In the typhoon which hit Aomori Prefecture directly in the autumn of 1991, apple farmers suffered catastrophic damage. Not only were more than half the apples knocked off the trees; trees themselves were blown over by the winds. The storm damage in Aomori Prefecture alone amounted to more than seventy four billion yen. The damage to Kimura’s orchards, however, was very limited. Even though the winds were strong enough to blow trees from other orchards across into his, more than eighty per cent of the fruit stayed on his trees. The trees stood firm. Not only were the roots denser and spread much more widely than those of normal apple trees, the stems holding the fruit to the branches were thicker than on other trees.

Whilst the orchards’ appearance changed each year, the ideal conditions were developing for apple growing. Then for some reason, after about 2000, the leaf rollers – which had previously proliferated – simply vanished entirely. This is why the buckets with fermenting apples haven’t been hung out for the last few years. Neither is there any need, naturally, for them to go around with shopping bags over their wrists collecting the insects. Alternaria blotch and scab remain, but they only blight a small quantity of fruit and far fewer leaves. Even when disease occurs, it doesn’t spread through the orchards.

How can this be when pesticides are not used? Kimura thinks that the biggest reason could be that excess nutrients do not exist in the orchards. Kimura has discovered one thing persevering with his apple growing.

Excessive fertilizer applied to apple trees, whether it’s chemical or organic, is one reason why pests congregate in numbers. Using pesticides is certainly an easy way to grow bigger apples. But, from the apple tree’s point of view, since nutrients can be easily obtained, they don’t have to spread their roots so deeply into the ground. They may not move much, but they can be overfed, just like some children.

Everyone knows that problems with the immune system are increasing among children today, but something similar is happening with apple trees which are given too much fertilizer. As a result, Kimura says, they lose their natural resistance and, without pesticides, they cannot overcome pests and diseases.

The length of the roots of the trees in other orchards is barely a few meters. It you study the apple trees in Kimura’s orchards, though, where the weeds flourish and fertilizers are not used, the roots extend to twenty meters or more. There is that much of a difference above ground in the branches and leaves, but if you look at the roots underground, they look like different creatures altogether. There is, without any doubt, a link between this and the fact that the spread of diseases and pests has stopped.

This wouldn’t necessarily happen if all you did was stop applying fertilizer. If that’s all that was needed, Kimura wouldn’t have had so much of a struggle. One thing we can say is that these aren’t simply direct causal relationships. There was no single reason for the pests disappearing or diseases not spreading.

He doesn’t spread manure or chemical fertilizers. He doesn’t allow any agricultural machinery that could damage the apple roots into the orchards. The weeds proliferate in the orchards, and the soil returns to its natural state. If there is insufficient nitrogen in the soil, he plants soy beans.

He cuts the grass once only, in autumn. He looks for signs of disease and sprays regularly with vinegar. If the insects start increasing, he hangs buckets on the apple trees with fermenting apple juice in them. He prunes the trees, observing which way the veins in the leaves are oriented … If you look for answer, Kimura points out that all that he has done to date is the answer. As a result, the apple trees have become stronger than you can imagine. And without the help of pesticides and fertilizers, the trees now produce fruit.

It would be fair to say that instead of pesticides and fertilizers, Kimura uses his own eyes and hands, and harnesses the providence of nature in the ecosystem, to grow apples. Kimura’s orchards, in other words, are a collaboration between nature, the apple trees, and the man Kimura himself. Kimura has created those orchards over a period of thirty years. Ask Kimura, though, and he would simply say that he gave the apples a helping hand.

The trees eventually produced sensationally sweet apples. They look pretty ordinary, are not that big, can be a bit lopsided, and sometimes have blemishes. Their appearance at least is not like the top grade fruit displayed in the basement food halls of departments stores. Biting into one of these non-descript apples for the first time, though, I was so overwhelmed I felt I might cry.

I have to confess to being biased of course. True, stuffing an apple into his mouth, Kimura was recalling the endless suffering he’d been through over those thirty years. But this wasn’t the reason for the tears. The apple was so incredibly delicious. This was the first time I’d been aware of how something can be so delicious it can actually make you cry! It’s no exaggeration when I say that the moment I took a mouthful, every cell in my body buzzed.

They were screaming ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’

It wasn’t a question of sweetness, sharpness, or aroma. The apple, of course, had all these, but it was overflowing with something else too. Putting that something into words is difficult. If I had to, I would say it was ‘life’. Or possibly that the apple was jam-packed with something you could describe as the ‘life energy’.

Can you imagine the expression on the face of a baby, taken from its mother, and then returned for the first time to her embrace? The baby would almost certainly be ecstatic. It would bury its face in its mother breast in bliss. This is was the image that came to mind as I munched on my apple.

The next second all I had left in my hand was the seeds. The apple was good down to the very core.

Finally, a footnote. Why are Kimura’s apples so delicious? There may be a rational explanation. What makes a good wine is something known as terroir. This may be translated as the ‘fragrance of the earth’. The nature of the geology of the area in which the grapes were grown has a profound effect on the taste and bouquet of a wine. The characteristics of a wine from a certain parcel of land is known as terroir. When it comes to terroir, rather than fertile vineyards, it is grapes grown on impoverished land that produce some of the finest wines. Finding insufficient nutrients, the roots of vines will be sent deep down into the soil. As a result, grapes will extract the minutest quantities of important elements in the soil, developing more complex and deeper aromas and tastes.

One can well imagine the same thing happening with Kimura’s apples, their long, thick roots going out into the soil, trees untouched by the typhoon. That Kimura’s apples should have more complex aromas and are sweeter than apples grown using man-made nutrients we know as fertilizers, may not be so mysterious, once you think about it. Just as the flavour of natural fish and farmed fish are different.

There is just one mystery. It happened when Kimura went around begging the dying apple trees one by one not to die. He didn’t in fact appeal to all the apple trees. The trees on the boundary with the next orchard and those lining the road were missed out. As you can imagine, Kimura didn’t want his neighbours to see him talking to trees. In the end there were quite a few apple trees which died, in spite of his pleas. They died in various parts of the orchards, but thinking about the trees Kimura realized something very strange. Some trees died whilst others didn’t, and there was no particular pattern about where they died. The stronger apples survived, the weaker ones died. But, there was one exception. Like fallen dominoes, every single tree he didn’t talk to died. Kimura feels deep regret over them to this day. Of the apple trees which Kimura did not appeal to, not one tree survived.

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[1] Seishū Hanaoka (1760-1835) was a physician. He was the first to perform surgery using general anaesthesia in Japan. He researched the use of various herbs as anaesthetics, although in the process his wife – who volunteered as a participant in his experiments – lost her sight due to adverse side effects.

In the autumn of that year, Kimura harvested a great mountain of apples the size of ping pong balls. Thinning out the blossom to produce a smaller number of fruit is essential for growing larger apples. The blossom thinning, though, had been half-hearted. Five individual flowers form each blossom cluster. Four of these must be pinched out, leaving one flower. He’d got that far, but that is not enough by itself. There’s also the job of assessing the strength of the tree, and deciding how much fruit it should bear, and then pinching out more blossoms. He hadn’t done this. For nine years at least.

In his desperation he’d seen apple blossom in his dreams, so now his hands shook when pinching them out – it seemed so wasteful. Unless you pinch the blossoms out, however, you won’t get bigger fruit. He couldn’t bring himself to do something he knew was obvious. The reason he didn’t do the thinning completely was not only to do with the issue of how he felt, there was also an excuse, one particular to Kimura, who’d put up with diseases and insects for so many years.

It was not simply a matter of being pleased at the blossoming and fruit being produced. Once the vinegar started working, the outbreak of disease could be contained to a significant extent.

The diseases were not fully controlled, and the numbers of pests remained the same, too. Overall, in fact, the number of pests increased along with the healthier leaves. Leaf rollers, for example, ate the inner flower parts of the blossoms as well as the leaves. He continued removing them by hand, but this didn’t entirely prevent the damage from feeding. Some of the blossom was eaten by the leaf rollers. A certain amount of the fruit itself would be affected by insects and disease. Even if you use pesticides, not all the remaining blossoms will come to fruition. You’ll always get a certain yield, and this was why the yield in Kimura’s orchards, where pesticides were not used, was rather low. In fact he had no clue as to what sort of yield to expect. This was the first time he’d seen blossom in full bloom in orchards that were pesticide and fertilizer free. He thought he’d try keeping pinching out to a minimum and see how much fruit he’d still have come the autumn.

But the disease and pest damage didn’t turn out to be as bad as he’d thought. When the blossom came out, the entire Kimura family worked hard at removing insects, but it was the strength of the apple trees which more than anything conquered diseases and pests. The yield turned out to be far greater than Kimura imagined, and there was a lot of fruit on the trees in the autumn. But not enough nutrients were getting through to the fruit, so the apples were only growing to the size of ping pong balls.

Of course, there are only a few people who will buy such small apples from you. His were eventually taken by an apple dealer for processing. Although they were small, their sugar content was high so they could be used for juice. If you packed the boxes used for the crop to the top, you would normally get, at most, seventy normal apples in, but they packed in about two hundred and sixty of the apples Kimura produced that year. The apples were small enough to have fallen through the holes in the mesh on the sides of the plastic cases belonging to the dealer. Twenty kilos of apples went into one box, and for this he was paid one hundred and sixty yen. A pittance you’d normally get for throw-out apples. The entire apple harvest hardly made ten thousand yen.

‘Having not had a crop for ages, just producing one was a cause for celebration. Thinking calmly about it, though, that by itself didn’t mean anything. The proof of the pudding is in the eating: we had to make a living selling the apples we grew. The following year I thinned out the blossom properly, and the apples were slightly larger, but nothing to compared to apples grown using pesticides. The orchards were still not settled. People were surprised. “You call this an apple?” I took them to various markets, but no-one was interested.

So I began to wonder about ways I could sell them. We could only really say that the apples were grown without pesticides once we could make a living from them. If we couldn’t make a living from them, no-one else would think of following us. I wasn’t going to settle for being content with feeling self-satisfied at growing them. To be honest, I’d thought so for a long time before the apples started looking after themselves. I reckoned customers buying apples direct from us would be the best thing.

Supermarkets only stock perfectly formed, beautiful apples. But I believed there must be customers who want to eat irregularly-sized, plain looking, pesticide-free apples. I wondered how I could get my apples to these customers. I didn’t know a way. So when the apples started looking after themselves, it must have been in the second or third year, I went to Osaka. Why Osaka? Well, they say Osaka’s the place for food. I reckoned if there’s someone who appreciates real food, they’re going to be from Osaka. Don’t laugh. I was serious. Anyhow, I went to Osaka, thinking I’d try selling apples on the roadside if I had to. I’d no particular plan. Ha ha ha. There’s desperation for you!’

The train from Hirosaki bound for Osaka arrived early in the morning. He’d already sent the apples on ahead. He had no acquaintances in Osaka, so he’d sent the apples directly to Osaka station addressed to Akinori Kimura. It may sound rather unfair, but this sort of common sense doesn’t apply in his case. When he went to the station office and asked where his apples were, the station attendant looked incredulous and lost his temper.

‘You sent those apples?’

Following the man, he found the apple boxes he’d sent piled high in a corner of the station now heaving with rush hour commuters.

‘This sort of thing gives us a real headache.’

The attendant was fuming.

‘I grow apples in Aomori. These were grown without pesticides, fertilizers … ‘

Paying little heed to what Kimura was saying, he accepted an apple Kimura apprehensively proffered. It was tiny for an apple. But it might have been its size which had caught his attention. He took a bite, peel-on. It seems he hadn’t missed the words ‘without pesticides’. His expression changed in an instant. The previously irate station attendant was all smiles.

‘Mm. What’re going to do with the apples?’

‘Well, if possible … ’

Encouraged by the man’s smile, Kimura launched into asking about whether he could sell them somewhere in the station. It was out of the question. What had he been thinking, sending goods like that to Osaka station in the hope he could sell them there? If they did agree to this sort of thing, the attendant went on, Osaka station would be packed with vendors.

Kimura was crestfallen. Having come all this way, he realized he had no other contacts. He’d been there in the 90’s. The city of Osaka had been through the bubble years, and changed greatly on the way. Rows of futuristic buildings now loomed over passers-by who flaunted the most desirable brands and were dressed in the latest fashions. He felt like a solitary figure from the 1950s, someone who’d just emerged from a time warp. Where, in this crowded, unwelcoming city, he could set out his apple stall?

Within seconds, a little circle of curious Osakans had formed. A dejected man in front of a pile of apple boxes, and a troubled looking station attendant nibbling on a small apple he held in one hand. It was human nature to want to know what was going on.

‘Why not try Osaka Castle?’ suggested one of the curious onlookers helpfully.

‘I’m not too sure, but I think there are loads of stalls selling food in Osaka Castle Park. They’d probably let you sell your apples wouldn’t they?’

‘That’s a good idea. I heard they had food events and the like.’

A number of folk voiced their agreement in unison. The station attendant looked relieved, burden lifted from his shoulders. He brought a trolley over from somewhere, saying he’d lend it to him and that he should definitely follow this advice.

This was just what he needed. Of course Kimura didn’t hesitate for second. He loaded the boxes on the trolley and set off in high spirits for Osaka Castle Park. It would have taken over an hour, but he seemed to be there in no time. Finding the event manager, he was told that all the pitches inside the venue were taken, but that there was space just outside the entrance. A number of farmers had already arranged and were selling fruit and vegetables, freshly picked that morning, under the awnings there. The spot offered to Kimura was next to a farmer from Nara who grew persimmons. There was no comparison at all between Kimura’s pathetic apples and his gorgeous persimmons.

He’d tried to pick out those with good colour and shape, but once arranged the blemished apples stood out. On top of which they were just so small.

There were quite a few people at the event, but none bothered to pay any attention to Kimura’s apples. One or two people stopped for a moment, but immediately lost interest once they say how tiny the apples were.

‘They really apples?’

‘They’re apples grown without pesticides or fertilizers. They are small … ’

His sales gambit was coolly received. People seemed to lose interest once he’d confirmed that they were indeed apples, and quickly moved on. Probably thinking what rubbish they were. Glances were exchanged with the persimmon farmer next door. He was looking sorry for Kimura. Without thinking he offered him an apple.

‘It’s small … but they taste good.’

They decided to swap fruit, Kimura receiving a persimmon. It tasted delicious.

He touted them as pesticide-free and fertilizer-free until evening came and he was hoarse, but the apples just didn’t sell. One or two people did buy some though. Pleased that they’d bought them, he filled the paper bags he’d prepared to the top with apples. Nevertheless, all ten boxes he’d struggled from Osaka station with remained virtually untouched. Even if he wanted to send them back to Aomori, he didn’t’ have the money. The persimmon farmer came to his rescue. He’d come by car, and when asked by Kimura if he’d like the lot, had gladly accepted.

The return journey to Hirosaki seemed to take forever. The feeling of elation he’d felt coming to Osaka had all but evaporated. If only he could have recovered the cost of sending them he’d have been happy, so he dropped the price right down. Sixty yen each. Even then no-one bought them.

Just sending them to the apple dealer wouldn’t be nearly enough. Unless he could sell the apples, he wouldn’t be able to maintain the orchards. Bowing his head before the apple trees would be no help this time. For one thing, he was now going to have to deal with people. But Kimura was useless when it came to dealing with people. Kimura had started growing apples when he was in his twenties. He was now over forty. When the apples had blossomed, he’d been on top of the world. He’d been quietly elated to have achieved something that no-one else had done. But it would all amount to nothing if his apples were ignored. He wondered if it had all been a waste of time.

Kimura headed once more for the orchards, this time with a heavy heart. The apple trees were dressing down for winter. The leaves, job done, were turning red. Any day now they would start falling. It was a sight you wouldn’t have seen in any other orchard.

For some reason, in orchards where pesticides and fertilizers are used, the leaves hardly change in the autumn. Insipid leaves remain on the trees, even as winter gets underway. There was no doubt that his orchards looked the more natural. Why was it that people weren’t interested in natural apples grown in natural orchards? A red leaf drifted down and landed on a patch of grass.

‘You’re not wrong.’

Sensing this, his mood brightened a little. That was it. He wasn’t doing anything wrong. The question was not whether he was accepted by others. That was for them to decide. He should continue along this path. What followed was not the most important consideration.

It was several weeks later that the letter arrived. It was from one of the customers he’d given a paper bag stuffed full of apples to. The letter contained the message, “I’ve never tasted such delicious apples. Please send more.”

The first person to set eyes on the spectacle was the owner of the neighbouring orchard, Takeya Ginzō. It was nothing to do with him, but the sight made him gasp. How had Kimura done it? He went to congratulate him, but there was no-one to be seen in the orchards. He searched everywhere but he wasn’t to be found. He wondered what on earth Kimura could be up to at this time of day. He’d recently been annoyed with the insects and the weeds all the time, so would just be annoyed as always no doubt. Then he suddenly had a thought.

Of course, he didn’t know about it yet! He’d have to tell him. He hunted around and eventually found Kimura working in fields he was renting from someone.

‘Kimura. Have you been to the orchards?’

‘Which ones?’

‘Your apple orchards.’

As usual, he inclined his head to one side.

‘There’re blossoms out!’

He couldn’t believe it. He just stood there, a dumbstruck expression on his face.

‘An apple tree in your orchards over on Iwaki has blossom on it. Go and see.’

Kimura’s sluggish reaction gave the impression he wasn’t that excited. He did eventually get on his moped, the old wreck he’d bought from a scrap merchant, parked on a track on the embankment. The engine sprang to life after a number of kicks, and the tat-tat-tat-tat sound of the 50cc engine gradually faded in the distance. With a wry smile, Takeya heard the engine note change. Kimura seemed to have opened the throttle up to full. He could see him hunched over, racing full pelt up the road towards the mountain.

The moped, husband now gripping the handles, wife on the luggage rack, was hurtling up the farm track. Definitely a motoring offence, but neither scared for the law at that moment.

They were still not visible, but both of them were staring towards their orchards.

As usual, her husband stopped the moped some way short of the orchards. If they continued up the track they would reach their orchards, but instead they approached apprehensively on foot, alongside the orchard before theirs, as if they were about to see something terrifying. They looked just like students come to see their exam results. They reached the neighbours farm machinery shed and peeked over from its shade. They saw white blossom. The orchard was an expanse of white blossom. The apple trees, which hadn’t flowered for years, were blossoming en-masse. Anything moving us deeply can render us speechless and leave us with blank expressions. At that moment, rooted to the spot, neither of them spoke a word or moved a muscle.

It was spring, but the breeze on the lower slopes of Mount Iwaki was still chilly. Who knows if it was the wind, but both husband and wife were overjoyed, their eyes brimming with tears. It was nine years since they’d enjoyed the blossoms together like this.

‘I couldn’t look directly at them for some reason. We felt more like we were stealing a look at them from the shadow of the neighbouring shed. Mind you, I was pretty confident inside. The previous year we’d seen seven blossoms. I’d also seen the state of the buds in early spring and reckoned that this might be the year they’d blossom properly. So I was hopeful, but on the other hand I wondered, in my heart-of-hearts, whether the apple trees would forgive me.

I hadn’t seen blossom for years, so I’d become used to not seeing any. Even when I saw the blossom, I felt I was looking at a neighbour’s orchard. There was blossom on every tree. Honestly, I was just so, so happy at that moment. It’s twenty years ago, but I still cry when I remember that time.

When we got back home and told my father and mother the story, we found they’d already been to see the orchards in the morning and knew about the blossom. Ha ha. The only people who didn’t’ know about it were me and Michiko. In the afternoon I went over again, this time by myself. I don’t know how many times I went that day. Come the evening, I went over to celebrate with saké, scattering some on every tree. I went round pouring a little over the roots of each tree. I thanked each one for blossoming. I drank some too. Ha ha ha. I must have drunk more than I scattered! I’ve never enjoyed the blossom so much, either before or since that day. I drank saké, then the fell asleep under the trees, gazing up at the apple blossom. The apple blossom seemed so incredibly beautiful. It looks like cherry blossom, but apple blossom faces upwards. Cherries blossom face downwards, looking at the people who’ve come to see them. Apples don’t heed people, the blossom faces upwards. Which is nobler in a way.’

Kimura smiled wistfully as he related the story. I’ve heard the same story about the day the apples blossomed after nine years many times. Even though it happened about twenty years ago now, Kimura always talks happily about it as though it was yesterday.

It was definitely a climax in his life. It was also a turning point. Kimura’s relationship with apples changed from that day. It was an experience similar to enlightenment, and of all the significant moments in his life, it was by far the most important event, in a very real sense.

‘The things we can actually do as humans are pretty limited really. Everyone talks about how hard I worked, but it wasn’t me who struggled, it was the apple trees. That’s not me being modest. I honestly think so. However hard an individual tries, they won’t produce a single apple blossom. Whether it’s on the tips of their fingers, or the tips of their toes, they just can’t do it. This might seem like common sense. Yet those who think they can don’t understand the real significance of this. When I see an orchard submerged in flowers in full bloom, I really appreciate this. It’s not me who made these trees blossom. It’s the apple trees. Deep down inside I realized that the heroes here are not the people, they’re the apple trees. I thought it was me growing apples. That I’m managing apple trees. All I can do, though, is help the apple trees. I realized this eventually after many failed attempts. And it took an awfully long time for me to realize that.’

There are hints of spring, even in the depths of winter.

Change in nature happens little by little, and in places we cannot see. Like the tide coming in and lapping against things all around you. Something was clearly changing now. People may sense these things subconsciously. Changes he was not aware of were changing Kimura. They also had an effect on the relationship between Kimura and the people around him.

Kimura told me the following story. The owner of a neighbouring orchard, no longer able to tolerate them, came over to complain about Kimura’s which now looked more like a jungle.

‘At least cut the weeds.’

He was clearly exasperated. What he said was short and to the point, but Kimura knew only too well the huge significance of his neighbour’s message. He was not about to put up with any further nonsense about being pesticide-free. The man was mad, but he hadn’t said anything because, at least up until then, he’d always told himself that at least the orchards had been tended. Kimura had then given up cutting the grass. The weeds grew out of control; the soybeans he sowed everywhere grew waist high; you had to wade waist deep through the orchards. There were all sorts of insects humming around the wilds of the orchards. You could hardly call them orchards any more. Getting crazy dreams into your head, failing to grow apples for years, getting poorer; these were all Kimura’s problems. He urged him not to cause any more trouble for other farmers in the area. What was he going to do when the insects flew their way? There’s no way they were going to put up with any more.

A year ago he would probably have argued with his neighbour. Now, however, he listened to him in silence. Then, quietly, he said this.

‘Could you come over again tomorrow evening?’

The following evening, the man stood with Kimura on the boundary between their orchards. Moths fluttered around. Moths produce the insects that devour apple leaves. The man had an expression of incredulity. He couldn’t see any insects at all emerging from Kimura’s orchards. The moths were flying in ones and twos, as if escaping from something, from the neighbouring orchards into Kimura’s. Far from being the source of the pests, Kimura’s orchards seemed to be where they congregated. This was clear, once they transformed into insects. The orchards where pesticides had not been sprayed felt decidedly more comfortable. If you were an insect you’d understand. It seems the fact that there were so many moths in his orchards, where pesticides were used, came as a shock to the owner of the neighbouring orchards. He couldn’t eradicate the insects. That’s why he had to spray pesticides every year, but he was shocked to see the reality. Not only did he never come and complain again, he also told all the local farmers the story.

This was not because Kimura was an eccentric; it was because his neighbour had noticed that he was on to something. Looking around the orchards he noticed deep holes had been dug here and there. Kimura said he was measuring temperatures under the ground. He started by saying that the temperatures of the soil on the mountain and the soil in the orchards were different, and then went on to explain why he allowed the weeds to grow. He explained it all with great passion.

‘Not that you’re an academic.’

The sarcasm was unintentional; inside they seemed to be genuinely interested. They’d hitherto given no thought to how well the apple roots were growing in the soil. At least they were forced to concede that he’d not just let the weeds grow rampant for no reason at all. It may have been their imagination, but compared to what they used to look like the apple leaves did indeed seem healthier. The apples aside, the vegetables Kimura was growing in the orchards looked amazing. The stems of some tomato plants grew to nearly three meters, and were laden with fruit. They’d never seen tomatoes growing taller than apple trees. Kimura may have been considered eccentric in some respects, but he could justly be regarded as a gifted farmer. Of course they didn’t acknowledge Kimura without some reservation. For one thing, the orchards were still full of insects. But if the insects didn’t damage their orchards, they’d be prepared to follow Kimura’s efforts more closely. The attitudes of the people around Kimura slowly started to change.

There’s something I should explain to the reader here. The story of what happened that evening is based entirely on what Kimura told me during an interview. I didn’t talk to the neighbouring farmer who had come over to ask if Kimura would ‘At least cut the weeds’. Kimura didn’t want who it was made public.

I’d probably have found out if I’d gone round all the orchards that surround Kimura’s orchards, but that was something I really didn’t want to do. This all happened more than twenty years ago, and many of the farmers who were in the prime of their lives then will already have made way for the next generation. More significantly, it was his problem, and the last thing he wanted to do was cause the neighbouring farmers any more grief.

So what is written here is what Kimura recalls and is purely subjective. Of course Kimura himself didn’t stand on the boundary of his orchards all day, observing where the moths came from and where they went. Neither does he claim that not a single moth from the masses that were produced in his orchards flew to someone else’s orchards. Hence we cannot be absolutely certain about whether the man who complained to Kimura was entirely convinced by what Kimura said. Even today, not all the apple farmers in the Tsugaru region accept Kimura. The majority may still be critical of him.

Aspiring to grow apples without using pesticides is probably viewed as an act tantamount to denying apple growing. If you put yourself in their position, you can understand the feelings of the farmers who feel their use of chemicals is being condemned when you can grow apples without them.

Kimura himself didn’t feel that way at all. All he was interested in was growing his own apples without using pesticides. This is why he was afraid, more than anything, of interfering with the surrounding orchards. It was the main reason he went around, all day long from morning to night, removing the pests by hand.

One young man, someone who watched Kimura closely, understood what he was up to. His name was Makoto Takeya. His father, Ginzō Takeya, had orchards adjacent to Kimura’s on the lower slopes of Mount Iwaki. At about the time he started helping out in his father’s orchards, Makoto – who was a graduate of the local agricultural high school – says that the apples in Kimura’s orchards were still blossoming out of season every year, so he must have been watching him from the start. He would also have known, of course, about the diseases and proliferating pests, and the intolerable conditions which prevailed.

Being younger, he doesn’t remember having talked to him, but Makoto Takeya relates how he can imagine what the grown-ups at the time thought of Kimura.

‘Agrichemical spraying methods are better these days, so that even if diseases and pests increase in a neighbouring orchard, there’s no need to get too nervous about it. If you spread the right pesticide at the right time your trees shouldn’t be hit by pests or disease. But twenty years ago, at that time, technology wasn’t so advanced. After all, it’d only been forty years since new the new pesticides had been introduced after the war.

Even if you sprayed pesticides, pest damage quite often happened anyway. It could’ve been that our methods weren’t up to scratch, but it’s a bit strange that some people suspected it was because of Kimura’s orchards. One thing I can say, as someone who watched him constantly from next door, was that at least far we were concerned I’ve no memory of hordes of pests flying over from Kimura’s orchards. The really amazing thing was orchards in such a bad state gradually getting better. Watching him, we knew better than anyone that Kimura wasn’t using pesticides. It may be embarrassing to say so, but Kimura began to be seen in a new light when the opinions of the surrounding farmers, including my father, slowly started changing. They saw the conditions in his orchards and realized what an amazing thing he was doing. They were actually looking at them rather than relying on hearsay. I believe all apple farmers would feel the same if they took the trouble to look at Kimura’s orchards.’

Just as the views of Kimura amongst the locals farmers were slowly changing, changes were happening in the way Kimura viewed pests. Something he’d not seen during the time he’d regarded them as a despised enemy which devoured his leaves gradually dawned on him.

‘I suddenly wondered, in the middle of catching the pests, what sort of faces they had. So I started studying the faces of the insects I’d caught with a magnifying glass.

You know, their faces are so adorable. They stared at me with those big, round eyes. Looking at their faces, you can’t hate them. Being a softy, I couldn’t bring myself to kill them, so put them back on the leaves. Even though they were my sworn enemy. Because although I thought of them as pests, when I looked at them closely they looked really cute. It occurred to me that nature could be interesting, so the next thing I did was to try looking at faces of useful insects. They help us out by eating pests. But they had frightening faces. The lacewing has a face just like a monster from the movies. For their own convenience, people label them ‘harmful’ insects or ‘beneficial’ insects, but caterpillars which eat leaves are herbivores, and so have peaceful faces. The useful insects which eat them are carnivores, and so it’s only natural that they have savage faces.

I knew nothing about insects, even though I’d been catching them every day. Various insects lay their eggs on apple trees, but thinking about it, I’d no idea which insects hatched from which eggs, nor did I know what adults an insect would grow into. That’s why I gradually started observing insects. How they went about eating leaves; I watched them all day long. When I discovered their eggs, I used to get rid of them all, but then I began to leave a few and make a daily record. I adopted various insects, and tried raising them indoors. It didn’t always work. If I accidentally forgot to watch them for a few days they’d all turn into moths and I’d find dozens of them flying around the room. Ha ha ha. I hadn’t really been observing them properly. And males and the females of the same species of moth flew differently. Another thing I didn’t know.

The insect world is an amazing one. The pests’ eggs laid on the trunks of Kimura’s trees, for example, are the colour of the trunk. It’s camouflage. They form a clump about five millimetres in diameter, and a clump will be made up of about fifty eggs. About ten centimetres away from that clump of eggs, there may be two other eggs. These might be ladybird eggs. They’re beneficial insects, and they’re waiting for the pests to hatch. But it’s not just that the pests are eaten. The fifty or so eggs don’t all hatch at once. Half of them hatch and head for the apple leaves to feed. When they reach about one centimetre, the other half hatch. The ladybirds hatch at precisely this moment. As they are small when they hatch, they feed on the second lot of pests’ eggs that have just hatched. The lot that hatched first continue devouring the leaves and growing quickly. In other words, the half that hatched later are destined to be eaten by the ladybirds. They are sacrificed so that the eggs that hatch first will thrive. Seeing that amazed me. I began to wonder about the sort of world insects inhabit. It was a mysterious feeling wondering who created all this. I realized how finely tuned nature is. It may be an exaggeration, but it felt like the existence of the world itself may be down to insects.’

It dawned on Kimura that in nature there is no such thing as harmful or beneficial insects. There are insects that we deem ‘harmful’, and this gives rise to others being regarded as ‘beneficial’. A natural balance is maintained as some will eat, whilst others will be eaten. There is nothing either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ about it.

From the time he noticed how fertile the earth in the forest was, and allowing the weeds to grow, the apple trees slowly started reviving. The apple tree roots were spreading healthily in the orchards, and there was a remarkable decrease in the number of wobbly trees. This was due neither to the disappearance of insects, nor to the decline of fungi and bacteria which caused disease. Talking about what is and isn’t natural, it is unnatural for apple trees – which originated in the Caucasus Mountains – to be in Japan in the first place. The oak trees being where they were was because nature intended it that way. It was the result of the relationship between the amount of rain that fell that year, the humidity, the temperature, and other plants in the area. Those conditions suited the acorns which fell to the ground, and they were able to grow there. Nature selected the oak tree, and the reason it was there was because it was natural. If the conditions change, then the oak trees would quietly wither and die.

Apple trees are different. Man planted apple trees and, at the end of the day, it is man who needs apple trees. Left to the providence of nature, they would probably die. It is for our benefit that we use various means to keep apple trees alive. It’s agriculture. Whether or not we use pesticides makes no difference. So another problem which Kimura had been grappling with was the extent to which he could reconcile nature with what was convenient for man. The irreconcilable took the form of insects and disease.

Pesticides allow this problem to be resolved effortlessly. If insects appear, kill them. If disease spreads, disinfect. This results in the natural balance being damaged at a very profound level. This much is patently clear if you compare the mountain soil and soil in the orchards. To put it bluntly, agriculture today survives as an epitaph to the natural balance. Kimura failed in his search to find something that could replace pesticides. It was good that he failed. If he’d found a food that was as effective against insects and disease as pesticides, this would end up being used, however harmful it was to humans, in the same way as agrichemicals. It would mean he wouldn’t have mistaken the oak tree for an apple tree, and he certainly wouldn’t have realized the vital importance of the soil.

The lesson he learned on Mount Iwaki was the surprising complexity of nature. It had been a fundamental mistake to simply try and reach a compromise with something so complex. In nature there are neither harmful nor beneficial insects. For that very reason, even the boundary between inanimate and animate is vague. Earth, water, air, sunlight, and wind. Nature is the intermingling of all creatures great and small, from the non-living to bacteria and other minute organisms, insects, weeds, trees and animals. Kimura realized he would have to partner the whole of nature. He concluded that his job was to harmoniously integrate his apple trees into the fabric of the natural ecosystem.

‘It was something I understood when I stopped using pesticides. Using pesticides I was depleting the strength of the apple trees to fight disease and insects. Having had it so easy, they couldn’t survive. If you ride around in vehicles the whole time, your legs will just get weaker.

The same thing happens. And it isn’t just the apple trees. People using pesticides become more vulnerable to disease and insects. They begin to understand less about diseases and insects. All you’ve got to do is spray pesticides, so you don’t need to watch disease and insects properly any more. I include myself now. I explained that the eggs of pests are a camouflage. They’re small, and go the colour of the branches, leaves, or whatever they’re born on. You really can’t see them. But because I had no idea which insects were going to emerge from which eggs, I’d end up taking the eggs of the ladybirds which were next to the pests’ eggs. The eggs of the ladybird are orange, so they’re a little easier to distinguish, but as I was totally absorbed in catching the harmful insects, my sworn enemies, I didn’t even notice myself doing it. Once I looked more calmly at the insects, I eventually learned all sorts of things.’

One day, for example, Kimura noticed that the camouflaged, and hence more difficult to spot, pests’ eggs, were turning white. Previously, Kimura would have squashed the eggs without a moment’s thought for such things as the reason for this. But now he didn’t do that. Observing them every day, the eggs hatched, and the larvae appeared. It was one week since they’d turned white. Just in case, he made a note for the next time he found the same type of eggs. But it turned out to be the same for all the eggs. One week before they hatched, the eggs turned white. Eradicating the eggs of pests became more straightforward after that. The eggs never hatched until they had changed colour. All he needed to do was remove the eggs which had gone white.

Curiously, when he scraped the eggs off the bark, insects such as moths and spiders on the ground would immediately home in and devour the lot. It was almost as if they were waiting for Kimura to drop them.

How do moths and spiders know that the white clumps are eggs, and that they are packed with larvae that will imminently hatch? It took me years before I noticed that the eggs turned white. It was the same with the ladybirds. Ladybirds know where to lay their eggs as they know where the pests eggs are. If they didn’t, there is no way they could lay their eggs so precisely, right next to the pests’ eggs. When you think about it, nature abounds with such mysteries. Unless people take the time to patiently observe them, they will know even less about nature than the insects which have just hatched.

Kimura remarks that it is only now, after working with apple trees for thirty years, that he knows instinctively an insect will lay its eggs in a particular place just by looking at a tree. Following his instincts, he will look at a certain spot and, sure enough, there’ll be eggs there. There’s no chance the pests’ eggs will escape Kimura’s eye, however well camouflaged or small they are. If they aren’t there, then no eggs will have been laid on that tree. He understands so much about insects he can be that certain.

It may sound strange, but he’s one of only a handful of people not to be outdone by ladybirds.

‘But it took many years until I got to that point. It was the same with measures to prevent disease. Vinegar seemed promising so I kept using it, but got no results. That was only because I was looking in the wrong places. Density and timing are important when spraying pesticides, but they are even more critical with vinegar. Unlike pesticides, with vinegar you don’t completely eradicate fungus and bacteria. Vinegar is specified as an agrichemical in the regulations, but is in fact completely different to pesticides. No-one tries to commit suicide by drinking vinegar! Vinegar has anti-bacterial properties which make it a popular health food, but it’s very weak. Its weak antibacterial properties supplement a tree’s natural resistance to withstand disease. You have to grasp the initiative by understanding the ecology of bacteria and fungus. It’s no good just spraying vinegar around. I didn’t realize this. I was just looking at it and trying to do something focused on a particular disease.’

Diseases are a part of nature. We get heavy rain in early spring some years, and in others it doesn’t get warmer in the rainy season. Nature changes every year. The timing and manner in which diseases occur, likewise, varies with the year. Disease and climate are intimately related. The vinegar started working once he understood the relationship.

That year, the second since he’d planted soy beans and allowed the weeds to grow, conditions in the orchards were visibly improving. The leaves that had appeared in spring hadn’t fallen by autumn. About one third of the leaves remained. Enough to make Kimura want to dance he was so happy. Most of the leaves had dropped by summer in the years prior to that. This was not simply down to the vinegar however. The soil in the orchards had become softer, more like the soil on the mountain. The apple roots were spreading and the trees were stronger. The vinegar may have started working. Kimura believes that this was the result of several conditions. He had been spreading vinegar around aimlessly, so it certainly wasn’t due to that. The vinegar became effective once he began to understand nature as a whole better.

‘Now, of course, all that makes sense. I can predict when diseases are going to occur if I know when the rainy season will start that year, or it seems like the summer temperatures won’t rise that high, or rain will fall from the weekend. If I spray vinegar just before fungi and bacteria become active, it can be quite effective. I learned how to predict the weather, because the weather forecasts can be wrong. At least I tend to be more accurate than the weather forecasts. That’s a difference between pesticides and vinegar. They’re like bombs and swords. They both kill people, but all you have to do with bombs is press a button and boom, anyone can wipe out a thousand people just like that.

But it’s different with swords. Unless you’re trained in swordsmanship, killing even one person is a challenge. You’ve got to know how to use it. Otherwise it’s just an ornament. Ha ha ha. Not such a good comparison perhaps.

In other words, for vinegar to work human experience and skill are needed. To put it another way, the more you know about nature, the more effectively you can use vinegar. I said that in autumn about a third of the leaves were left, but compared to the surrounding orchards this was pretty feeble. Because you don’t expect the leaves to fall do you? Looking at the leaves that were just about hanging on to the trees, it felt to me like the trees were imploring me to observe nature even more carefully, to put into practice what I learned.’

If you keep spreading the same density of vinegar, the resistance of the fungi and bacteria builds up and the vinegar stops working. To prevent this, the method that worked for Kimura was altering the density of the vinegar very slightly. He started getting hold of barrel-fermented vinegar that was a little more acidic than the vinegar he normally used. He was certain that the vinegar became more effective as the apple trees grew healthier. Kimura’s vinegar application methods were improving, too. That one third of the leaves clung on until the autumn was, as Kimura says, the result of a combination of factors. Natural phenomena, like phenomena in a laboratory, do not have a single cause. Behind changes which may appear subtle to us are infinite webs of interrelated causes. As small waves build and form giant waves, an infinite number of small changes combine and can, occasionally, bring about inconceivably big changes.

They may have been feeble, but the third of the leaves that were left were bringing about considerable changes in the trees. Early the following spring, the topmost branches of the trees grew about ten centimetres. The apple trees, which had been dormant for years, were starting to grow again. Whilst you’d certainly have missed it unless you were looking very hard, one apple tree at the entrance to the orchards blossomed. Of the eight hundred trees he had when he stopped using pesticides, more than half had died. One out of these four hundred or so apple trees produced at most seven blossoms. But it had been such a long time since he’d seen flowers blossoming in his orchards. It was spring of the third year since he’d sown soy beans, and the eighth year since he’d completely stopped using pesticides. Seven blossoms in the orchards. Of the seven, two produced fruit. A crop of just two apples. He placed the apples on the Shinto altar in the house, and later shared them with the whole family. They tasted surprisingly good. They’d eaten apples for as long as they could remember, but it was the first time they’d eaten apples like that. And it wasn’t just their imagination.

Nutrients produced by the leaves of one apple tree had been taken up by just two fruits, so they couldn’t be anything but delicious. That year, at least two thirds of the leaves on the apple trees hung on until the fall in late autumn. Kimura’s bitter struggle was finally coming to an end.

Kimura started doing part-time work from about this time. He felt the orchards were showing signs of improvement, but the family finances remained in dire straits. Their circumstance worsened by the day. Unless he found work and earned some cash, they would find themselves on the breadline.

The main reason he finally started casual work, though, was a matter of pride. Having made an awful mess in the apple orchards, going to work would have been sending out a message admitting defeat. It would have been painful for him to have others think he’d taken on part-time work because he couldn’t make a living out of apples. People had always gone to do seasonal work in the cities, so there was no stigma attached to that, but doing casual work locally was something he couldn’t bring himself to do. Kimura was more deeply hurt by criticism and gossip than he imagined. Whatever anyone else said, he was an apple farmer. He could live by apples alone. He was hardly the type to do part-time work. Or so he’d always thought.

Since climbing Mount Iwaki and finding the answer, this peculiar sense of pride had vanished entirely. If feelings of pride arise in response to the way in which others see us, then he’d become oblivious to what others thought of him. He was prepared to do anything to have the apple trees bear fruit. Since returning from Mount Iwaki, he’d stopped sitting on the apple boxes in the middle of the night. There was a vast amount to be done before there would be an apple crop, but he no longer worried about what needed to be done. When work in the orchards finished, he now slept at nights.

He thought he’d do part-time work at nights. But finding a job in a rural town is by no means easy.

The first place he worked at was a pachinko [1] parlour in Hirosaki. It was the first time the earnest Kimura had been into a pachinko parlour in his life. He’d never even seen a pachinko machine. It was daring. The primary task of staff in a pachinko parlour is to respond to complaints from clients. Balls get stuck between the pins, balls go into a pocket but the balls you’ve won don’t come out, balls aren’t coming out of the machine in the first place … Complaints are non-stop. The key to the business is dealing quickly and appropriately with problems, and keeping the customers happy. It’s all down to the staff.

If the complaint is justified, and there is something wrong with the pachinko machine, they have to deal with the problem promptly and, without a fuss, make up for any loss the customer has suffered whilst ensuring the parlour doesn’t end up out of pocket. Even if a complaint is spurious, you must be able to deal sensitively but firmly enough with the customer so as not to annoy them.

It was all too much for Kimura. He’d didn’t know what to do when called over by customers, and instead of appeasing them would often end up rubbing them up the wrong way. His long-suffering boss let him have an old pachinko machine that was going for scrap. He told him he wanted to practice on it at home. He ended up learning how a pachinko machine worked, but showed no signs of improvement as an employee. He may have been able to understand apple trees, but the customers’ feelings were beyond him.

Given the boot after eight months, the next place Kimura found work was in a downtown cabaret. He started cleaning the toilets part-time. When the place closed down for the night, he’d go from bar to bar cleaning toilets, earning five hundred or a thousand yen.

It was a tough job, but he stuck at it so that at least he could buy things for his family. One night a cabaret manager asked him if he’d be interested in working in the club. When there were few customers, he’d try and attract them into the club, and when it was busy, he’d act as a waiter. Cabarets were an unfamiliar world. He didn’t know that you used different glasses for whisky on the rocks and whisky with water, and didn’t even understand the slang used by staff. Yet he somehow managed to bumble through each day and the customers indulged him.

The hostesses and most of the other staff came from outside Aomori Prefecture. They’d all ended up at the club for different reasons. Asking the others about their pasts was taboo in the club, but they were all sensitive to each other’s situations. That Kimura was poor was obvious. He was as scrawny as the apple trees which had been undernourished for years. He’d go straight to the cabaret on his moped when he finished work, wearing threadbare sweaters and shabby, patched trousers covered with mud. He’d start his work attracting customers after changing into a cheap a suit he rented from a clothing hire shop for five hundred yen a day, putting on a bow tie held in place with elastic. On cold nights when there were no customers, he’d stand on the empty street until after two in the morning.

Apple farmers were good customers in the downtown bars of Hirosaki. Why had Kimura, an apple farmer like them, ended up so poor?

When asked this, Kimura had nothing to hide. He probably talked jokingly about his wretched apple orchards, devastated by voracious insects, and his dreams of growing apples without pesticides.

The reason people like Kimura is obvious the moment you talk to him. Firstly, he’s interesting. He doesn’t blow his own trumpet, so although he usually talks endlessly about his failures, his disarming manner and perfect timing draw you in. There’s also a calmness about the way he talks. It’s like listening to rakugo [2] in the Tsugaru dialect. The stories are all about apples, yet are far more than that. After a drink or two, all sorts of dubious shaggy-dog stories are blended in. They may be fanciful, but they ring true, so when you hear them they sound quite plausible. He warms up after a few more drinks and the stories get decidedly bizarre. There’s one about the time he met a spaceman.

‘That was before I sold the light truck. It was the second or third year after I’d stopped using pesticides. I’m not sure of the time, but it was one evening, and it was just starting to get dark. I’d finished working and was sitting in the driver’s seat of the truck about to drive home, when I suddenly saw someone standing in front of me. Someone very strange. He shone silver from head to toe, although I couldn’t make out his nose or eyes. The silver man was facing my way, straight over the windscreen.

I couldn’t move. All I could do was stare at him wondering what on earth he was going to do. Then he disappeared into the apple orchards. The orchards where the leaves had fallen and which were in an awful state. He started running around the orchard at an incredible speed then, in a flash, he vanished. All I could do was shake my head in disbelief at what I’d witnessed.

A little while later, and this time it was during the night, I’d woken up and was sitting thinking beside my bed. My bedroom is on the first floor, but the curtains were swaying and the window was open. Two people came in through the window. They were small, and dark like shadows. They each took one of my arms and we flew out of the window. The next minute we were floating in space. Looking down, I could see the roof of the house. The dark men said nothing. We went higher and higher, each of them grasping one of my arms. I could see what looked like a huge spacecraft hovering high in the sky. I was led into it. I wasn’t the only one there. There were a couple of others. One was a young western woman, the other a western man. He had a crew-cut, which made him look a bit like a soldier. We sat there for a while before being led away one at a time. First the woman, then the military-looking man, and last of all me. Walking through, I saw both of them laid out sleeping on what seemed to be a raised platform. They’d had their clothes removed. For some reason I didn’t have the urge to escape or put up any resistance. I carried on walking thinking I’d be undressed too. But I wasn’t made to take my clothes off. Then I was taken to a place that looked like the control room of the spacecraft. I say a control room, but I couldn’t see any gauges or whatever. They explained how the spacecraft flew. Then they showed me some black stuff that was used to power the spacecraft.

This was how it managed to hover in the sky. I was then led to another room. There was a Greek philosopher there, not one of the shadowy figures. He looked like Socrates. He was sorting out piles of boards, telling one to go here, another to go there. Taking a closer look, I noticed that they were terrestrial calendars. One for each year. They weren’t for past years, they were future calendars. I wondered how many there were, so started counting them.’ He wouldn’t tell him how many there were. But he did say that there weren’t that many.

Jung would say that flying saucers are symbols of wholeness. They are one of the typical visions people today have when they are struggling to find a way out of life’s difficulties. People in the Middle Ages saw God. Having lost their faith in God, people now see flying saucers instead. If the earth symbolizes reality, whoever comes from space represents salvation from that reality. They can help those who are faced with difficulties, and who might be shattered, find some sort of balance in their lives. Round shapes and spheres are symbols of the whole self. There would be nothing particularly strange in Kimura having a flying saucer hallucination, given that he had failed with apple growing year after year and become so desperate and confused he felt his brain would split. But just when his stories are about to be explained in this way, a drunk Kimura will deliver a punch line.

‘We’d been watching television in the house for several years. You know those documentaries on UFOs that come on quite often. Things like “Flying saucers do exist!”. There was someone on telly who’d been abducted by aliens. It was that western woman. My wife watched it with me and was amazed. The story was the same as mine! She said there were two other earthlings in the flying saucer apart from her: a man who looked like a soldier, and an oriental man wearing glasses. That was me. Ha ha ha. Even I was amazed at the time.’

I haven’t checked the story with his wife Michiko. I know only too well that it’ll upset her. Kimura only tells the stories when he’s drinking. The staff at the cabaret were probably told stories like this. You know they’re fantasies, but they’ve got something that makes you want to listen to them again and again.

Pioneers are solitary. Since the dawn of time, people who have done something completely new, those who have been truly revolutionary, have always been solitary. This is because they’ve broken with the stereotypes. For people who adhere to accepted world views and conventions, a ‘pioneer’ is just another name for someone who upsets the established order. They say that when the Wright brothers attempted to fly, certain academics in Europe went as far as writing theses to ‘prove’ the man-made flying machines called airplanes couldn’t fly. The story about Galileo Galilei being brought before the Inquisition, where he was forced to denounce Copernican theory, is the same.

It’s hard to understand, from our perspective today, how these questions could cause such an outcry. Saying that the earth goes around the sun isn’t going to change anything. What harm can experimenting to see if you can fly do? But people at the time reacted differently. The arguments that they challenged the laws of physics and were blasphemy probably came later, as these have their roots in human beings’ instinctive fear of change.

We fear change. The reason the Wright brothers and Galilei are considered great and are respected by people today, is that neither aeroplanes nor Copernican theory are new. Kimura had to deal with the same sort of instinctive fear people have. Trying to growing apples without them in the days when pesticides reigned supreme amounted to lunacy comparable to asserting that the earth revolved around the sun in Galilei’s day. It’s not difficult to imagine how awful the physical and mental pressure he was subjected to was. For his part, Kimura hardly ever talks about it.

Instead, you’re likely to find him talking about flying saucers. His hands and feet may be covered in scars, but he’s like an adventurer talking about tomorrow’s plans. Flying saucers and apples would seem to have little in common, but subconsciously Kimura sees a profound connection. Both flying saucers and apples grown without pesticides symbolize the impossible. His having been in a flying saucer is Kimura overcoming the impossible. It is him growing the pesticide-free apple, Kimura becoming himself again.

Making the impossible possible. His entire is being devoted to growing apples without pesticides.

Staff in the cabaret, who knew nothing of growing apples, listened intently to Kimura’s dreams. Even if they didn’t really realize how difficult it was to grow apples without pesticides, it was clear looking at Kimura how significant his dreams were to him. Dreams are dreams, even if they aren’t your own. They remind us of how precious our lives are. Kimura, who had discarded his pride and worked day and night to realize his dream, was their own unsung hero. Kimura was soon known as ‘Pop’, and befriended by all. They knew that he came straight to work from the fields, so the hostesses took it in turns to take food in for him.

The manager of the cabaret noticed how the atmosphere in the club brightened up after Kimura arrived. An unselfish and honest character with bookkeeping skills, he was entrusted with the accounts. Kimura, who hadn’t given a moment’s thought to doing this sort of nightclub work, was suddenly an indispensable member of staff.

He worked there for three years, from seven in the evening until late at night. His one hundred and seventy thousand yen monthly take home pay was vital for the family finances. He’d probably not have left if it hadn’t been for a certain small incident. Although perhaps it was the apple trees that called Kimura back?

That day there were hardly any clients. Waiter-cum-accountant Kimura was, unusually, standing outside the club trying to attract passing trade. It was a cold winter’s night with snow piled on either sides of the road and there were very few punters out on the town. Whilst they were few and far between, he approached every drunk who happened to appear. If it hadn’t been for the car headlights which temporarily blinded him he probably wouldn’t have called out to the two men passing. There is an etiquette amongst those working in the entertainment districts; one thing you must never do is approach those in the same business. You can immediately tell people working in clubs and related lines of work, even if you don’t know them personally. There’s something that sets them apart from normal customers. These men happened to be the type you must be extra careful about, and never approach. They were the local yakuza, or mafia.

‘Evening gents. Fancy a drink?’

No sooner had the words left his mouth than he was grabbed by the scruff of the neck.

‘Hey, idiot! Can’t you see these?’

They brandished the gold badges they had pinned on their chests. He apologized profusely, but the damage was done. They tried to force their way into the club. If they had got in there’d surely have been trouble. Frantically apologizing, he was led away to the precincts of an out-of-the-way temple. The next minute he was surrounded by seven or eight men who proceeded to beat him up. His front teeth were broken and his white shirt covered in blood. Scared witless, he tried to escape. Looking at the ground, he noticed that the man who’d hit him was wearing soft, insulated boots. Without a moment’s hesitation, he stamped with all his might on the man’s instep with the heel of his shoe. He recalled a customer, a chiropractor, once telling him that a person’s weak point was their instep. Kimura made his escape whilst the man nursed his injured foot, getting away by tumbling down a slope behind the temple. Where he went and what happened after that is a blur. He recalls running down a private railway track that passes close to the nightlife area, and going over a level crossing. He ended up squeezing behind some gas cylinders next to a bar he found, from where he heard the sound of the men running after him and their shouts as they searched. He held his breath and waited. When he eventually got back to the club, there were two police cars parked outside. It was just like a TV police drama.

‘At the police station they showed me what looked like a register. It contained photos of the faces of people linked to gangs who the police were after.

They seemed to ignore the fact that my shirt was bloodstained and my face swollen. They went through the photos one by one asking me if it was this man or that man. I knew which one had hit me the moment I saw him, but I told them I didn’t want to bring charges. I was out of order for having spoken to them, so I wasn’t going to make a complaint. The policeman appeared to call it a day then, too. “Alright then. But the men who hit you are going to have to appear at the police station tomorrow.” No report concerning an injury had been filed, so they couldn’t arrest them, but he told me the police were aware of the details. The next day, the two men came to my house to offer a formal apology. I heard this later, but it seems that the club I was working in wasn’t paying any money to that gang. It was common in the old days for entertainment businesses like that to hand over money. As we hadn’t paid, the place was being watched. They couldn’t do anything, though, because the police were now involved. They came to apologize twice, saying they wanted to make amends, and I was asked over to the boss’s place. We made up over a cup of saké. I’d have been fine with it, even if they hadn’t apologized so profusely. But honour is everything to them and that’s the way they did things.

That was when I decided to quit. It was great timing because the apples were quickly getting better. I felt the trees were desperate for me to return to making a living from my main job of growing apples, rather than doing casual work. The manager of the cabaret came and asked me many times if I could return to work once I recovered. Feeling I ought to refuse in a more polite way, I went to the club only to find that he was waiting for me and wanted to give me severance pay.

“I understand. All the best with the apples!” I was amazed when I opened the envelope to find five hundred thousand yen inside! He said it was severance pay for having worked there for three years, but it was ages since I’d seen such a large wad of cash. There wasn’t much left after I paid my tax arrears, mind you.

Anyway, that’s the story of how I lost my teeth. I only lost one front tooth at the time, but I left it like that and didn’t go to a dentist so I wouldn’t forget what happened. The missing tooth was evidence of my having fought for the apples. I decided to live without the tooth so as never to forget the lengths I went to for the apples, including getting punched. Having lost one tooth, though, the other teeth started moving and then wobbling. When they began to wobble, I pulled them out one by one with a pair of pliers until there were none left. So when I’m asked why I don’t have any teeth, I tell them “I lost my teeth and turned over a new leaf”.’

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[1] pachinko A vertical pinball machine for amusement and gambling.

[2] rakugos Popular storytelling. The stories are long and usually comical

‘That was it. That was the answer. I felt like dancing right there and then on the mountain. I’d been so stupid, I even forgot why I’d climbed the mountain, not to mention forgetting entirely about the rope. I ran back down the mountain as I wanted to check the condition of the soil in my orchards and think about what I was going to do as quickly as I could. It was all downhill so it only took just over an hour to get to the orchards at the foot of the mountain. By then it was nearly midnight. I was so late coming home that Michiko had come out to the orchards with the children to look for me. She was worried, but I was ecstatic.

The next morning, Kimura climbed the mountain again. He wanted to study the soil around the oak trees more closely. In daylight, the oak tree looked thinner than he remembered. The trunk must have been fifteen centimetres thick at most. But its roots were surprisingly sturdy. He dug around and found that they went everywhere. It was a young tree, but the roots were thick and long, and it had a mass of finer roots too.

Thinking how soft the soil was, Kimura dug the earth in several spots nearby. The impression he’d had last night wasn’t wrong. The soil was faintly warm, and had a distinct, pungent smell. It was completely different to the soil in his orchards.

‘Sure enough the soil was different. I’d taken some paper and a pencil to try and sketch the structure of the soil, but I couldn’t draw it well. I put some soil in a nylon bag and carried it home over my shoulder. I tied the mouth of the bag securely so that the intense smell of the soil couldn’t escape. When I got back to the orchards I dug up some more soil and compared them. The earth in my orchards didn’t smell like that, and was hard. It was so solid that the roots snapped off when I tugged up some grass. The roots of the apple trees were miserable. They were neither thick nor long, and were blackish, not the creamy white roots should be. The oak had put those roots down in ground that was smothered in weeds. The roots of the apple trees in my orchards, where I’d cut the weeds as closely as a monk’s shaved head, were like that. I’d always thought of weeds as enemies. I’d cut the weeds to help the apples. However much I’d cut the weeds, though, the apple trees had not improved. In fact, they were wasting away because I’d cut the weeds.

Thinking that there was nothing more I could do turned out to be wrong. I believed I couldn’t do anything because there was nothing I could see to do. I was too focused on the visible; I’d lost the energy to look beyond the things I could see.’

He discovered that the pungent smell of the soil he’d dug up from around the oak tree was caused by an actinobacteria. Actinobacteria fix nitrogen in the atmosphere and store it as a nutrient in the soil. Rhizobium, which binds with the roots of soya beans and other legumes, is one well-known actinobacteria which fixes nitrogen.

Nitrogen, phosphates, and potash, are the three fertilizers vital for growing crops. It says so in the text books. But mountain soil knows nothing of those textbooks. Without applying one gram of fertilizer, it provides the sort of conditions in which an oak tree like that can thrive. There is no need for fertilizer. Whether they are chemical fertilizers or manure, nutrients used by man only work for a short time. Thus they have to be applied every year. Yet the apple trees he’d grown like that in his orchards, which were treated with nutrients as though they were children being indulged with as many sweets as they want, lost the strength to spread their roots in the soil.

Kimura continued digging and observing the soil. He dug wherever he could, under the oak tree – now the ultimate textbook – in his own orchards, as well as in various parts of the mountain, and in waste land at the foot of the mountain. He’d never really thought about it, but even walking over the ground in the orchard felt different to walking over the ground on the mountain. First and foremost, though, the temperatures differed. At that time, Kimura always went out carrying a large thermometer, stuffed into a cardboard casing to make sure it didn’t break, so he could measure soil temperatures whilst digging.

However deep he dug, the temperature of the soil on the mountain hardly varied. The temperature on the surface was about the same as the temperatures up to one or two feet down. In the orchards, on the other hand, the temperature dropped significantly, even after he’d only dug down four or five inches.

‘To be honest, I’d previously argued about weeds with my father. He told me not to remove the weeds. He had experience of seeing how well certain crops grew in the Southern Islands in places where there were weeds. I found it hard to believe. The Southern Islands and Aomori are so different. On top of which the apple trees were deteriorating. I reckoned that if the weeds increased, they’d take all the nutrients and the trees would be even worse off. But it was as my father-in-law had said. Weeds break up the soil. Weeds were weeds, doing what they were supposed to. I hadn’t been able to see what my father-in-law could see. I was so short-sighted. It was as though I’d been squinting at apple trees through the eye of a needle. I couldn’t see the wood for the trees. I was only looking at the apple trees in front of me.

An apple tree does not live in isolation. Its life is sustained by the environment it lives in. Human beings are the same. People are forgetting this and believe they are independent. At some point I realized that this was true for the crops I was growing too. This is the main problem, in fact, when it comes to using pesticides. Spreading pesticides effectively means isolating apple trees from the nature around them.

The reason for the mountain soil being warm was healthy microorganism activity. This explained the constant temperature, however deep I dug. Low levels of microorganism activity in the soil explained why the temperature in the orchards decreased every ten centimetre I dug down. To prove this, I dug the soil in various places and found the temperatures, but it was the same some distance from the orchards as it was close by. The deeper you go the cooler it gets. The soil ecology must have been altered by pesticides and chemicals fertilizers. My orchards were the same. The numbers of microorganisms living in the soil was much smaller than on the mountain. Six years had passed since I’d stopped spraying pesticides, but I’d done it continuously before that, so I imagine the soil ecology had been destroyed. What’s worse, I was regularly cutting the grass, so the microorganisms never had a chance to recover. An ecosystem is built up by the actions of innumerable living creatures.

Anyway, I figured that to develop more robust apple tree roots, all I could do was try and reproduce the mountain soil, so I tried letting the grasses grow. I knew that the soft mountain soil was full of life, and that the roots grew in soil which, however deep you dig, had a constant temperature. I’d cut the grass in the orchards so, although it was unseasonal, I sowed soya beans in place of weeds. They were low grade soybeans I bought cheap. I’m not sure how much I sowed. I’d no idea how much to sow, in fact, so I used the lot. We were invaded by turtle doves. Doves everywhere you looked. This wasn’t exactly crows digging around for seeds Farmer Giles had sowed; the doves were following me around eating the soybeans from where I’d just scattered them. Ha ha ha, that was funny. The doves made their nests in the orchards at some point. It was dove heaven.’

When he pulled up the soybeans after they’d grown, he found many small nodules on the roots. Nodule bacteria colonies. It was just as he’d thought. They were acting in the same way as the actinobacteria in the mountain soil.

The following year, he sowed soybeans from the spring. They grew waist high, turning the orchards into a jungle. He stopped his monthly grass cutting completely, weeds flourished under the soybeans, and insects sang in the shade. Frogs followed the insects, then snakes which were going after the frogs appeared. They started seeing mice and rabbits running around too. Before he knew it, Kimura’s orchards were bustling with life. Curiously, however, there were fewer soybean nodule bacteria than the previous year.

The apple trees looked slightly healthier. Alternaria blotch and leaf rollers were still rampant but, to Kimura’s eyes, it seemed as though the apple trees’ fight against prolonged disease was over, and they might just be on the road to recovery.

The apple tree was glowing as though it were magic. What was an apple tree doing so far up the mountain? He wondered if he was dreaming or this was a vision. However hard he looked, though, the vision didn’t disappear. He could distinctly see each leaf shimmering in the light of the full moon. The tree was breathtakingly beautiful. Its vigorous branches reached out, every one heavy with leaves. He instinctively assumed that someone was using pesticides on it. It was an apple tree, after all, and such healthy leaves surely couldn’t be produced without pesticides. Kimura felt he’d been struck by a thunderbolt. It simply wasn’t possible. Not a drop of pesticide could have been used on that tree.

Forgetting the rope, he ran. An apple tree couldn’t possibly exist somewhere like that on the mountain. Running past it, Kimura noticed that the tree wasn’t actually an apple. This didn’t stop his heart racing. It was some sort of oak tree. It had probably grown from an acorn which had dropped on ground cleared on the mountainside by the army to grow feed for their horses during the war. It must have been one of those fields for growing fodder crops for military horses he’d heard about. The oak trees growing on flat areas of ground on the mountain looked liked apple orchards. To Kimura at that moment, the apple and the oak were the same. How could this tree produce such luxurious foliage without pesticides?

In a daze, he fumbled around in his pocket and lit a match. He went over to a tree and held the match up to it. Just as he thought, not a pest in sight. It wasn’t completely free of pest damage, or leaves that had been discoloured by disease, but most of the leaves were healthy. The answer he had sought for six years lay in front of his eyes. And it wasn’t just this oak tree. Trees of the forest don’t depend on pesticides. Why hadn’t this struck him as mysterious before? Why hadn’t it occurred to him as strange that plants growing naturally do so without the help of chemicals?

It’s not as if there weren’t any insects in the mountains. The insects were making a din. There was evidence of small animal activity all over the place. The pests in the orchards, like the huge slug, could well have come from the mountain. It would be the same for fungi and bacteria which caused disease. So why was it that those pests and diseases didn’t devour the oak tree? Kimura realized the reason the moment he set foot in this area. The apple trees around Mount Iwaki, this oak tree, they all breathe the same air, are bathed in the same sunlight. The conditions are more or less the same. There was, however, one fundamental difference. Weeds here grew unchecked, creating a dense undergrowth. The soil was totally different. Kimura feverishly dug into the soil underfoot, engulfed in a thick carpet of fresh green grasses. The soil was friable, easily dug with bare hands. Pulling up the grass, clumps of soil clung to the very tips of the roots. It was the first time he’d handled such soft soil. The scent of the mountain soil was pungent. That was it! He’d somehow have to produce this soil.

It felt as if someone was whispering inside his head, urging him to do it, rather than being just a hunch. Without thinking, he slipped some soil into his mouth. The inimitable aroma percolated through his nose and flooded his mouth. It was a sharp, yet indescribably wonderful smell.

All he’d thought about until that moment was the parts of the apple tree you could see, what was above ground. He hadn’t considered what lay below the ground, the parts of the apple tree you couldn’t see. All he’d done was spread manure and cut the weeds so they didn’t deplete the nutrients. Concerned about the condition of the leaves, he’d forgotten the apples’ roots. The oak tree had been growing vigorously in just that sort of grass. Were the grasses which grew around them the very reason the oaks were so healthy? This soft soil is not made by man. It’s a product of all the plants and animals living there. Fallen leaves and dead grass accumulating over the years are broken down by insects and tiny organisms and turned into soil. The roots of acorns and grass seeds which fall onto the soil go deep into the earth, breaking it up. Countless fungi and bacteria live both in the soil and on the surface of grasses and trees. Among these there are beneficial as well as harmful bacteria.

It dawned on him that no creatures live independently in nature. All life was interdependent, each life supporting another. He ought to have realized this before, but had overlooked the most important thing in his enthusiasm to look after his apples. All he’d been doing was searching for a means of killing pests and preventing disease in place of pesticides. He was trying to apply manure, cut weeds, and isolate his apple trees from the surrounding nature. He’d given no thought to what gives apple trees life. Even though he’d not been using pesticides, it was just the same as if he had.

He had simply thought that the apple trees were weakening due to disease and pests. So, if he could just get rid of them, the apple trees would return to health.

But this wasn’t the case. Pests and disease were, rather, a result. The apple trees were weakening so insects and disease were increasing. The oak trees ought to be vulnerable to attack by pests and disease. The reason they were so healthy was because they could protect themselves without the help of pesticides. They were in their natural state. The apple trees were suffering so badly from insects and disease because they had lost their natural strength.

However far he dug, the earth remained soft, and very slightly warm. He thought of the invisible, minute organisms living in it. If he could only regenerate the soil in the orchards, the roots of the apple trees were sure to grow. Then, like the oak trees, they would return to health. It wasn’t so much that he thought this; deep down inside he was certain that this would be the case.

He’d found the answer at last. To make sure, he dug the soil with his hands, smelt it, and again put some in his mouth and tasted it. He then pulled up some grass and checked, with trembling fingers, what the soft roots felt like. The full moon, gleaming white in the heavens, shone on his soil covered figure.

It’s the 31^st July, the height of summer, 1985. Evening has come to the apple orchards spread around the foot of Mount Iwaki. The orchards are deserted. There’s not a soul in sight. Work that has to be done at this time of year in the orchards is basically picking any fruit that has been eaten by insects, and spraying with pesticides. Spraying no longer takes much time thanks to the sprayers. Spraying equipment has been used since the Taishō Period, but with the improvements that have been made they are very sophisticated, like the ‘smart cars’ which were once so popular. Their performance has advanced dramatically, and spraying can be done in two or three hours in the morning, the coolest part of the day. There’s no reason for anyone to be in the orchards late in the evening.

The grass underfoot in the orchards is carefully mowed and looks more like a lawn. Leaves are thick on the carefully trimmed branches of the trees, now heavily laden with apples which, although still green, are heavy enough to weigh down all the branches. With this amount of fruit, a healthy crop this year is assured.

With the busy harvesting season around the corner, Japan’s apple growing areas are settling down as another quiet evening passes.

Meanwhile, in one spot, a very different, more miserable scene is unfolding. Needless to say, it was in one of Kimura’s orchards. Kimura was slumped in the middle of a devastated orchard, now in a state that most apple farmers would find intolerable. From there, on its eastern flanks, Mount Iwaki looms above the apple trees. The view from other orchards would be obscured by thick canopies of leaves, but from his orchards the purple peak of Mount Iwaki looked immense through the withered branches. But Kimura was oblivious to the magnificent scene. He’d been staring at the ground in front of him for some time. Staring at the ground, but not really seeing it. Deep lines furrowed his face, burned from the summer sun. In his thirtieth year, and in the prime of life, his face was more like that of an old man who had endured a life of hard labour. His eyes saw nothing. He no longer knew where to look.

He realized his powerlessness, yet however sincerely he bowed his head, and however much he implored the apples trees not to die, the desolate orchards remained desolate. And it wasn’t just that orchard. All eight hundred apple trees in his four orchards were getting weaker and dying. On top of his having run out of options, the apple trees – still just about clinging on – could only now succumb to disease and pests and die. All the trees would die, and it would all end.

The answer was perfectly clear. The only course left was to give up immediately and return to the growing methods that everyone else used. But no … . This was as far as this line of thought went. He’d been through this a hundred, a thousand times. Held by what seemed like a thick metal chain, this train of thought could move no further. He couldn’t find the resolve within himself to give up something he’d started. Perhaps he clung to that dream at a much deeper level than he’d ever imagined? He was obsessed by the dream. Why had it come to this? In the beginning it had just been an impulse.

He’d imagined a high mountain in the distance and wondered if he could scale it. No sooner had the thought occurred to him than he’d started climbing. If it was beyond him, he could always turn back. But that wasn’t the point. The higher he climbed the further the peak. He’d been climbing for six years now, and all he’d learned was that the mountain was too high for him. But this had only increased his resolve. He was totally absorbed in the climb, believing that he was born to conquer that mountain. To grow apples without using pesticides. It was his fate. Gritting his teeth and throwing himself into it, a thought had struck him as if he’d been hit by lightning. If he gave up, no-one else would do it. Giving up amounted to humanity giving up. He lived so that one day he might realize his dream. But the dream he lived for had dissolved. There was nothing more than Akinori Kimura could do.

The evening sun faded and stars started flickering in the sky. Kimura came to his senses and looked around. He found a length of rope in an old car body which he used instead of a shed at the entrance to the orchard.

The rope was for securing apple boxes loaded on the back of light trucks. Pulling the rope out, he held it up to the dying embers of light in the western sky. Worn and frayed, it clearly hadn’t been used for years. It was a little thin, so he deftly braided three strands together to make a single, thicker piece of rope. His thinking nearly always came to nothing, but on that day his train of thought went one step further. He’d found an elegant solution to an unanswered question. Thinking about it, he’d known the answer for several weeks. Now it was simply a question of putting it into practice.

Finishing off the rope, Kimura started off up the track between the orchards. Now darkening, Mount Iwaki rose up in front of him. Anyone who spotted him might think he was a devout local setting out on an unseasonable mountain pilgrimage. Since the earliest times, farmers in the Tsugaru region had climbed Mount Iwaki on the first day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar to pray for a good harvest, and to pay homage to the rising sun the following morning. The grim face of an old man had reverted to the softer features of a man in his thirties. Kimura had decided to climb to a place where no-one would find him, where he would die. He was responsible for it all. He was the cause of it all. If he died, he could end all that.

Why hadn’t he realized something so basic? He’d been unable to fulfil his destiny. Hence there was no longer a reason to live. He felt no regret or sadness whatsoever. He wasn’t afraid of dying. Just a sense of liberation at the prospect of unburdening himself from a load which had been weighing him down for years. He had done all he could. There was nothing more to be done. If he lived, he would continue to cause the family trouble. If he disappeared, the others would certainly be happier than they were now. It may have been irresponsible, but he didn’t believe the decision to take his own life was the wrong one.

How far had he climbed? Noticing his shadow on the ground, he turned around to see an enormous moon rising in the sky to the east. A spectacular full moon. It was ages since he’d seen such a moon. Below, he could see the night lights of Hirosaki. All in all, a perfect night.

Everything was beautiful: the moon and the city lights, the summer night sky, the shadowy mountain path, the trilling of insects.

The world was a far more beautiful place than he’d imagined. Realizing this when you’re on the point of ending it all sounds ironic, yet he felt no urge to change his mind. Having discarded his heavy load, he clearly perceived how beautiful the world was. The view had distracted him during the climb. All of a sudden he was there. Grasping the rope, he proceeded, step-by-step, treading with the greatest care. A twig snapped under his feet, startling a bird which fled from the wood. Had the bird looked down, it would have seen the figure of Kimura in the moonlight, climbing the mountain path and disappearing into a small clump of trees.

‘The Hirosaki city lights were really beautiful. I wondered why Hirosaki looked that beautiful. It was the 31^st July, the evening before the start of the Neputa festival. I was intent on dying and, having made the decision, I’d forgotten the pain. Everything … the problems of life, being criticized, making life difficult for the family, being told something by one person and something else by another.

All the pain and suffering I’d endured was washed clean away. It sounds easy but it wasn’t. It’s neat and tidy saying that dying was the only way to free myself from my dream, but I was torn by mixed feelings. I might well be called a coward. As far as my family and others around me were concerned, I was a really selfish man I suppose.

To be honest though, I felt so relieved at that moment. I’d no regrets. I felt fresh climbing Mount Iwaki, the same feeling you have after you’ve had the first bath in days. I wasn’t afraid of bears either. You used to see them in the mountains quite often, unlike now when they’re only seen occasionally. I’d startle the odd bird which would drop a twig. I knew they were only birds, but it got my heart racing. That was all that really frightened me. Still, I climbed pretty high. I crossed a stream too. I must have climbed for a couple of hours. I got to a place that looked alright, found a tree I thought would do, and threw the rope I had over a branch.’

He put too much effort into it, though, and the rope slipped and went flying in the wrong direction. Even then he managed to fluff it. Thinking how totally useless he was, he was stepping down the slope to retrieve the rope when he noticed something strange. An apple tree in the moonlight.

Kimura still talks to the apple trees when he’s in the orchards. Even when I was doing my research, he would often say things like ‘No. It wasn’t me. It was the trees that struggled.’ This was said more to encourage the apple trees that were within earshot, rather than out of modesty.

‘You’ve done so well.’

‘Amazing, amazing.’

It may sound strange, but watching Kimura, smiling, eyes half-shut, talking to the trees, I really began to feel that he was getting through to them. The branches were swaying and the leaves rustling even though there was no wind … ‘Steady on!’, I thought, blinking in disbelief. It was surely my imagination? Maybe, but I was certain about one thing. He was in all earnestness talking to the apple trees.

It wasn’t until he recognized that he would achieve nothing by himself that he was, in a very real sense, able to face the apple trees. Kimura speaking to the trees comes from a deep sense of gratitude. Whether the trees are listening or not is not an issue. Apple trees are not machines manufacturing the fruit we know as apples. They have their own lives and place in the world. This might seem pretty obvious, but believing that with all ones heart is another matter. He knows this better than anyone. This is why he speaks to the trees. It is Kimura, a human being, standing before a living apple. It’s not superficial. It’s something he’s finally come to know after countless failures and after endless struggles.

Looking round the orchards he was shocked. He could see something clearly which, back when he thought he had it in himself to do something, he simply couldn’t perceive. There were eight hundred apple trees in Kimura’s four orchards, and they were all starving. They were dying.

What on earth had he done? Whatever it was, all he could do now was to bow his head before the trees. He didn’t mind if they couldn’t produce any fruit; all he asked was that they didn’t wither away. That they survive. Kimura was not confronting the apples with his experience or knowledge, but with his very being. Kimura had said that it was at this moment that he was at his most honest. From that day on he began to listen to the apple trees. Every leaf, every branch, was the voice of an apple tree. He hears their vitality in the fresh green leaves of early summer, and words of gratitude in the plump fruits of autumn. His talking to the apples is only in reply to these voices. Kimura continues to talk to the apples in the same way to this day.

Perhaps the years Kimura spent struggling were, in the end, the time he needed to come to terms with the apple trees. When Kimura says ‘It’s alright to be crazy’, this is what he means. Experience and knowledge are vital for people to get on in life. A store of experience and knowledge are necessary if you want to achieve something. That’s why we label someone without experience or knowledge stupid. But when someone takes on a genuinely new challenge, experience and knowledge may be the greatest obstacles.

Each time Kimura failed, he discarded a piece of common sense. After he’d failed a hundred times, a thousand times, he finally understood that his experience and knowledge were of no use in the challenges he faced in life. It was then, for the first time, that he was able to see the apple trees with an open mind. He’d reached an enlightened state of mind. Having reached it, however, didn’t mean that anything would change. Just because he’d spoken to the apple trees didn’t mean a miracle was going to happen. He was living in the real world. As a farmer, and as a man who grew plants for food, Kimura understood that only too well. Nature is the work of providence. Providence is not affected by our prayers or thoughts.

And it was in the real world that Kimura had to do something. He knew that his knowledge and experience were of no use. He had come to see the apple trees for what they were through an awareness that he and the apple trees shared life on earth. Yet now there was only him and his inability to do anything, and desperately weak apples which were dying.

Things couldn’t come to a dead halt. He had to move in some direction. The path Kimura set out on was an astonishing one. Aware of his own powerlessness, the conclusion he came to may have been inevitable, but what transpired was of mythic significance.

The myth of death and rebirth. Kimura, like his apples trees, was close to death. He had no choice but to follow the path he was on.

It was 1985, six years since he stopped using pesticides in all the apple orchards, and spring was turning to summer. Kimura, as usual, was in the fields from before dawn to dusk. He acted as he always did when he was in the orchards with his wife and other family members. He’d either be catching insects with a supermarket bag hanging from his wrist, or spreading vinegar. By this time, it was mostly vinegar he was spraying the trees with.

Of all the foods he tried, the most effective seemed to be vinegar. One disease that affects the fruit and leaves of apples is apple scab. It is caused by a certain fungus. He’d take a leaf marked with dull black lesions and spray it with vinegar. In the days when he had a little more time, he used a toy microscope that had come with a supplement in a learning magazine he’d bought the children, to watch and see how the growth of the fungus was halted by the vinegar.

Yet spraying the orchards had little effect. He was using a solution diluted three to five hundred parts with water. If it was too concentrated, the apple leaves would end up being discoloured by the vinegar. All he could do was dilute the vinegar. Meanwhile, alternaria blotch was on the rampage, leaving him uncertain as to whether it was having any real effect at all. The only thing that spraying vinegar achieved was help to ease his mind.

If there wasn’t enough money to buy vinegar he’d use citric acid. He could get this for nothing from a factory which produced grape juice. Although he took the trouble to get hold of citric acid, dilute it with water, and spread it, the apple trees continued to weaken. Rather than helping to ease his mind, continuing with the spraying was probably more a question of him simply not being able to stop.

At least catching insects and spraying vinegar with his family made some sense to him. Even if it wasn’t working, they were at least doing something to try and save the trees. However, the picture of Kimura alone in the orchard after the rest of his family had gone home was a bizarre one.

His wife had once returned to the orchard to get something she’d left behind, to find Kimura talking to someone beside an apple tree. Peering through the gloom she realized there was no-one there. Her husband was the only person in the orchards.

Yet he had definitely been speaking to someone. She couldn’t hear what he was saying from that distance, but she could hear his voice on the breeze. It had an apologetic, beseeching tone. A short while later, just as if he were greeting it, Kimura reached out to the trunk of one tree, then went over to the next tree. There he began talking in the same manner. He looked up at the topmost braches whilst he talked, gently stroking the insect damaged leaves. Kimura was apparently talking to the trees. He was going slowly around the orchard, talking to each tree as if he was having ordinary conversations.

She wondered whether her husband was finally going round the bend. It would be perfectly natural to think so, but Kimura seemed to be behaving so naturally that she found this hard to believe. One farmer talking to apple trees wasn’t going to do any harm. The only thing worrying her was what he was saying to the trees. She felt the urge to get closer so she could hear what he was saying, but stopped herself. She felt that doing so might destroy something precious.

‘I was walking around the trees praying for them. They were getting very weak. It’d probably got as far as the roots. The trees rocked unsteadily if you pushed them. I reckoned they’d die if this carried on. I walked, head bowed, from tree to tree. I told them ‘I’m sorry for what I’ve put you through. I’m not worried about the blossom, or the fruits, just please don’t die.’ I was at my wits’ end. I couldn’t talk to my family about it, so I carried on in the orchards as I‘d always done. There was nothing more I could do apart from pray for the trees. I suppose that people in the surrounding orchards that saw me must have thought that I’d finally lost my marbles. But thinking about it now, that was me at my most honest.’

Kimura wondered whether he’d lost the plot. It was like his brain was splitting in two. Someone inside his head was screaming ‘Give up!’ The voice woke him at night. The next thing he knew he’d have slipped out of bed and be slumped on an apple box in the shed, staring into his conflict-torn mind. Part of him insisting that he could do it, the other saying it was impossible. Which was the voice of the angel? Which the voice of the devil? Finding no answers, in desperation he’d clung on to pursuing pesticide-free methods. But it was no longer a question of which was right and which was wrong. Wasn’t he just being stubborn? Plain selfish?

The more he’d stuck to pesticide-free apple growing, the harder life had become, and the more strongly others had criticized him.

He’d eventually had to let go of the rice fields, which had yielded about nine sacks of rice, in order to repay his loans. Without the means of providing themselves with rice, life had become even harder. He planted an orchard with dry rice, but the yields had been negligible. Eventually there was scarcely enough rice to eat. The pittance they got at the market for the vegetables grown in the orchard was used to buy rice. As you could only buy rice from rice shops in rural areas in five kilo bags, Michiko used to go down to a vending machine, which sold rice by the kilo, clutching a one thousand yen note.

Seven of them quickly got through a kilo of rice. They would eke it out by making rice gruel. Even then there was hardly enough rice gruel left over for Kimura and Michiko. Their growing children came first. To fill their bellies they would consume bowl after bowl of miso soup. The vegetables grown in the orchard which could be sold were sold; the vegetables which ended up in the miso soup were the spoilt ones that wouldn’t sell. When there weren’t enough, weeds from the fields went into the soup. Most of the weeds were too tough to eat, but some were edible as long as you boiled them.

‘During the winter when we couldn’t grow crops, I’d go and work in Tokyo. There was a park near the company where I used to work in Kawasaki, and I knew that casual labourers went there in the mornings, so that’s where I lived for a time. I had no money for a room, so I slept in the park. I didn’t want to be seen by people I knew at work, so I wrapped a towel around my head. The money I got I put in a purse I used as a pillow at night, but I woke up one morning to find it’d vanished.

So I sewed a pocket into my underpants and stuck my purse in there. I wore the same pants for one or two months. I didn’t take baths either, so my hair and beard grew really long; I must have stunk to high heaven by the time I got home to Aomori in the spring! Among other things, I worked on the construction site for a dam, and collected cardboards boxes in Kanda. Some men I worked with foraged through rubbish for a living. There was no way I could do that, but doing seasonal work you live like a vagrant. It was during the bubble years and people were living it up, but it meant nothing to me. I worked like crazy, but didn’t make much at all.’

To help make ends meet, his father-in-law collected Japanese knotweed stems from the mountains. If you split the stems, you sometimes find itadori insects growing in them. The larvae of the knotweed borer moth are used as bait when fishing in mountain streams. A fishing tackle shop would buy them from him. His father-in-law did this to help, even though it only brought in a tiny bit of cash.

It was his father-in-law who defended him against the relatives who were saying ‘Get rid of that son-in-law’. His father-in-law never once told him to stop pesticide-free farming, even though it was so hard on his daughter and grandchildren.

Once, when leaving for the orchards at dawn, Kimura found some rice and miso at the front door. His own parents had probably left them there during the night. He was virtually cut off from them. When he did visit, they would lock the door and pretend to be out. His own parents were the ones who opposed him stopping pesticide spraying most fiercely. The son they’d given in marriage was turning the Kimura family life upside-down.

Somehow we’ve got to make it up to the Kimuras, his mother cried. His father offered advice when he saw him, but his son turned a deaf ear. As parents, the only course open to them was to do the honourable thing and cease having anything to do with him. Yet they secretly took rice to him out of parental concern for his wellbeing. It distressed him to imagine how his mother must have felt trudging along the road at night, bringing him a bag of rice and some miso.

What on earth was he doing? What was the point in carrying on?

He hadn’t been certain of anything right from the start. All there had ever been was a shaky optimism. There must be a way to grow apples without using pesticides.

When all this started five years earlier, his optimism had shone like the evening star, but now it was a feeble glimmer, more like a star peeping from between the clouds on a stormy night. There one minute, gone the next. It was probably just an illusion. It was unbearable to think his wife and children were caught up in all this. It was like putting the seven of them in a small boat and setting them adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. They may still have had faith in him, but he himself no longer had the faintest idea which direction to go in.

There was no land in sight.

He’d tried absolutely everything he could think of, but had achieved nothing. Now he’d run out of ideas. He was at the end of his tether. A paralyzing sense of frustration was welling up inside him. He was desperate to do something, but didn’t know where to turn. Nothing he did worked. He knew for sure, though, that however long he sat on the apple box and thought, he wasn’t going to find a way out of this. The answer had passed him by. His pesticide-free apple growing had failed. The clearest evidence of this was that the apple trees were now withering. He should start using pesticides without further delay.

This is what logic dictated, but something inside Kimura persistently denied it. Yet there was no ray of hope. It felt as though he was alone in total darkness, surrounded by an insurmountably high wall. It had taken five years and he’d reached a dead end.

Forget it all and use pesticides. Kimura knew better than anyone, and certainly didn’t need telling, that this was the only way out.

Yet he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Why couldn’t he give up, even though he’d lost all hope and any dreams he had? Why couldn’t he quit? He sat on the apple crate until the sky began to lighten, racking his brains, but there was no answer.

Racking your brains for an answer to a question that has none. For practising monks of the Rinzai sect of Zen Buddhism, this is an important training technique for clearing the mind of worldly thoughts. They call it a kōan [1]. The apples were Kimura’s kōan. It was as though he’d been doing zazen sitting meditation in front of the apple trees for years. But even if he achieved enlightenment, it would be meaningless if the apple trees didn’t bear fruit. In that sense, Kimura’s training was probably more severe than a Zen monk’s.

He’d had hallucinations too. Sitting at the top of the tripod ladder he was using to removing pests from the higher branches, he’d start daydreaming. Looking down from his perch, deep in thought, the ground would seem miles away. Sitting at what he imagined was the very edge of a precipice, the earth below would seem to open, and whilst he may have realized he was hallucinating, he couldn’t take his eyes off the yawning abyss.

He saw himself falling into this crack and down towards the very centre of the earth. But he wasn’t afraid. He imagined it must be like this diving to the bottom of the ocean and peering into the Japan Trench [2]. Returning to himself and looking around, all he saw in the bright sunshine was the apple orchards, ravaged by disease and pests. Reality was far bleaker.

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[1] kōan A Zen Buddhist conundrum to meditate on, kōan are designed to encourage self-awareness and a state of no-mind.

[2] Japan Trench The Japan Trench is an oceanic trench, about 9,000 meters deep, on the floor of the northern Pacific Ocean off northeast Japan.

His wife Michiko noticed Kimura leaving his bed in the middle of the night. He went out through the front door, as if sleepwalking, and went into the barn at the end of the garden. The only thing in the big barn was carefully arranged stacks of wooden boxes waiting for the apple harvest. The boxes hadn’t been used for years. Peeping furtively at him, she would see her husband sitting motionless on an apple box, eyes shut. He would often sit like that until daybreak. She might not have understood what he was doing, but she did know that her husband was helpless and suffering.

She didn’t want to make her husband give up what he’d been working at for years. Anyway, he would simply turn a deaf ear the moment it was mentioned. He wasn’t going to stop, whatever anyone said. If he wasn’t going to quit, she had no choice but to go along.

Any semblance of acting the ‘happy family’ had disappeared. Her husband remained stressed. Even when with the family, his heart was not in it. He mind was always elsewhere. He said very little at mealtimes. If he did open his mouth, it was normally to tell someone off. No-one understood exactly what was annoying him. They tried desperately not to rub him up the wrong way. His young daughters stayed clear of him. Everyone in the family tiptoed around him.

Before they’d sold the car, and it only happened once, her husband decided to take the family on holiday. The girls weren’t in the least excited. They already knew what would happen if they went on holiday with their dad who could explode at any moment. One lunchtime, he stopped the car at a noodle restaurant at a sightseeing spot. Never having eaten out, his daughters were stumped when they had to choose something they liked from the menu. His eldest daughter eventually found something that looked familiar on the menu and gave a waitress her order.

‘Curry rice please.’

Her father lost his temper when he heard this.

‘Who orders that sort of thing in a noodle restaurant?’

His daughter was momentarily bewildered. She had no idea why he was so angry. Having specially stopped at a soba noodle restaurant, her father naturally expected her to have some delicious noodles. That message is hardly likely to get through to a child, though, unless you spell it out clearly. Scolding without a proper explanation can only harm a child.

Her husband no longer cared about such things. His energy was entirely devoted to worrying about his apple trees.

Things were terrible, and that day they would certainly have headed home straight after lunch. She remembers nothing of the trip home. No-one in the car would have uttered a word. She had never disliked or felt so dissatisfied with her husband as then. But she knew that the turmoil her husband was in was because he cared for his family.

Had he been tackling the apple trees alone, he might not have had such bad moods. He is an unselfish man. If it was only him, he wouldn’t have cared if he was without food, or had no clothes, nor would he be upset. However hard-pressed, he would happily have pursued his dream. The reason her husband was suffered was the family.

He offered not a single apology for reducing them to poverty, but it was her husband who suffered thinking about this more than anyone. The cause of his misery was that he couldn’t buy his daughters the things they needed for school, let alone clothes, and was unable to give them the happiness they deserved. His wretchedness created a gloomy atmosphere in the home, and the children started flagging. For their part, the children didn’t find the family being poor particularly painful. Their father’s helpless misery, and the shadow it cast over their hearts, left them much more dispirited than having an awful time at school.

They didn’t mind not having money. Had they all been able to just live and laugh about it, the children would have been much happier. Everyone thought so except their father. He couldn’t bring himself to share these feelings. In the end, his feelings of guilt about his family in turn affected them. It was a sad dilemma, but there was nothing anyone could do about it. If there was any saving grace, it was that the family was not falling apart.

Her husband, uncharacteristically, once showed signs of weakening in the orchards.

‘Well, better to give up then, eh?’

Inside she knew he didn’t really believe this. To show that them that their dad was suffering too, however, she told her eldest daughter about it, and got an unexpected answer.

‘I hate that sort of talk. What are we this poor for?’

At some point, her daughter had come to share her father’s dream.

She didn’t talk to her husband about this. She knew that her daughter, in her own way as a child, knew herself, and that the stage of offering words of encouragement was long since passed. Her husband would now have to shoulder the additional burden of his primary school daughter’s hopes too. He was being driven to the edge.

Growing apples without using pesticides. This was a noble dream, but it was clearly failing. There had been no blossom for years. Some apple trees had already started to wilt. It was only a matter of time before all the trees started to wither and die. It seemed there were no options left for her husband. In the beginning, new measures had been tried out one after another, but more recently it began to feel they’d tried everything. He continued going to the orchards every day, catching insects, and spreading mud and vinegar, but the apple trees simply weakened. They’d have been much better off if they’d packed it all in. Had that been possible, it wouldn’t have been this hard.

Her husband hadn’t achieved his goal, and he wasn’t about to give up. This was something that, as a wife, she instinctively knew was true. But where was he going to end up? She’d given up thinking about it. She felt there may be something terrible waiting. If you were going to end up there anyway, there was no point in dwelling on it, however awful. All she could do was stick by her husband. This meant following him when he got up in the middle of the night and tenderly watching over him. Her husband spent nights in torment sitting on an apple box. Even if he was aware of his plight, she had no intention of bringing it up.

Four years passed, and as the fifth year dawned the state of the apple orchards continued to deteriorate. From dawn ‘til dusk, every day for five years, the four of them – the Kimuras and their parents – continued to care for their barren orchards. Neighbours could only conclude that this was sheer folly.

Being cheerful yet earnest, Kimura had many friends. In the beginning they too had been worried about Kimura. Being farmers, like Kimura, it was obvious to them that Kimura’s orchards didn’t look normal. However you looked at it, Kimura was heading in the wrong direction.

‘You knew that pesticide-free was going too far didn’t you? At least acknowledge that.’

‘How about taking your wife and children into consideration?’

Their criticism sprang from their concern as friends. However sympathetic they were when talking to him, Kimura would simply shrug in denial. Having a firm conviction sounds good, but clinging on to the belief in spite of failing to achieve anything, his family was plunging deeper into poverty. In the eyes of others, this amounted to nothing more than pigheadedness. Getting angry with Kimura and the way he ignored their sincere advice, his friends gave up on him. Friendly words of caution became quarrels, and sometimes terrible arguments.

One friend left, then another, until, in due course, all Kimura’s farmer friends disappeared. More and more people he bumped into on the street would bow their heads and pretend not to notice him. This was not just because they were acquaintances. It was almost certainly because Kimura’s face at the time looked so grimly determined. One can imagine how dejected he must have looked, wearing a frown as though he’d swallowed something sour. Meeting someone like that would put anyone off.

It was around then that Kimura acquired the nickname kamadokeshi, the worst thing you can call someone in the Tsugaru dialect. He certainly had it coming to him. The fact was that the head of a household, someone who was supposed to look after the family, was dragging them into poverty. There was nothing he could say.

‘There’s something wrong with his head.’

‘Stay away from him if you don’t want to go crazy too.’

He knew that everyone was talking about him behind his back, so Kimura naturally began to avoid people. In order not to meet anyone on the roads, he would go out to his orchards before daybreak, then find his way home when it got dark, after checking that there was no-one left in the fields.

It takes about two hours to walk from Kimura’s house to his orchards near Mount Iwaki. He’d sold the car and the tractor. All he had was a moped he’d bought from a scrap dealer for one thousand yen, and another tractor which had cost him two thousand yen. He’d bought one that wouldn’t start and repaired the engine.

He had his wife and old parents use the worn out moped and tractor. He would walk four hours in the dark to the apple orchards and back every day. This was far better than enduring the cold stares of others. How wonderful it would be to go to an uninhabited island somewhere and grow apples. He even thought how insignificant being troubled with disease and pests was compared to being watched by others.

This was a close-knit community. There was no-one who didn’t know what Kimura was doing, or the distress his family was suffering. The word murahachibu[1] didn’t crop up, but Kimura’s family were getting close to being treated as such. Invites from others of course, and even from relatives, dried up. This wasn’t so surprising either, when you imagine what they must have felt as farmers.

Orchards that are not maintained are known as hōchien or ‘deserted’ orchards. When gossiping about them, local apple farmers would whisper about the ‘hōchien over there’. There was a ring of reproach in those voices, as though they were talking about someone who’d done something immoral. This was because deserted orchards could well be the source of diseases and pests. Neglecting apple trees is a vice of sorts.

Aomori Prefecture has byelaws. Owners of apple orchards who fail to take countermeasures against diseases and pests are liable to fines. Kimura’s orchards, which he hadn’t sprayed with pesticides for five years, were more a wilderness than ‘deserted orchards’, but no-one could claim that Kimura, of all people, had infringed any bye-laws.

He was in his orchards every day, from morning to night, catching insects, and regularly sprayed the apple trees with shōchū and vinegar, although he certainly can’t have thought it would work. He was cutting the grass once a month, so weeds weren’t growing in the orchards. So he wasn’t neglecting diseases and pests; it was just that nothing was working. And this was by far the biggest problem. The fact that he didn’t infringe the bye-laws made matters worse. It meant there were no legal grounds for complaints. However many pesticides you use in apple growing, you’ll always suffer a certain amount of damage from disease and pests. Even today, with advances in pesticides and their universal application, farmers fear the spread of diseases and pests. Ever since the general use of pesticides, a cry for collective control at a regional level to eradicate diseases and pests has been heard on an annual basis. Kimura was seen as turning his back on these efforts by farmers.

This was one more problem with the pesticide-free growing of fruit trees. Not using pesticides drives even more of a wedge between you and those around you in the regional community. Pesticide-free farming may have been Kimura’s dream, but as far as other farmers were concerned it was nothing more than an illusion. From other their point of view, Kimura was ensnared in a selfish fantasy; not only was he turning his orchards into breeding grounds for diseases and pests, he was endangering the surrounding apple orchards. Deserting apple orchards normally happens when, for example, the person who is looking after them in a family dies, or there is a management failure. In Kimura’s case, he was entirely culpable. He was a menace, undeserving of any sympathy. If it had stopped at badmouthing it might not have been too bad, but it was no wonder that some people harboured feelings approaching hate towards Kimura.

These were ordinary people, and their reactions were quite reasonable. Kimura himself was wavering. Tough in front of others, self-doubt gnawed away inside him. Self-doubt would be putting it lightly.

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[1] murahachibu is similar to ‘sent to Coventry’ in British English. In Japan it refers to people ostracized by other villagers.

The faintest of hopes remained the faintest of hopes.

Three years had passed since all the orchards had become pesticide-free, and there was no hint of any apple blossom at all in the fourth year either. Their savings ran out, and they had used up all the retirement money his father-in-law had from the post office. Kimura had three daughters, the eldest being in her fourth year at middle school. The family of seven, if you included his wife’s parents, had hit rock bottom and were staring poverty in the face.

He sold their pride and joy, the English tractor, of course, as well as their car, and the two ton truck they had used to transport apples. Their tax arrears remain unpaid, and on more than a couple of occasions revenue officials stuck red tags on his trees. When that happened, in desperation he scraped together a little money and somehow managed to prevent them going up for auction. He borrowed money from the bank, but that ran out, so he applied for a consumer loan, and borrowed money from his own parents and other relatives.

The telephone had been cut ages ago. This left them having to raise just enough cash to pay for vital electricity and water services. Unable to pay their health insurance, their health insurance cards had been taken away. They couldn’t even afford the PTA fees. They couldn’t stretch to buying clothes for their daughters, let alone the things they needed for school. They sewed patches on the holes in their socks, and when pencils became too short and stubby to hold, his wife would stick two together using sellotape so that they could still be used. She even cut one eraser into three and gave each child a piece. All this happened not that long ago.

At the beginning of the 1980’s, Ezra Vogel’s book Japan as Number One became a bestseller, and the Japanese economy was deemed a model. The price of apples was high and stable, and life for the folk of Iwaki-chō was good. It was not unusual for local children to go on to universities or colleges in Tokyo, and no-one was particularly surprised when children travelled abroad after they graduated. To the eyes of others, the austere, post-war type of life the Kimura family was enduring must have seemed peculiar rather than wretched.

The other reason Kimura was able to continue confronting his flowerless apple trees whilst enduring that sort of life, was that he planted rice in the fields and vegetables in the spaces between the apple orchards. They were all grown pesticide-free. Cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, aubergines, pumpkins, melons, daikon [1] radishes … . He could grow any crop without pesticides. He was even able to produce more than nine sacks of rice from one paddy field without the use of pesticides or fertilizers. This is hardly worse than ordinary fields, where pesticides and fertilizers are used, which yield about ten sacks of rice.

Pesticide-free cultivation of crops other than apples was not that difficult.

‘Then again, the first year I produced rice without using pesticides or fertilizers, I could only manage a yield per field of four sacks. This wasn’t so amazing, but I thought it was pretty good. Going pesticide-free I’d definitely produced good quality rice. It was delicious too. But you can’t make a living from that sort of yield. Unless I could make a living, my dream would be over. If the rice, as well as the apples, had failed, the world would have taken me for a fool. So I tried an experiment. With rice growing, too, you can only try something out once a year. So, you know that One Cup saké [2]? I got hold of a bunch of empty jars from the saké shop and did an experiment. I lined up about two hundred jars and put some soil from the fields in each of them. I wanted to see which ways of tilling the soil, which methods of levelling, and what sort growing conditions, are best for growing rice.’

He didn’t use rice in this ‘experiment’; he used seeds of Japanese millet, one of the true grasses. The growth of grasses is much faster than rice and if he grew Japanese millet in the cups, he could repeat the tests many times in one year.

Cultivating them all under different growing conditions, he found there were tremendous variations in the development of the millet planted in the two hundred One Cups. Common sense suggested that breaking up the soil carefully, turning the mud into a gloopy, thick soup consistency, and levelling it off, would be the ideal method. But tests showed that the Japanese millet grew best in the cups where exactly the opposite tilling methods were used. The millet grew well if he tilled the soil so that clods remained, and then levelled it off two or three times. The result was the complete opposite of what he had believed up until then. Since the initial results could have been chance, he repeated the same experiment three times. The result was the same every time.

From the following year Kimura changed the tilling method in the paddy fields, ploughing far more coarsely than normal.

‘The farmers laughed at me, wondering what I was up to. I was doing the ploughing but leaving great lumps of earth all over the fields. I’d then flood the fields and level them off. If I lightly muddled-up the surface as in the experiments, I finished really quickly. Then when I planted, I ended up with an incredible crop of rice. Immediately after planting, growth seemed to be slower than in normal fields, but in about the middle of July, the rice suddenly shot up.

Pulling up the rice, you could see how healthily the roots were growing. The number of roots, and their quality, were far superior to any rice grown in fields which had been ploughed normally. Maybe because ploughing coarsely made it easier for the roots to grow. Directly after planting, they would be putting all their energy into developing the roots, so the plant above the ground doesn’t grow much. On the other hand, once the network of healthy roots has grown underground, the leaves and grain flourish better than usual above ground. We didn’t have combines at the time, so we harvested by the sheaf, but there was so much there was no way you could lift one of those sheaves of rice by hand. The crop was slightly over seven sacks per field. This was about double the harvest of the previous year. The yield we managed the following year was about nine and a quarter bags.’

In the course of his experimentation using the One Cup jars, Kimura made another discovery. One week or so after he planted some millet seeds, about the time the shoots should have been appearing, he poked a disposable chopstick down into the cup. The millet in that cup did not send up shoots. The chopstick crushed the seeds.

With this in mind, Kimura devised a unique method for weeding. When the time was right, about a week after planting when the seedlings were settled, he walked between them dragging a tire chain. After doing this three or four times, leaving a week between them, weeds more or less stopped growing in the field. If he didn’t use weed killer, he would inevitably be faced with the laborious job of weeding the fields. This was one of the stumbling blocks farmers who aspired to going pesticide-free faced, but the simple act of walking along dragging a chain overcame that obstacle. Using this method, even elderly farmers would be able to stop using weed killer without too much inconvenience.

Everyone thinks pesticide-free farming is labour intensive, something challenging that requires sophisticated techniques. In fact, once he got started he found it wasn’t that bad. Difficulties will certainly arise immediately after you switch from using agrichemicals. Once you settle down and start observing your crops, though, you’re certain to find ways of solving the problems.

Kimura was also growing pear and plum trees in his apple orchards. He wasn’t using pesticides on any of those trees, but none of them were damaged by pests and diseases as much as the apple trees. Both pears and plums produced delicious fruit every year.

Since it was easily done with other crops, Kimura thought there was no reason why it should be impossible just for apples. They may be afflicted by pests and disease now, but he reckoned that one day he’d solve the problems and find a way for the trees to bear fruit. He was convinced. This conviction was, in one way, Kimura’s biggest handicap.

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[1] daikon are long, mild white radishes, normally growing to about 25 centimetres in length.

[2] One Cup Saké is a well known brand sold in small glass cups with removable lids.

‘The first pests to appear in spring are leafrollers. Then the caterpillars and spring cankerworm appear. There were many types of caterpillar, the larvae of moths. My orchard had many larvae of the Japanese buff-tip moth. There were also larvae of the white-spotted tussock moth and others. Red, green, and other bright colours pretty to look at. I was amazed at how many leaves they ate. You remember I mentioned that if apple trees lose their leaves, new leaves will shoot. They emerge from the tips of the branches. So, whilst the insects were busy consuming all the leaves, they would mass together on the tips of the branches which still had new leaves, like passengers on an overcrowded train. That was the wake-up call. Talk about the rush hour, well that’s what it was like. The weight of the insects actually weighed down the tips of the branches. There must have been thousands! Tens of thousands! Hundreds of thousands! Anyway, there were an incredible number of insects on the trees. It was a staggering, almost unbelievable sight.’

To begin with Kimura thought he’d catch the pests by hand.

The overwhelming numbers of insects alone made catching them impossible. He might not have been able to catch them, but that didn’t mean he simply left them alone. Somehow, he would at least have to eradicate the pests on the trees planted along the boundaries between orchards. He had no intention of allowing the insects to spread to his neighbours’ orchards. Day-in, day-out, Kimura and Michiko, and his father and mother-in-law, would get up at the crack of dawn and collect insects until sunset. The tools they used were plastic bags from the supermarket, slipping one handle over their left wrists and flicking the insects into the bags with their other hand. In this way they could use both hands.

They filled three bags with pests from one tree. However many they caught, though, wave after wave of insects would continue to appear. It was a job offering no sense of fulfilment whatsoever. It was like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it with water from a pond. The pests showed no sign at all of diminishing. Needless to say not a single apple grew. However assiduously they caught insects, the harvest was zero. He wondered why they carried on with it. Kimura devoted all his time to catching insects and pondering this dilemma.

Dead apple leaves falling to the ground make a sound so faint it is hardly a sound at all. Holding a plastic bag under his arm, silently catching insects, Kimura would listen to that quiet sound. It was one day at the height of summer. Sweat poured out of him, flowing down his forehead and over his jaw. With both hands full, however, he couldn’t wipe it away.

One by one he’d pluck the caterpillars clinging to the branches, blinking his eyes to get rid of the sweat. The surrounding apple trees were smothered in dark green leaves in the dazzling sunshine. The foliage was so dense you could hardly see the other side of the orchard. Chilly autumn seemed to pervade Kimura’s orchards, and his alone.

Rustle … rustle… rustle …

The faint sound of falling leaves began to sound like the beating of a big drum. The thundering noise echoed in his ears the entire time Kimura was in the orchards. He felt he could hear the sounds, even when we got home and went to bed. It seemed as though the apples were crying out.

Brown sugar, pepper, garlic, chilli, soya sauce, miso, milk, Japanese saké, shōchu, rice starch, wheat flour, vinegar … . He continued experimenting with any foods he could lay his hands on in place of pesticides. Foods in place of pesticides. If he could only find them this battle would be over. Or so Kimura thought. It was unlikely, of course, that he’d find foods that were as effective as pesticides. He didn’t believe they would provide 100% protection against disease and insects. It would be enough if, by creating an environment on the surfaces of leaves and branches which the bacteria and pests which caused disease disliked, sufficient numbers of leaves remained for the apples to grow. What Kimura was looking for, therefore, was not antibacterial agents or pesticides, but some sort of repellent.

The capsaicin in chillies, for example, is used as a spice in cooking, but it was a substance originally produced so that the leaves and fruits of plants would not be eaten by insects. Many plants, in the course of evolution, have started to produce the substance by themselves. Salt can suppress bacterial activity. It has also been known for ages that alcohol and vinegar have antibacterial properties. It would have been worth it had just one of them worked. Or so he thought every time he tried out a new food. Not one of them, though, was sufficiently effective.

He would collect large quantities of dry grass and chicken manure, and make compost. This natural compost was then spread on the orchards. He would cut back the weeds completely every month. The whole family went out to catch insects from morning to night. They tried grating garlic, mixing it with water, and spreading it on the trees, and diluting vinegar and applying that. Each day in the apple orchard started and ended with experiments. He spent longer in his orchards than any of the neighbouring farmers, and spent more time looking after his apples than any other farmer.

In spite of all this, Kimura’s orchards looked in a far worse state than even the most slovenly of farmers. Virtually all the leaves were affected by disease. The few green leaves and branches that did remain were covered with pests, and underfoot was a thick carpet of fallen leaves. Kimura’s orchards were an apple farmer’s worst nightmare.

‘There was nothing in the kitchen at the time that we didn’t try out. We ended up spreading stuff over the soil in the orchards. There is a disease which affects apple trees called Japanese apple canker. It’s a disease caused by a certain fungus that lands on tree trunks and branches and proceeds to cause rotting. Mud has traditionally been used to prevent it. It could be cleared up by cutting out the infected area and covering it with mud. I think that the bacteria in the soil suppress the fungus which causes the canker. I thought I could use that. As you’re not supposed to put the soil directly onto the trees, I made slurry from earth from the orchards. This was left overnight and the mud would settle to the bottom. The clearer liquid at the top would be filtered through a cloth and then sprayed on the trees.

The muddy water was probably more effective than anything else. The condition of the leaves improved a tiny bit. But not enough for us to go pesticide-free. However carefully we tried filtering it with cloth, we couldn’t remove the finer particles which were almost invisible to naked eye. This resulted in the pump we were using to spray getting blocked and breaking. I’ve no idea how many pumps we destroyed. We were running out of money at the time, so we’d buy broken pumps from an agricultural scrap machinery dealer. One was about one hundred yen. We’d use them if we could repair them. If it was just scratched pistons, they could be used again if we carefully polished them using fine sandpaper. I’d done quite a bit of polishing of engine camshafts in the Shonan tuning shop, so I found it easy enough. There were times I would spend every night polishing cam shafts. Ha-ha-ha. I’m not sure if I’m a farmer or a mechanic.’

Spring can also be a cruel season.

The snow melts, the sun gets warmer, and hope springs in the heart which has been depressed all winter. Trees which had lost all their leaves and seemed to have withered produced new leaves at the beginning of spring. Seeing the pale green leaves, free from disease and pests, you feel that this may be the year it could happen. Let’s try for one more year. That happens one year, then the second year passes, then the third. The more time passes, the more difficult it becomes to give up. If you do give up, then all your effort will have been in vain.

‘The leaves this year look better than last year. This year things will work out.’

Kimura said the same thing every year. But nothing got better. All he was doing was comparing what he saw with the dire state the previous autumn, and saying that the new leaves seemed healthy.

Kimura laughed when he said ‘It was like I was brainwashing the family’, but he was in all likelihood brainwashing himself more than the family.

‘If you don’t use pesticides then you’re bound to get a certain number of insects. But, this wasn’t a question of ‘a certain number’. Where on earth that number of insects came from is a mystery. What was interesting, though, was how much the look of the orchards changed as the years passed. With pests increasing, and getting bigger, the changes were basically unwelcome ones.

Inchworms are usually about as thick as a matchstick. But these were as thick as my little finger. If you picked them up they’d bite you. There were a lot of slugs too. Not like the small ones you might get in the kitchen. They were enormous. One I found was about ten centimetres long! It might have been a mountain slug I suppose, but I found it clinging to the side of an apple tree the sun didn’t get to. When I went out to the orchards in the morning I found moist, whitish slug trails gleaming on the barks of the trees. What were they eating for heaven’s sake? There were such huge numbers of them I tried to remove as many as I could, because I imagined they could cause damage, but they might have been eating the larvae of pests for all I know. I just didn’t have the sense to think about things like that at the time.’

It was hardly a Pandora’s box, but amongst all those changes there was a ray of hope. The second year after he stopped using pesticides, the spider mites disappeared. Spider mites damage fruit leaves by feeding on them. Miticides are normally used to get rid of them, but there are many species, and how effective an agent is will vary depending on the species. On top of which, their resistance to these agents is high, which means that continuing to use the same miticide can result in loss of effectiveness.

Even if you’re using miticides, when you return from a day working on the apples, you’ll find your hat and the back of your clothing dotted with poppy seed-sized mites. They’re almost an integral part of apple farming. They’re extremely hard to get rid of. For some reason, every single mite disappeared.

‘I hadn’t used a single drop of miticide, so how could that happen? If mites disappear, the inchworms and leaf rollers could disappear too. I had no reason to believe they would, but hope springs eternal. Although it wasn’t to say that the apples would fruit because the mites had gone. It just became the faintest of hopes.’

The first fungicide used at this time was Bordeaux mixture, a compound invented in Europe. Kimura had used it once. The name Bordeaux mixture comes from Bordeaux, the famous wine-producing region in France. A fungicide originally used in vineyards, it was recognized that a mixture of copper sulphate and quick lime could protect vines against pests thanks to its powerful anti-bacterial properties in about the middle of the nineteenth century. Its use spread around the world with the overwhelming growth in disease and pests, not only among vines, but also in other crop cultivation.

Methods for growing fruit trees had been changing significantly. Grapes, apples, satsuma oranges, peaches … Individual fruit trees were densely planted in huge orchards. One of the pleasures of travelling through France and Italy was the beautiful prospect of endless vineyards on gentle slopes, but this was a far cry from the beauty of the purely natural. They were landscapes minus all the native plants, insects, and animals.

To the extent that we all benefit from civilization today, it is hard to be critical of these practices.

We only drink wine thanks to the landscape being like it is. This is why we can eat apples and peaches, not to mention rice. Some 6.4 billion people live on earth today. Producing enough food for these people to eat is what it’s really all about.

Be that as it may, nature makes no allowances for human beings’ circumstances. There are forces at work trying to return unnatural environments to nature. Take an environment where the natural ecosystem is maintained, and in which the numbers of one type of insect, for example, are limited within a certain range due to the quantity of food available and other organisms which prey on those insects. A feedback mechanism is at work in the ecosystem. This feedback does not function in an apple orchard. If you point a microphone at speakers, the speaker noise picked up by the microphone is amplified infinitely, causing a phenomenon known as ‘howling’. Something very similar happens inside an ecosystem.

Leaf-eating insects are known as herbivores. In the natural world, herbivores are destined to be food for other animals. Herbivores, and this means mammals and fish, as well as insects, can give birth to many young. A proportion of them will be eaten by meat-eating animals. Where there is an inexhaustible supply of food, however, and in this case apple leaves, numbers no longer decrease. Meat-eaters, destined to perish once they have eaten all the herbivores, do not produce as many offspring as herbivores. When, thanks to an abundance of food, the increase in herbivores exceeds a certain threshold, balancing mechanisms based on meat-eaters cease working. In the same way as when a microphone picks up speaker noises and the sound is infinitely amplified, the young, which should be decrease in numbers as they are eaten, do not diminish. They survive and become parents of the next generation and so on. This results in an explosive increase from one generation to the next. There are several generations of pests in an apple orchard in the course of a year. In human terms, it would mean a hundredfold increase in no time at all. This was the shape apple orchards were in a hundred years ago.

They may only be insects, but they can be a terrifying prospect. Records of the damage caused by huge swarms of migratory locusts in the grain-growing regions of China stretch back to ancient times. With the larvae of some species of locust, increases in numbers and population density can even bring about changes in their physiology. Their wings and hind legs lengthen to allow them to fly long distances, transforming them into a marauding horde which acts as a single entity, devouring any vegetation in its path.

Because their appearance and behaviour change significantly in what is known as the locusts’ gregarious phase, until the start of the twentieth century they were considered a different species to ordinary locusts. The ancient Chinese called them oriental migratory locusts.

In the Edo Period, rice in Japan was so badly devastated by the spread of an insect called the whitebacked planthopper it caused a major famine. They were as big a natural threat as tidal waves and forest fires.

Whilst migratory locusts and planthoppers don’t spread to apple orchards, of all the crops people grew, apples were the trees which were the most readily affected by diseases and pests. People these days just about manage to withstand these menaces and produce apples thanks to Bordeaux mixture and the agrichemicals developed subsequently.

Kimura stopped using these pesticides. The writing was on the wall. And it came to pass. Disease was rampant, and pests proliferated. Without pesticides, all that lies ahead for apple orchards is devastation.

What he experienced was what his predecessors had gone through a hundred years earlier. Had applying shōchū or wasabi worked, no-one would have had to struggle. For thirty years or so from 1887, thousands of apple farmers and agricultural scientists confronted the same problem as Kimura, and like him tried out many ingenious schemes. After decades of struggle, they found the grail they sought in pesticides. Kimura was trying to rewrite history. He was overly confident.

Kimura’s words ‘I was hurtling along the road to hell’ are no exaggeration. Kimura was indeed heading for the worst possible scenario. He was turning the history of apple growing in Japan on its head and rushing headlong towards disaster.

Until varieties began to be improved in England in the eighteenth century, apples were a fruit which grew at most to the size of satsuma oranges. As noted earlier, they were used solely as an ingredient in cooking, or to make alcoholic drinks. They were sometimes eaten as they were, but that was probably because in those days they didn’t have the abundance of sweet fruits we have today. The modern palate would find it lacking in sweetness, overly acidic and sour, and anything but the sort of thing you could eat.

In the nineteenth century, this close relative of the wild varieties was called the crab apple, to distinguish it from other apples. Simply saying ‘apple’ would mean you were talking about the improved varieties of larger, sweeter apples. The varieties which had been improved were the ones which became ordinary apples. They may have been larger, but only relative to the crab apple. Europeans tend not to slice apples up and share them as they do in Japan. They prefer smaller varieties, ones they can take whole bites out of. Perhaps eating habits from the days when they ate small crab apples remain largely unchanged in Europe today.

Variety improvements that started in England developed rapidly in the New World. It was the immigrants from Europe following the Mayflower who carried apple trees to the American continent. As it was the seventeenth century, they would have been crab apples. They were probably a fruit which reminded them of their much missed homes in Europe, but they were most highly prized as a fruit that provided juice in place of drinking water, and as the main ingredient in cider. Securing safe drinking water was of paramount importance in the unexplored territories. A pioneer’s garden would always have apple trees, and as they moved westward, the apple producing area spread from east to west with them.

The character Johnny Appleseed then appeared on the scene. Appleseed is a legendary hero known to all Americans. His real name was John Chapman. He planted apple trees. He assisted pioneers, planting tens of thousands of apple trees in the areas they settled. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the time when Appleseed was going about his work, new varieties of apple appeared one after the other in America. Most of the ancestors of the eating apple varieties directly linked to today’s apples appeared at this time. People who had only ever known small, sour apples, must have been astonished at these big, sweet apples. New variety seedlings were re-imported into Europe, the home of the apple, and the American-born, large apples, enjoyed a worldwide boom.

The consequences of this also reached the shores of the recently colonized islands of the Far East. It was in 1853, eight years after Appleseed died, that Perry arrived in Uraga with four steamships.

Seven years later, Niimi Buzen no Kami, who had travelled to America as special envoy heading a mission to ratify the Treaty of Amity and Commerce between the United States and Japan, brought seedlings of these Western apples back to Japan from America. We do not know if they were a gift from someone in the United States government, or if Buzen no Kami had bought them himself, but there is no doubt that these Western apples were foreign fruits meant as souvenirs for high ranking shogunate officials. These large, sweet, improved variety of apple, would be the pride of a civilized America; a cutting edge, high tech product as we would say nowadays.

Once we enter the Meiji Period, growing of this Western apple started all over Japan. The Japanese government’s Ministry of Home Affairs Industrial Promotion Board and the Hokkaido Development Commission imported Western apple seedlings from America as part of a national policy to develop agriculture and, after propagation by grafting at agricultural experiment stations around the country, distributed them to prefectures throughout Japan.

Japanese horticultural techniques had been very highly advanced since the Edo Period. In the hands of an Edo gardener, propagating the fruit trees from America by grafting would have been a simple matter.

In fact there have been apples in Japan for a long time. They are referred to in a letter of thanks for a gift of apples received by Nagamasa Azai, who was married to Oda Nobunaga’s younger sister Oichi[1]. But those apples were most likely to have been the wild variety that had arrived in Japan via China and which grew in the Tien Shan or Celestial Mountains. In Japan, where water is abundant , there was no custom of replacing water with squeezed fruit juice, or making alcohol from fruit, as there was in Europe. It seems that they were almost exclusively for ornamental use.

The Chinese characters for apple refer to this early Japanese apple. When the apples which had come from America started to be cultivated around Japan, traces of the old Japanese apple faded, and it became known as the wa-ringo, or Japanese apple. Indeed, the same thing happened in Japan as had happened with the original, almost wild apple, which came to be known as the crab apple.

The Western apple was surprisingly vigorous and spread throughout Japan. The Industry Promotion Board began distributing apple seedlings in the seventh year of the Meiji Period (1874). These grew and first bore fruit in about the tenth year of Meiji (1877). Apples started fruiting throughout Japan in the thirteenth year of Meiji (1880). The apples, incomparably more delicious than the Japanese apple, sold very well indeed. It was said that you could ‘earn as much from a single apple tree as sixteen bags of rice’, the land devoted to apple growing increased dramatically and, in the twentieth year of Meiji (1887) there was the first ‘apple boom’. Apples were grown throughout Japan at the time. The scheme devised by officials in the agricultural policy planning of office of the Meiji government was a spectacular success. But it didn’t last.

It wasn’t just the people who welcomed the arrival of the new varieties of apple. Sweet apples became the prime target of insects. Pests went for the soft new buds and leaves, as well as the fruit. The farming community noticed this the moment they started growing apples. But these were Japanese farmers of the Meiji Period. They weren’t rattled by a few insects. These were times when they knew nothing of so-called pesticides. When insects increased, they would protect their apple trees by energetically trying to catch them from before dawn.

From the thirtieth year of Meiji (1897), right in the middle of the apple boom, even the hardest working farmers were overwhelmed. The increase in insects was far from ordinary.

There’s one insect called the woolly apple aphid. These parasitic insects are often found where branches divide and around shoots and, as their name suggests, they protect themselves by producing masses of white filaments. It is a troublesome insect which hinders flower bud formation and impedes swelling of the fruit. It was brought to Japan when the seedlings were imported from America, and so is not an indigenous species. Having no natural enemies, apple orchards everywhere in Japan were attacked by huge numbers of woolly aphids and decimated. To make matters worse, the larvae of a variety of moths, including apple ermine moths and peach fruit moths, flourished, devouring flowers and leaves. On top of which, Japanese apple canker, a disease that rots the trunks of apples, spread, damaging apple trees to such an extent it made their revitalization impossible. Towards the end of the Meiji, nearly every prefecture abandoned apple growing.

The reason Aomori Prefecture alone didn’t give it up was because silk cultivation was not possible. Rice had had its day and, whether they liked it or not, the money economy was spreading to farming villages. Farmers needed a cash crop. This was another reason the Meiji government had introduced apple growing so aggressively. To rank alongside Western powers and succeed in becoming a prosperous country with a strong army, revenue from taxation had to be increased. To increase revenue from taxes, it was necessary to raise the incomes of farmers, who at that time made up more than half the population of the country. Of course the Meiji government not only introduced apple growing. They sought various other ways for farmers to earn a cash income.

Silk cultivation was one of them, and as silk products were Japan’s main export, silk farmers were able to secure decent incomes. There was no need to needlessly struggle to grow apples in areas where silk production was possible.

In Aomori, however, silk cultivation was not possible for reasons to do with the temperature. Apples, moreover, could be cropped even in years when rice was badly hit by cold weather. For Aomori farmers, who had suffered repeated damage from the cold weather, apples offered a promising way out of poverty. They were not going to give up apple farming.

By sheer force of numbers they exterminated the exploding pest population. By hand, and one-by-one, they removed hundreds of thousands of insects, knocking them off using sticks wrapped with rags. To prevent them being eaten by the pests, they tied a bag around every single apple. Then they soaked straw with caustic soda and used it to wash each tree. Stories are told of how it took thirty five pairs of hands to cover an apple orchard of a quarter of an acre. Polished up, the apple trees would probably have gleamed like the alcove pillar [2]in a living room. If a tree did perish, they would cut it down and plant a seedling in its place.

In the fourth decade of the Meiji Period (1907-1917), the orchards of Aomori Prefecture, having somehow managed to make it thus far thanks to the farmers’ tireless efforts, succumbed to blossom blight and apple leaf spot infestation, and this time faced the prospect of destruction. As it happened, the outbreak of leaf spot in the forty-fourth year of Meiji (1911), the leaves fell early, so early the following spring the apples failed to blossom and, for the second year in a row, there was a major crop failure.

Whilst they had weathered the pest infestation, thanks to the sheer number of farmers, they were helpless in the face of disease. Disease is not something you can pluck off by hand. Needless to say, people at the time did what they could, just like Kimura. They tried all sorts of measures used to control pests, including the Japanese andromeda shrub and quick lime, sulphur, tobacco stems, and soapy water, but were unable to curb the spread of the diseases.

It was pesticides that came to their rescue and saved them from this desperate situation. As far as the history of apple growing is concerned, records show that pesticides were first used in Japan in the forty-fourth year of Meiji (1911). It was the year in which the Aomori apple orchards were devastated by the spread of apple leaf spot. In that year, pesticides which had been used in Europe and America were applied under the direction of a researcher at the agriculture experiment station in Aomori. To start with there were problems about how to use them, as well adverse effects such as the spreading of pesticides hastening the falling of leaves, so they weren’t very widely used. Correct methods had been established by the start of the Taisho Period, however, with remarkable results achieved in terms of control and prevention.

When they saw life returning to apple trees which had been heading for extinction due to leaf spot, the apples farmers raced to introduce pesticides. As with streptomycin, the wonder drug for tuberculosis, pesticides helped eradicate apple diseases they had been unable to do anything about. Now they had an effective means of countering the threat posed by pests, farmers were at last able to grow apples with confidence. Without pesticides, there is no doubt at all that apple growing would have ended in Aomori Prefecture too.

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[1] Oichi married Azai in 1565. Azai committed suicide at the age of 28, when his castle at Odani was besieged after Oichi informed her father that her husband had rebellious intentions.

[2] The most important room in a Japanese home traditionally has an alcove with a pillar made from a single tree trunk. This is specially selected and often highly polished.

The apple trees in Aomori bloom in May. There was no problem with the flowering. He didn’t spray so the air in the orchards was clean and fresh. Mount Iwaki rose peerlessly in the clear blue sky. The apple trees Kimura had raised by hand were blossoming pure white against the beautiful scene.

Apple and cherry blossom look alike as they are both trees belong to the genus Rosa, but the leaves of the apple appear before the blossom. The white flowers blossom amongst green leaves. They are not as vivid, so apple blossoms are not as popular for blossom-viewing as cherry trees. However, for the apple farmer, it is a sight that more than any other makes the heart sing. Once the leaves and blossom have formed, the apple fruit can begin to grow. Once pollinated, the base of the flower begins to swell. As much of the nutrients, stored inside the leaves, are sent to the tiny fruits as possible. The flourishing leaves promise autumn fruitfulness.

The late spring sunshine in the Tohoku region strengthens rapidly. The leaves get bigger and become darker green in response to the intensifying light. By June there was hardly any of the insect damage he had feared. He felt he was in a dream. Perhaps he’d stumbled on something incredible. Pesticides weren’t necessary to grow apples … . Perhaps it was good that he’d given up chemical fertilizers and used compost? If you could cultivate simply without pesticides, this farming method would spread rapidly through Japan. Apple farmers would be released from enslavement to them. Maybe he would get the glory for it! People talk about welcoming a false dawn. Well, Kimura was literally lost in those feelings as he gazed on apple trees which seemed to be the very picture of health. Things went well, but only for the first two months. Just as July started, something strange happened. The leaves on the apples started going yellow.

‘It really was just as July started. Yellowing leaves started to appear. Yellow on a green background stands out. The yellow apple leaves then fell everywhere.

A few falling leaves would have been alright. When I’d tried reducing the pesticides there’d been some disease. I just thought that, well, I could expect some disease. As I hadn’t used pesticides it was only to be expected. To begin with I didn’t worry too much about it. But it didn’t stop. All the leaves in the orchards quickly began turning yellow, and by the end of July half of them had fallen. By the middle of August, less than half of them were left. The few that were hanging on were nearly all yellow. The trees were just about bare. They’d bloomed in early spring, so apples were forming but, how shall I put it, it was like they were just stuck on a mountain of withered branches.

If leaves get diseased and fall, apples trees will do their best to put out new leaves. But the new leaves that eventually opened immediately became diseased. The disease was alternaria blotch. It’s a disease where dark brown spots appear on the leaves and the entire leaf turns yellow and falls. It had never occurred to me that this kind of damage would happen simply if pesticides weren’t used. The difference between orchards which had been sprayed with pesticides once, and orchards which had not been sprayed at all, was like heaven and hell.

To be honest, that was the only time that I thought to myself how incredible pesticides were. Simply by applying pesticides you could prevent diseases like that! It seems strange, but looking at those orchards and their mountains of withered trees, a fighting spirit arose in me. In early spring when there’d been no problems, I’d not felt so satisfied. After all, apart from not using pesticides, and making compost, I’d not really done anything. But I did know that pesticide-free apple growing was never going to be straightforward, and this fired me up. This was what I’d been waiting for.

I was determined to somehow change that mountain of barren trees back to the sort of green apple orchards they were originally.’

When summer ended and autumn came along, the apple trees in the withered orchards started flowering all at once. It was an unseasonal blooming. Most of the leaves had fallen, then the temperature dropped, and I guess it was biologically like being subjected to spring conditions for the apple trees.

The apples harvest was under way in other orchards … In Kimura’s orchards, next to the small, undeveloped fruits which were still bitter, in spite of it being autumn, there were apple blossoms. It was a chilling scene. Apple trees which bloom in autumn won’t bloom the following spring. These are next year’s buds. There was no hope for the following year’s harvest either. But to Kimura’s eyes, it seemed as though the apple trees were desperately trying to survive. When apples lose their leaves, they put out new ones. However many fall, they are replaced with new ones. However blighted they had become, they were fighting to live. Leaves are a plant’s source of life.

Several hundred chloroplasts exist in one leaf cell. Chloroplasts convert sunlight into energy, synthesize sugars from CO₂ and water they absorb from the atmosphere, and metabolize fats and proteins. For a plant, losing its leaves is the same as an animal not being able to obtain food. Even when faced with acute starvation conditions, the apple trees were mistaken about the coming of spring and flowered in order to ensure survival of the next generation.

As long as you can get rid of diseases affecting the leaves, their innate vitality should revive the apple trees. The key to pesticide-free apple growing is first and foremost protecting the leaves. How far can the leaves be protected if you don’t use pesticides? If a method can be found, then pesticide-free growing of apples, deemed impossible, could be made to work. Kimura talked to no-one about this, but in his heart of hearts he believed he could do it.

The first time you take a close look at a motorbike or tractor engine, they seem very complicated. As you disassemble them, one by one the inner mechanical working of all the parts becomes clear. Once you understand these, you can rebuild the engine in the way you planned. The same is true for apples.

The organisms that cause diseases in apples are fungi and bacteria. Alternaria blotch, for example, is a type of fungus. It thrives on the surface of apple leaves and fruit, destroying biological functions. It’s similar to a human skin disease and, as such, preventing it ought not to be that difficult if one can only find and treat the bacteria or fungus with an agent it dislikes.

Kimura wondered whether, instead of pesticides, he could find a way to prevent disease using food the family normally ate. If so, as well as making it safe for people who ate apples of course, apple growing would also be safe for the farmers.

It would have less environmental impact too. With this in mind, he was able to make a list of several foods that would seem to fit the bill. There are more than a few foods which have natural anti-bacterial properties, including garlic and wasabi. Even if they weren’t powerful anti-bacterials, he could probably find foods with properties that would prevent the growth of fungus and bacteria.

But, there was a problem. It would take too long to experiment with all of these in one orchard. The reason he’d started pesticide-free farming with just one of the four orchards had to do with income. Kimura hadn’t thought they’d be successful with pesticide-free farming from the start. Even if he got no income from the orchard he did not use pesticides on, then at least it would only mean a loss of a quarter of their income. He didn’t know how long it would take, but the plan was to expand pesticide-free growing to the other orchards once they had a stable income without the use of pesticides.

Gazing at the withered orchard he realized that this was no time for such half measures. All the apple trees were malnourished. If this continued, the trees themselves would weaken. He had to discover a way to protect the leaves without delay. But you only see the products of apple growing once a year. That’s the difficult thing about agriculture. It means, for example, that if you work growing apples for thirty years, you can only produce apples thirty times. He wanted, as far as possible, to increase the number of trials so that he could find an answer quickly.

Kimura went pesticide-free in two orchards the following year. The year after that he took a risk and stopped using pesticides in all the orchards. The apple harvest was zero. They still had some rice fields, so they didn’t lose all sources of income, but the money coming into the family fell to next to nothing.

In spite of this, he believed that this was the only way to succeed. Too bad if people thought he was mad. But perhaps Kimura was losing his mind …

‘No apple crop means no income. I had done something stupid. I was on the road heading straight to hell. But I was dead set on it. The only thing I could think about was finding foods which might help control the spread of alternaria blotch.’ This is how Kimura puts it. It’s a bad habit he’s had since he was a boy. He loses sight of everything else once his heart is set on something. In the days when he played with machines and did up motorbikes, he’d work non-stop for two or three days without sleep until he finished. This was the first time he’d been in that state of mind since he got married. For Kimura, going pesticide-free was more than simply a job. In that sense one might also say that he was fortunate. Although even if he was fortunate, it was an extremely dangerous state of mind as far as the domestic finances were concerned.

‘As far as getting an income was concerned, I just couldn’t really care. The thought didn’t cross my mind. I dream up one scheme I want to try after another. I have to admit they were pretty random. You eat rice and put soya sauce on your fish. So I wondered whether soya sauce might work. When an idea comes to me I desperately need to try it out.

That’s all you think about, even when asleep and dreaming. Once I got an idea, I had to go out into the orchards, even if it meant getting up in the middle of the night. I tried making a paste from wheat flour and spreading that, and diluting shōchū [1]and sprinkling that on. I also tried using wasabi[2]! I mixed powdered wasabi with water, but that was unbearable as it brought tears to my eyes. If I went into the orchards a short time after spreading it, my nose would sting from the smell of wasabi. Ha-ha-ha … that story makes me laugh.’

He tried using egg whites, too. He’d read that milk worked for aphids in a gardening book about roses. If it worked for insects, he thought, it might work on diseases. So with this in mind, he diluted some milk with water and sprayed with that. Milk doesn’t mix well with water. He made an emulsion, mixing it by hand with soap, and tried applying that. Nothing happened of course. Measures for aphids clearly didn’t work on alternaria blotch. But Kimura’s was beginning to think along different lines. Milk is animal protein. He wondered whether egg white, which was after all the same sort of animal protein, might be effective.

‘So, this time, I decided trying out egg whites. All we seemed to eat around then was the yokes of eggs, day-in, day-out. Whatever I tried, nothing worked. I don’t know what on earth I thought I was doing. Still, I carried on thinking something or other might work. When something didn’t work one year, I thought I’d give something else a go next. It might seem crazy, but I went on and on doing that. The apple trees looked wretched. They got worse and worse.

Alternaria blotch was out of control, and the number of pests exploded. It was insect heaven on earth!’

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[1] shōchū is a clear spirit normally made from potatoes, rice, or barley.

[2] wasabi is a pungent condiment similar to horseradish. Made from a root that grows in clear streams, the paste can be made from powdered wasabi, or freshly grated, and is often served with sushi.

‘I just thought it was amazing. If you could only do that with apples!

If I hadn’t read Fukuoka’s book, I wouldn’t have given it a thought. Let’s face it, there’s no-one around who’s going to do things like that is there? Using pesticides to grow apples is taken for granted; it was out of the question that anyone could grow apples without them. I reckon that every farmer today thinks the same. In one sense, it’s true. Normally, without pesticides, you’re going to fail for sure. But reading that sort of book can give you other ideas. However possible it may’ve been with other fruit trees, if you didn’t use pesticides in apple growing, and it was only apples, it was impossible. If you really think about it, though, no-one knew if it was possible or not as they hadn’t tried. Diseases and pests certainly increase in apple orchards which are no longer looked after, making them unmanageable. I used to think they go like that because pesticides weren’t used, but is that really the case?’

Fukuoka’s farm is in Ehime Prefecture. There was nothing about growing apples in the book Kimura had bought. There were, however, detailed notes about satsuma orange cultivation.

Fukuoka later left the management of the withered satsuma orange orchards to his son. It seems that he initially used chemical fertilizers and pesticides. By gradually using less of them, however, it explains how he was eventually able to only spread agents which, as in the more distant past, presented hardly any danger – mainly fertilizers like chicken manure and compost, and machine oil and lime sulphur, and produce wonderful satsuma oranges. Even Fukuoka’s satsuma orange fields, at least at that time, were neither perfectly free of pesticides, nor fertilizer-free.

Kimura did not aspire to completely pesticide-free farming either. He felt that small quantities of pesticides would be alright, so he thought he’d try reducing them.

At the time, though, nothing had been written about growing apples using fewer pesticides. So Kimura started to study by himself. He would read any book he could find to do with apples. He’d stop by the town library, which was well-stocked with books on apples, every day. He devoured books, not only on apples, but also to do with organic farming.

‘I began to think that chemical fertilizers weren’t so good, and started collecting chicken manure and making compost. One of the farmers I knew and I produced so much compost we could have sold the stuff. First you stop chemical fertilizers completely, then spread the compost you make yourself on the fields, and then reduce the quantity of pesticides you’re using. We had apple orchards in four places. Three of these had always belonged to the Kimura family. The other orchard had been given to us by my father when I’d married into the family. I tried varying the frequency of spreading of pesticides on these four plots. Up until that time I’d sprayed pesticides about thirteen times a year. On one orchard I did it six times, on another orchard three times, and then on other orchards only once. The upshot of that was that the crop from the orchard I’d sprayed six times was no worse than the crop I’d normally get. The orchard I did three times suffered insect damage but produced a passable crop. The orchards I’d only sprayed once were infested with insects. But there again, they produced a crop at least half the size of the orchards I would normally spray with pesticides. So I started doing the maths.’

Even when he reduced the quantities of pesticides, the apples did not suffer the kind of damage he’d feared. To be sure, spraying once year the crop fell by half but, at the same time, the cost of the pesticides, simply calculated, was one thirteenth!

If you calculate the outlay, the rate of return is not so bad. If you reduce pesticides further, and practice completely pesticide-free farming, then of course the cost of your pesticides is zero. One can’t be sure about how much further the crop will decrease, but it seems to make some sort of business sense.

Everyone said that completely pesticide-free farming was impossible. No-one had succeeded. Kimura’s pulse quickened at the prospect of doing something no-one else had ever done.

‘If this was the case, then completely pesticide-free farming may also be on the cards I reckoned. This is what my youthful enthusiasm led me to think anyway. So I had a chat with my father. I told him I was thinking about trying to go pesticide-free from the following spring. To be honest I thought he’d be against it. I believed I could do it, but common sense told me no one in their right mind would agree. So I thought he’d take a lot of persuading. In fact, when I said to him “I’d like to try without pesticides”, he readily agreed. “Let’s give it a go” he said. His approval came as a surprise.’

The person Kimura refers to as ‘father’ here is Michiko’s father, his father-in-law. His father-in-law had worked in the post office for a long time, and although he had apple orchards, he was not a full-time apple farmer. During the Pacific War he’d been sent to the Southern Islands where he’d had some experience of surviving on produce he’d grown. He had tilled ground in the jungle, and grown rice and potatoes.

‘My father-in-law told me all sorts of stories about the war. There was the one about a rusty helmet with holes in it they’d used in place of a bamboo basket to catch shrimps from the river to eat. Apparently they made quite a few fields. Of course they couldn’t get hold of any pesticides, but the eggplants grew as big as trees.

I suppose it was because he’d had that kind of experience that he wasn’t held back by the conventional idea that you can’t farm without pesticides. He’d tried various things after returning to Japan. Like how many rice seedlings you should plant in order to get the biggest crop. He was really passionate about studying things. I’m sure that’s why he understood what I was trying to do. Had my father-in-law been a regular apple farmer, just trying to reason with him about not using pesticides would have been hard. He laughingly told me that at the time he never thought that producing apples without pesticides would be possible. He thought I’d give it up after two or three years.’

This happened some thirty years ago, when Kimura was still in his twenties.

Kimura himself doesn’t recall exactly how old he was. From what was happening about then, he reckons that he probably started moving from reduced pesticide to completely pesticide-free farming in about 1978. In that year, he decided to stop pesticide spraying of one of the fields, the two acre field at the foot of Mount Iwaki which his own father had handed over to them when they’d got married. It is an orchard that his father had cleared when Kimura was a boy. Kimura remembers digging the slopes around Mount Iwaki with his elder brother, and helping to plant apple seedlings with him. It was in this orchard, filled with fond memories, that Kimura started pesticide-free apple growing.

Pesticide spraying normally starts in early spring before the apple buds appear. Pesticides are then sprayed when the buds appear, and a second time once they blossom. The reasons for spraying pesticides vary depending on the timing – it may be to prevent diseases or to eradicate pests – and of course the types of pesticide used are different.

A typical apple farmer in those days would apply various pesticides about thirteen times in the six months up to the harvest in the autumn. He stopped using all of them.

Fukuoka Masanobu was a thinker rather than a farmer. Denying human knowledge, Fukuoka states that all artifice is useless. His writing may suggest that he was a very cynical thinker, but Fukuoka’s ideas pose a single, deep-rooted question; one that humanity has faced ever since the dawn of civilization.

The words of Jesus about “Taking no thought for the morrow” appear in the Bible in Matthew’s Gospel – “Take therefore no thought of the morrow: sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof”. Jesus said stop worrying about tomorrow, live life to the full today.

Buddha speaks of attachment to life being the source of all suffering. Everything in this world is emptiness, he goes on, but people suffer because they are attached to this emptiness. Lao-tzu, who denied the intellect and idealized non-doing and being natural, essentially says the same.

Whether it’s worrying about the future, or attachment to life, it all springs from the mind. People try to satisfy their desires using their minds. But desire has no limits. Satisfy one desire and the next desire arises.

By repeating this again and again, people have built up civilizations. The history of civilizations is the history of the growth of human desires.

Zeus punished Prometheus, the giver of fire to mankind, by having him chained to a rock where a great eagle ate his liver. Prometheus, being a Titan, was immortal, and his liver regenerated the following morning. As he couldn’t die, it meant Prometheus was destined to live forever and endure the pain of his innards being eaten. This cruel punishment can also be seen as symbolizing the equally cruel truth that however far civilization is advanced, it will never attain happiness. Because if the history of the advance of civilization is the history of the burgeoning of desire, then civilization will never bring real happiness to people. And if that is the case, then what on earth is the significance of human knowledge and the achievements based on that knowledge?

Since the dawn of civilization people have, somewhere in their hearts, pondered this mystery. Lao Tzu’s doctrine of non-doing, of being natural, is the polar opposite of civilization. If civilization aims to make people happy by satisfying their desires, there may be a different way to happiness. Denying civilization and living naturally. It is, as the Buddha said, knowing that desires are nothing more than illusion, and, as Christ said, not dwelling on tomorrow, but living in the moment, in a spirit of gratitude for all things.

From the point of view of civilization, this is perhaps where the real function of religion lies. Putting aside the question of faith for a moment, belief in a god or Buddha is ultimately just a means. Their real point is surely to question the aims of civilization, and possibly deny desire.

Fukuoka’s ideas about denying knowledge and the uselessness of human endeavour are in the same vein. What is unique about him is not that he perfected them in a single philosophy or system of thought. He demonstrated them through his farming. He may have denied the natural sciences, but his own teachings have everything to do with an intuitive understanding of them.

Born in Iyo City in Ehime Prefecture in 1913, Fukuoka Masanobu studied at the Gifu Agricultural and Forestry College (now the Gifu University of Faculty of Applied Biological Sciences Graduate School of Agriculture), then got a job researching plant diseases in the Plant Quarantine Section at Yokohama Customs. Whilst he was researching gummosis in satsuma orange trees under the guidance of Eiichi Kurosawa, the world famous plant disease scientist who succeeded in isolating gibberellins from fungal strains in rice, Fukuoka eventually reached the view that ‘All Human Knowledge and Endeavour is a Waste’. Then, during the war, whilst teaching so-called scientific farming methods at the Kochi Prefectural Agricultural Experiment Station, he looked at the same time for a way to farm which was not based on human knowledge. Later, in 1947, he returned and spent the rest of his life farming in his native countryside.

He aspired to ‘do-nothing’ farming. He tried to demonstrate in farming, the field he understood better than anything, the fact that human knowledge and endeavour were pointless. Nature, he says, is a perfect system.

With no help from anyone, the leaves flourish on the trees, flowers bloom, and seeds are scattered. According to Fukuoka, agriculture is what we call it once we tamper with the system, and what we do is aimed at getting results that will serve humans. Spread fertilizer and you’ll get bigger fruit. If you kill insects, you’ll harvest more produce. This is the way humans think. Using our ingenuity in spreading fertilizer, we have at the same time improved pest extermination techniques.

As a consequence of all this, crops are closer to petroleum products than the fruits of nature. Agriculture today is no longer possible without the input of huge quantities of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and the use of agricultural machinery. What on earth is going to happen when fossil fuels run out?

Not only did Fukuoka believe that human knowledge and endeavour are pointless, but that they are manifestly harmful. Unless the ‘do-nothing’ farming ideals he aspired to could be shown to be superior to modern agriculture, however, they would be nothing more than empty theories. The fact remains that, whether the products are petroleum or something else, food grown today sustains a huge world population.

In his book, Fukuoka reflects on how, in the beginning, he set out to literally practice do-nothing farming. He took over his father’s satsuma orange orchards at home and didn’t prune or do anything else to them. As a result, the branches went all over the place, insects increased, and the satsuma orange trees withered. Orchards made by man are far from natural.

Animals raised in a zoo cannot be released into the wild. The same goes for trees in orchards; they cannot be simply returned to nature. This applies to rice paddies and fields, not just orchards.

‘Do-nothing’ farming is farming which relies 100% on a natural system which is completely self-sustaining. Such a natural system requires processes to which we can entrust the agricultural produce we are used to growing. Realizing this, the thing which Fukuoka perfected over the course of forty years was the natural method of farming he advocated. Fukuoka says it was a matter of trial and error based on the idea ‘What would it be OK not to do?’ The direction civilization has grown in is based on the principle of addition, always adding things. He aspired to his ultimate ideal of do-nothing farming through the opposite – repeatedly subtracting.

The continuous no-ploughing, direct sowing method of growing rice and barley Fukuoka perfected through trial and error was described in the book which Kimura had accidentally come across. To put it very simply, the farming method amounts to nothing more than sowing rice, barley, and clover seeds, then cutting the rice and barley when it has grown and leaving the straw strewn around the fields. Fukuoka writes that he used these methods for more than thirty years, increasing his crop yields to levels similar to modern agriculture which relies on agrichemicals. It seems an almost unbelievable story.

Without ploughing there’ll be no rice planting. If neither pesticides nor fertilizer are necessary, what are the world’s farmers actually slaving away at?

Not only that. Kimura was one farmer making a living this way. What Fukuoka wrote in his book was not something he could believe intellectually. There is a big difference in climate between Ehime Prefecture, where it’s possible to double crop rice and barley, and Aomori Prefecture, which is buried under snow in the winter. Implementing Fukuoka’s farming methods per se was not an option.

Nevertheless, Kimura found himself having to read the book over and over again. The more he read Fukuoka’s book, the more one thought stayed in his mind. It was something which had never occurred to him whilst he was growing apples, covered in pesticides. To grow apples, he had been spraying a dozen or more times between early spring and the time before the harvest in September. The apple leaves were white with the stuff. This was because he believed that unless he did so, he couldn’t protect the apples from disease and insects. But was that actually true?

‘When I got to the rice fields, I found that the river had overflowed, and only the tips were poking out of the water. This was exactly why I didn’t fancy the life of a famer. Remember, I was Mr Efficiency! I immediately pulled out my abacus and calculated the cost of the damage. Even if you sweated away, covered in dirt, a whole year’s income could be lost as a result of the weather. If you did your homework, you could only conclude that farming was an inefficient, outdated occupation. There was something my mum used to say though. “Being a farmer is much better than working as a cog in a machine. You might not make money, but I like this much better.

As you get older you can be sure you’ll want to get back to the soil.”

I doubt if my mother, having grown up before the war, had a proper schooling, but she did read a lot. She would suddenly come out with words of wisdom. Looking back, she said some wonderful things, but I didn’t listen at the time.’

Kimura had a stroke of luck, however, whilst helping his father and wondering if there wasn’t a way out of farming. His brother, who had joined the Self-Defence Forces, changed his mind and returned home. This meant he was freed from his obligations as heir to the house. Should he go back to the city to work, or work as a proper apprentice in the tuning shop in Shonan and become a mechanic? His had his dreams, but in the end he decided to stay with farming.

At the age of twenty two, he married Michiko Kimura (from this point Akinori Mikami becomes formally known as Akinori Kimura). Michiko was the eldest daughter of a farming household and, when he married her, Kimura had to marry into the family. Pursuing a life in farming was perhaps his destiny.

‘I worked really hard at farming. I’d married into the family, so unless I was serious about my work I’d be kicked out. Ha-ha-ha. Then I discovered what I thought was a ray of light in farming. Guess what? A tractor! It wasn’t a small, Japanese tractor. You know those huge tractors you see driving around big fields in America or wherever? I’d seen them in magazines and other places and quite fancied trying out that sort of farming.

It was called industrial farming. They ploughed large acreages with tractors, and grew wheat and corn. If I was going to farm, then I wanted to try that dynamic kind of farming. So I decided to grow corn. I thought I’d try creating corn fields similar to the ones in America. To be honest, I was completely obsessed with that tractor. Tractors are basically simple constructions assembled around an engine linked to a transmission. There are none of the frills you get with a car. It’s like an engine on wheels. If you like vehicles they’re addictive. The more I fiddled with it, the more I liked it and, in the process, fell in love as I had with motorbikes. Ha-ha-ha … . So a big reason I stuck at farming was because I wanted to fiddle with tractors.’

There’s one other product for which the Iwaki region is well-known today. Corn. Dakekimi corn, which takes its name from the well-known Dakekimi Highlands, is surprisingly sweet and delicious. In summer, before the apples start appearing, Dakekimi is the quality product from this area. Golf ranges now stand alongside Route 30, which follows the Mount Iwaki ridge, but at that time they were unkempt fields. They were fields in name only. It was really rough, overgrown ground. Renting a large area of this wasteland, Kimura took his first steps in large-scale farming.

He started out growing corn as well apples. His partner was the imported tractor he purchased at the outset.

‘It wasn’t a dowry as such, but when I got married my own parents gave me some fields and a little money they’d got together. I used it to buy the English tractor. It was made by a company called International Harvester. Studying various magazines and books I couldn’t find a Japanese tractor more powerful than 30 horsepower, but the International Harvester was 45 horsepower. Even though it was a diesel, the engine didn’t need pre-ignition to start. Diesel engines are advanced in Europe. Having decided to go ahead, I found the address and wrote a letter to England. I supposed they wouldn’t be able to read the Japanese script, so I wrote the letter using the alphabet. Well, I didn’t know English, and though I say I wrote it in English, the words were Japanese. “Torakuta no katarogu wo okutte kudasai. Akinori Kimura” … Ha-ha-ha! Still, International Harvester did reply with a catalogue! How much was it now? I’m pretty sure it was about one and a half million yen. Pretty expensive. The Crown saloon car was about one million yen at the time. Agricultural machinery’s expensive!’

It was a big tractor. The tires alone were as tall as Kimura. Kimura liked the almost enclosed engine, and uncompromisingly functional, rugged design. Needless to say there were no other farms in the neighbourhood with such large tractors that were manufactured overseas.

Thrilled with it, he would polish it almost daily. The family might get washed once a year, but he washed the tractor every day. When he got home in the evening after a day in the fields, he would jack up the tractor, wash the mud from the tires, and even wax the body.

He didn’t like leaving the tractor out in the rain and, as it wasn’t too big to fit into the shed, that’s where he kept it. Once, squeezing it in, he ended up scratching the side. Kimura would later, and with a tear in his eye, give up the tractor, but the mark on the wall of barn at the end of the garden is still there today. Whenever he sees the mark, he clearly remembers what happened more than thirty years ago as if it were yesterday.

The giant tractor transformed the overgrown waste land into fields at an amazing speed. The power was sensational. Neat fields of corn of the sort found in those foreign magazines appeared amongst the dense thickets. They were the Honey Bantam variety. It was probably thanks to the fertile soil that they grew so well.

However, he was troubled by the damage caused by racoon dogs. Just when they were ready to be harvested, the plump sweet corn was ravaged.

‘I placed traps in several places around the fields, but ended up trapping a young raccoon dog. The mother stayed next to it, and didn’t run away when I approached. When I tried reaching out to release the trap, the young raccoon dog bared its teeth and got really upset. It seems harsh, but I held its head down with my rubber boot as I released it from the trap. It didn’t run away though. Right in front me, the mother started licking the young one’s wounded leg. Seeing that, I felt I’d committed an awful crime.

I told them ‘Stop eating our corn!’. But then I started leaving small piles of second-rate corn around the edges of the fields. When you produce corn you end up with quite a bit of corn that looks something like my toothless mouth. They’re not good enough to sell. I left it all. The next morning when I went to the fields, they’d completely disappeared. But the raccoon dogs had caused no other damage at all. So at harvest time I decided to stop using the traps and put out the cobs with kernels missing. After that, damage by the raccoon dogs stopped almost completely. So I figured that farmers suffer this sort of damage because they take everything. That was what came to mind. After all, we’d turned what used to belong to the raccoon dogs into fields. I worried that if I actually fed them, the raccoon dogs would end up being even more bother, but that didn’t happen. Which I thought was strange. I suppose you could say that my eyes were opened to the mysteries of nature. Anyway, I realized that nature didn’t work in the way that most people thought. This was probably the turning point as far as my ideas about so-called ‘efficient’ agriculture were concerned.

There was one other reason why Kimura started growing corn, apart from his tractor. His wife Michiko was sensitive to pesticides. The meticulous application of pesticides that apple growing requires means their growth is effectively pesticide-dependent. A born worker, it was natural that Mr Efficiency would carefully spread pesticides in accordance with the spray calendar.

Although they had rice fields, the rice was basically for home consumption, so the household income depended on apples. The income of an apple farmer is determined by how many perfect, sweet, large apples he can produce. Pests and disease mean a reduction in income. They are a hated enemy that can threaten livelihoods. Farmers would apply as many pesticides as they could in order to eradicate their arch enemy.

In simple terms, a spray calendar is one used in the agricultural business to show which chemicals should be used at what time. Calendars are prepared for nearly all produce, not just apples, from fruits such as satsuma oranges and peaches, to vegetables including cabbages and garlic. Since the types of insect and disease that tend to occur vary depending on the area, the local farming cooperative basically produces them following the advice of specialists in prefectural agricultural experiment stations.

The spray calendar Kimura was using was one for apples published by Aomori Prefecture. Details including the types of agrichemical which should be applied in each season, and their concentrations, were noted on a calendar the size of an unfolded newspaper. To the uninitiated it would seem dizzyingly complicated, but for combating pests it was indispensable.

Insects, mildew, bacteria, viruses … . Apple trees are vulnerable to attack by a host of organisms. A single pesticide cannot protect against all enemies. Whether it’s disease, or pests, they each have a time of year when they proliferate. Unless they are sprayed at the appropriate time, their application will be ineffective. Moreover, disease and pests come and go, which means that applying in the same way every year does not work either. Hence the annual spray calendars take into account factors including the status of diseases and pests, and weather forecasts. Without spray calendars, even experienced farmers find the appropriate application of pesticides difficult.

These spray calendars had another use – helping keep any residual pesticides on the apples after harvesting to below the specified amounts. Many different types of agrichemical started to be manufactured after World War II. They included quite a few chemicals, such as DDT, about which safety concerns remained, or that were banned. As research into the safety of pesticides advanced, strict rules regarding their use were established. Substances which are clearly harmful to human health cannot be used, and among those whose use has been approved, there are chemicals whose density and frequency of use, as well as permitted times of use, are controlled. This is to eliminate even the slightest danger to health from harmful residues in agricultural products.

There are various theories concerning the dangers of pesticides. Putting aside these theories for a moment, and taking an unbiased view, standards relating to the density of agrichemical residues in Japan are pretty severe. In recent years in particular, there have been moves to reduce the use of pesticides as far as possible for food safety reasons. The spray calendars also have the job of providing guidelines concerning the use of pesticides so that these strict standards can be met. If you stick to what it says on the spray calendars, the residual pesticides in the apples when they are harvested should now be close to zero.

However, growing safe apples, and growing apples safely, are two separate issues. You may be able to grow safe apples if you follow the spray calendar, but there is no reference to methods for growing apples safely.

The reason the density of residual pesticides on apples became strictly controlled was the possibility of adverse side-effects. Levels of residues in apples that are shipped may now be next to nothing. The fact remains, however, that the apple farmers who have to work extra hard as a result, come into contact with the pesticides on a daily basis.

There are, of course, precautions over the use of the various pesticides. To the extent they observe these precautions when using them, users will not suffer any damage to their health. Having said that, in practice it is extremely difficult to follow these precautions to the letter when, during the course of a year, you are spraying hundreds of apple trees with pesticides, many, many times. There may be a warning which says ‘Wash immediately in case of any contact with skin’, but if you were to wash off every drop that came into contact with your skin with water immediately during spraying, you’d never finish the job. Growing apples means accepting such risks.

Besides, the safety of pesticides was not as hotly debated then as it is today. His wife Michiko was physically so sensitive to the pesticides that she would sleep for up to a week during the spraying periods.

‘We should have won a medal from the agricultural cooperative for the quantity of pesticides we used. With pesticides in those days they didn’t think about the skin or whatever of the people using them. Apple production came first. There was a pesticide called nicotine. The smell was enough to make you feel sick, but you often heard stories about people who would collapse whilst spraying it! The one I used mainly was copper sulphate, the blue crystals.

It looks so beautiful. Pure cobalt blue, like that the stained glass in churches. It’s so pretty there are probably people who’d pick it up and eat it by mistake. We mixed lime with the copper sulphate and used it as a fungicide. It’s called Bordeaux mixture, and I guess it’s been used from about the Meiji or Taisho Periods in Japan. We used so much of it the apple leaves would go completely white. It was a heck of a job of just making up the Bordeaux mixture using copper sulphate and lime. You get a hell of a rash; it’s a strong alkaline irritant. You get blisters, just like being burned.’

Of course they used other synthetic pesticides developed after war, such as the drins and plations, as well as Bordeaux mixture. There were more than a few which are no longer produced today due to concerns over their safety. Spraying was supposed to be done up to a certain number of times in a year, so all sorts of insecticides and fungicides were mixed together and applied. They hadn’t given any thought to what damage you might do if you used those quantities of pesticides.

‘I’d always seen my parents growing apples like that. I thought it was normal. That was what growing apples involved; we thought nothing of being burned. But it seemed Michiko was very sensitive to pesticides, and would fall asleep when we sprayed. I realized I had to do something about it. That was a reason why I started in corn. Sure, I wanted to farm with a tractor, because if I could make a living from corn, I wouldn’t have to produce apples. Perhaps Michiko wouldn’t have ended up having such a hard time.’

If it hadn’t been for a twist of fate, Kimura might indeed have given up growing apples. Corn cultivation with the tractor was progressing smoothly. Regardless of the consequences as he often was when he fell for something, had growing corn really grabbed him, it’s possible that the lower slopes of Mount Iwaki today would be a sea of corn fields. If he had earned a stable income growing corn, there would have been no need to grow apples and put his wife through so much.

That this didn’t happen was due to snow. The Tsugaru Plain is buried under snow in the winter. All they can do is wear snow shoes and go around shaking the snow from the apple trees. It’s the season when farmers who don’t have to do seasonal work elsewhere can enjoy an annual break from their hard labour. This time off was the worst for Kimura. His wife Michiko says she never saw Kimura relaxing around the house or lounging in front of the television. His character is such that unless he’s busy he can’t relax.

When the orchards are buried under snow, Kimura starts studying agriculture. He’ll drop by the library in town, go to book shops, and lose himself reading books which might answer the questions which have come up in the course of farming that year. If he gets an idea, he’ll carefully jot it down in his notebook. He had a habit, when going to bed, of reading books and other literature and, like a student revising for his exams, there were always books and notes piled up around his bed.

One day Kimura was searching for a book to do with tractor farming. He went to several book shops in town, and eventually found the book he was looking for on a top shelf. It had been probably been left on the top shelf where no-one could reach it because it didn’t sell well.

Kimura was lazy. He should have looked for a step or asked an assistant, but instead he found a pole just the right size nearby.

‘I was trying to knock the tractor book down with the pole, but the book next to it came down too. Picking them up quickly I noticed that the corner of the next book was squashed. The floor was dirty from the snow and rain so there was a bit of mud on it too. I had no choice really but to buy both books. I think the other one cost about two thousand yen. Pretty expensive, though the paper looked cheap. It didn’t close well. It felt like it would tear easily. I reckoned I’d lost out. Anyway, I took it home and left it on the side for a time. Another reason why the book I wanted had been stuck on such a high shelf must have been because it didn’t sell well either. I can’t remember when I got around to reading the other book properly, but it must have been six months or a year later. I’d take it out and look at it in my free time. There was a photograph of rice on the front cover, and at the very beginning of the book were the words “Do-nothing agriculture without pesticides or fertilizer”. It dawned on me that this sort of farming actually existed. Without thinking about whether or not I’d do it, I found myself getting interested just because I was a farmer like him. I don’t remember how many times I read the book. Enough for it to end up looking tatty at least. The book, by Masanobu Fukuoka, was called ‘The One Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming’.

Kimura was born in Iwaki-chō, Nakatsugaru District, in Aomori Prefecture, in August 1949. His family name was not Kimura. He was the second son of a family called Mikami, who had been farmers for generations. Not particularly wealthy, they nevertheless owned a considerable area of farmland and, as they had a reasonable cash income from the apple orchards, he has no memory of the family having any difficulties in making a living. This was a time when bananas were still a very expensive fruit. Apples were the typical fruit, and their price was stable. Amongst local Tsugaru famers, apple trees were regarded as money-making. If you cultivated apples, with the family all working hard, you could make a fairly comfortable living.

However, his grandfather was old-fashioned, and it seems Kimura would be scolded by him if he studied at home as a child. Study and similar activities were regarded as luxuries, and if a farmer’s children did that sort of thing they would certainly be told off. A firmly rooted belief remained in farming communities in those days that if their children aspired to going to a university in a big city, it would mean them having to sell their land. So any studying happened during the night, after parents had gone to bed.

He was never bought a study desk, and was sure to be discovered if he switched a torch on at night. Placing an apple box beside the window and studying by the reflected light from the snow on the window, his mother would secretly bring him a candle. He clearly remembers standing three candles up, as a single candle would cast a shadow from his hand.

‘I’d be told off by my teachers at school if I didn’t study. So I was caught between my grandfather and my teachers.’

Kimura laughs when he talks about it, but he probably didn’t mind studying. His best subjects were arithmetic and science. He was also brilliant at art for his age. So good that his teacher told him off when he painted landscape ink painting on paper meant for sliding screens. The picture went on to win gold prize in a competition, but his teacher always doubted that Kimura had done it on his own. He was sure an adult had helped him.

The thing he loved above all when he was boy was machines. Like any ordinary child, he played with toys when he was young. But the way he played with them was a little different. As a young schoolboy, he begged his grandpa to buy him a toy robot. By the time they got home the robot had been transformed. He’d taken it to pieces on the bus on the way. Whatever the toy, be it a car, a plane, or even something like a clock, he’d take it to pieces whilst the grown-ups weren’t watching. He turned a deaf ear when scolded. Toys were not toys to him; they were devices for understanding how things moved or gave off sparks. There was nothing that gave him greater pleasure when he was boy than figuring out how machines worked.

The 50’s and 60’s, his childhood years, would have influenced him. The television, the refrigerator, and the washing machine, were considered the Holy Trinity of domestic appliances. Mechanical civilization was taking hold in a Japan which was bouncing back from the shock of defeat in the war.

It was in 1946, just three years before Kimura was born, that Masaru Ibuka established the forerunner of the Sony Corporation, the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation, and Sōichirō Honda established the Honda Technical Research Institute. At the start of the 50s, Honda started production of its first motorcycle, the Honda Dream D-Type, and the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation started selling a succession of new devices including tape recorders and transistor radios. These new machines symbolized an affluent lifestyle, and embodied people’s aspirations.

Of course, they were a mere dream as far as most ordinary folk were concerned, and hardly the sort of thing children got their hands on. But children’s games always mirror the times. Kids today are obsessed with the Internet. Children in those days were obsessed with machines. It is a child’s nature, when they come across a mystery, to try and unravel its secrets. Taking to pieces machines they are most familiar with, notably wind-up robots and cars, seemed to be their destiny. Having said that, there can’t have been many like him, children who rather than playing with a toy would immediately take them to bits …

As he grew, Kimura began finding pleasure in assembling the devices he’d taken apart.

‘I was interested in electricity in middle school. I wanted to figure out how the signals which radios received become sounds. So I made a wireless. It was in my second year in middle school I think. I would be told off for doing that sort of thing in the house so I tested it outside. I led a cable off from just before the electricity meter. I don’t suppose you can do that sort of thing now, but in those days it was easy. Ha-ha … I did some naughty things. Stealing electricity! I ran a wire directly from a telegraph pole to see if I could get a radio working. Then I’d cause the circuit to short using a screw driver. Had it been in the house I suppose a fuse would have blown in the fuse box, but as I had a wire running directly from it, a telegraph pole fuse went. About forty houses around us had power cuts. I really got told off for that!

Kimura’s mischievousness didn’t stop there. Once he tried making a primitive computer based on circuit diagrams published in a specialist magazine. It was a computer from the days when valves were still used in circuits. He secretly borrowed valves from the broadcasting room at school. Kimura maintains that they were taken from defunct devices, but who knows what might have happened if he’d carried on making computers in this way. That Kimura’s school broadcasting club was able to continue broadcasting was primarily thanks to the inefficiency of valves.

‘I realized, after I started to build it, that I would need loads of valves. I’d started building it step-by-step from scratch without reading the book to the end.

The computer would be the size of a three storey building when finished! That’s when I realized it wouldn’t work. A middle school kid will never find that many valves, however much he chases around Aomori Prefecture.’

He made many amplifiers in his high school days. Pop groups were in their heyday. The output of an amp he made for a school friend who played the electric guitar, and which he finished after three days and nights without sleep, was so great it threatened to shatter the windows in the gym. In the event, the windows didn’t crack, but his amp certainly blew the speakers. The instant the guitars were plugged in and notes played there was a shattering sound from the speakers and that was that. The school speakers were designed to handle 50 watts at most, but the output of the amp he built was nearer 100 watts.

Round about the third year of high school, he became obsessed with motorbikes. He would cycle around farm tracks in the middle of the night and ride along mountain trails on bikes that today we would call motocross bikes. He had frequent accidents and broke bones. But the main reason he liked motorbikes was their engines.

‘One of the bikes I rode was a Benly Racing CR93. I bought second-hand bikes really cheaply from American soldiers at the Misawa military base. I did them up as it would have been a waste just riding the bikes as they were when I bought them. Mind you, whilst I imitated them in some ways, I’d no interest in roaring around like the other bikers really.

By tweaking the engine slightly, you could boost the bike’s performance. That was exciting.’

The energy from the combustion when a mixture of air and petrol is ignited by spark plugs is converted, through pistons and a crank, into a driving force. The mechanism is simple enough, but for Kimura it held profound secrets. Among the many human inventions, the internal combustion engine has to be one of the cleverest. The more you know about engines, the more the opportunities for ingenuity open up. Kimura was captive to their hidden secrets.

Had Kimura been born in the city, or if he had been born a little later, he might well have ended up as a brilliant mechanic with a racing team, or an engine development engineer with a car manufacturer. However, being born into a farming family in the Tsugaru area in the 1940’s, he would have been unaware that such occupations even existed.

‘Being the second son, I didn’t have to take over the house, so I didn’t intend to go into farming. I wasn’t bad with figures, and watching my parents doing the farming I decided there was no future in that. All I thought about at that time was efficiency. In my second year at high school, I passed the top bookkeeping exam. I reckoned I’d become an accountant, and in the year I graduated from high school I took an exam but failed. So I took another employment exam and got a job with a company in Kawasaki. It was a Hitachi affiliated company making pipelines for places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq.

I was a migrant worker I suppose. I took the Tsugaru Express and arrived at Ueno Station on the 23^rd of March 1968. In those days the journey took about seventeen hours. There’s the song ‘Ah, Ueno Station’ – it was just amazing to be at that Ueno Station. There were big crowds and more platforms than I could count. I was overwhelmed. I eventually came to my senses, but I still didn’t know how to get from there to Kawasaki. I thought Ueno and Kawasaki were near each other, but far from it. I asked one member of station staff after another. I’d a heck of a time getting there, but when I eventually reached Kawasaki, someone from the personnel section was there to meet me at the station. That cheered me up. And you know what, the sun was orange! That amazed me. I’d always thought sunsets were red, but I didn’t see a red one in Kawasaki.’

Kawasaki in the 1960s.

Virtually no environmental measures had been taken at all. It was a time when the tall chimneys bristling from rows of factories meant prosperity. Pollution in the cities which formed Japan’s industrial belts was peaking. The black exhaust fumes pumped out by trucks made breathing at intersections almost impossible, and the sky was hazy, even on cloudless days. At night, illuminated by city lights, the clouds glowed eerily. When he returned to his dormitory in the evening, Kimura would find the sleeves of the clean white shirt he’d worn to work in the morning were stained with residues from the greasy fumes.

The rivers were as murky as drains and, if you walked beside them, the smell was so unpleasant you had to hold your nose. The mains water tasted so bad it was virtually undrinkable. Such a place would be hard to imagine for people from Hirosaki.

But Kimura didn’t feel he’d arrived in such an awful place. Rather, it appealed to him because this was a city with sophisticated manufacturing industries. His friends back home would have been amazed. It was the big city he’d dreamed of, and Kimura was in high spirits.

He was assigned to the cost management section. It was there that Kimura came across a real computer, not just a circuit diagram, for the first time.

‘Being qualified in bookkeeping, I always thought I’d earn a crust with my abacus, so I wondered what it was that computers did. It was an IBM computer, one of the old computers which you operated by putting punch cards into a reader. The thing I noticed, within a month, was that it seemed to amount to nothing more than a machine which used old data. However good the performance of the computer, it was useless unless you input data. Data is by definition dated. However much old data you collect and process, you won’t produce anything new. It won’t shed any light on the future. As far as I was concerned a computer was just a toy. I imagined that humans would one day be used by these machines. We’d be used by the machines we had created. Looking at the world today, that’s exactly what’s happened! Just as with computers, the number of people who can use only what they’ve been given or told by others has increased hugely. They aren’t using their heads. It’s the same with the Internet. Everyone thinks that the Internet holds all the answers.’

It wasn’t that Kimura disliked computers. He learned how to punch cards and studied how computers worked. Studying what happened in the black box hidden within a computer was as much fun as it had been taking robots to pieces when he was a boy.

Kimura remembers being happy living in Kawasaki. His job was interesting, and he was treated well in the office. His most important job in the cost management section was checking each section’s expenses. He was the one with unenviable task of going around the other sections encouraging them to cut their costs, yet for some reason Kimura was welcomed everywhere he went. When Kimura appeared the whole office brightened up, apparently. Probably thanks to his warm voice and loud Tsugaru accent.

Any time he had at the weekends he would stop by a tuning shop on the Shonan coast. He got to know the owner, and remained as obsessed with tuning engines as he had been in his high school days.

‘In those days it was mainly cars like the Celica 1600GT and the Skyline. We’d polish cam shafts until they gleamed like mirrors to increase engine power. We used our fingertips to check how the grinding was going, but we’re talking about thousandths of a millimetre. If you do it for long enough, you’ll be able to feel differences of 0.001 millimetre. Human senses are incredible. They’re far more accurate than using machines. Boosting the power like that, it was easy to increase the 120 horsepower Skyline to 300 horsepower. I felt it would be interesting to do this as a job, but in the middle of it all I was summoned home and had to go back to Aomori.’

Kimura had been with the company in Kawasaki for a year and a half when he left. The summons had been sent by his parents, which meant he was being recalled to the family home. His elder brother, who was son and heir, wanted to be a pilot and had entered the Self-Defence Forces. Akinori, as second son, had to take over.

The day he returned home was the day after a typhoon had swept through Aomori. His grandfather came alone to meet him at Hirosaki station. The other family members were all out in the storm-damaged apple orchards and rice fields.

The thing that had driven Kimura crazy was, of course, pesticide-free farming. Even today, there are many specialists who claim that it’s impossible. They believe you cannot harvest apples without using pesticides. For those familiar with the realities of apple growing, this is a foregone conclusion.

This point may be difficult to understand for anyone other than a farmer.

Agriculture today is heavily dependent on agrichemicals. Even those not involved in agriculture know that pesticides are used in virtually all crop cultivation, and that growing crops without the use of chemicals is very limited. However, it’s not really a question of dependence, or farming not being possible without the use of agrichemicals. There are fruits and vegetables out there which, although they may not be all that appealing, were grown without them.

Many years ago pesticides simply did not exist. Farmers in the Edo Period cultivated rice and grew vegetables without using herbicides or pesticides. As far as apples are concerned, they must have been around in Newton’s day, although the apple which led to the discovery of the law of gravity would not have not been treated with pesticides. If apples could not be grown without using pesticides, the fruit which William Tell placed on his son’s head would not have been an apple. There were no pesticide spraying machines in fourteenth century Switzerland. Pesticides are essentially used to help increase crop yields, reduce manual farm work, and to improve the appearance of produce. At least this is the generally held view.

Whilst this may be true, ask an apple producer today and he’ll tell you that this is an oversimplification. It is not merely a case of yields falling if pesticides are not used. Without pesticides, apple orchards would be ruined.

The extent of crop reliance on pesticides depends to a large extent on the type of crop. Research in Japan suggests that if pesticides are not used, apple yields decline by at least 90 per cent due to damage caused by pests. Cucumbers suffer similar damage from the non-use of pesticides. However, fresh seeds can be used every year to grow cucumbers.

Apples are different. Trees subject to major damage which results in a reduction in yield to 10 per cent or less of annual average yield cannot produce blossom the following year. Without blossom, there will of course be no fruit. In other words, if pesticides are not used for two continuous years, the apple crop will almost certainly drop to zero. Unless pesticides are used, this situation cannot be turned around.

There is a big difference between apples today and the apples in William Tell’s and Newton’s time. Here lies the most important reason why apples cannot be grown without pesticides – improvement in varieties. Apples today are a completely different fruit to early apples.

Adam and Eve are supposed to have eaten an apple in the Garden of Eden, but in the Old Testament it simply says it was the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. What sort of tree the ‘tree of knowledge of good and evil’ was a mystery. The fruit of the unidentified tree being seen as an apple came about because, in both English and German, the word apple originally meant the fruit of a tree.

The fruit of a tree being synonymous with an apple suggests that people have been familiar with apples since the earliest times, and knew about them before they knew about any other fruit. Charred apple was discovered in Switzerland among four thousand year old remains left by the early inhabitants of Europe. Many archaeologists believe this is evidence that apples were cultivated from this time. Apples were a well known fruit in the Roman Empire, the Greek city-states, and in Ancient Egypt. Hence apples have been cultivated by humans for millennia.

Classified as apple species of the genus rosa, the plant is native across a large area from Western Europe to Asia. The prevalent theory holds that the area from which the apple we eat today originated is the Caucasus Mountain range.

The wild apple was generally small, and was strongly acidic and astringent. It was not a fruit which people today would find palatable. There is still an apple, primarily used for cooking and making the alcoholic beverage cider, called the crab apple, cultivated in Europe and North America. It is a small apple characterized by a sourness similar to other wild apples. It is likely to have been this sort of apple the Egyptians and Greeks ate.

Nonetheless, they knew about grafting techniques at that time. To the extent that grafting techniques are described in Greek literature, it is not difficult to imagine slightly tastier varieties of apple being selected and those varieties spreading. There are said to have been at least twelve varieties of apple known in Roman times. Even though improvements in varieties was nothing like it is today, random improvements over a period of years would have meant steady progress from the time when apple growing started.

This discussion is not limited to apples. It is no exaggeration to say that all the grains, vegetables, and fruit we eat, are plants which people have improved over the course of a long period time. When they ripen, the grains of wild strains of rice and barley detach and get blown far and wide. The reason this does not happen to the barley and rice we eat is to make it more convenient for us to harvest. Have you ever wondered why bananas don’t have pips? Because people in the tropics having selected and grown forms that do not produce seeds.

With Mendel’s discovery of the principles of genetics and, in eighteenth century England, the discovery of the method of crossing two varieties and producing a new one, more and more varieties of apple appeared. People started hybridizing in order to produce tastier apples and different varieties. Once we enter the nineteenth century, variety improvement in America enjoyed a boom. This started with the apples that were carried by hand to America by immigrants from Europe. It was also because the apples produced as a result of improvements to the fruit in the New World were far larger, and much sweeter, than the earlier apple varieties in the Old World. The nineteenth century saw a transition from apples which had existed up until then to a completely different type of fruit. A critical event in the several thousand year history of apple growing occurred in the nineteenth century. The invention of agrichemicals. What today we refer to as the classic pesticides – lime sulphur and Bordeaux mixture – were invented in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Pesticides did not, of course, spread through the farming community immediately after they were invented. It wasn’t until towards the end of the nineteenth century that they came to be used widely in apple growing. This was when the existence of chemicals which could very efficiently eradicate pests and disease fundamentally changed aspects of the way people thought about variety improvement.

Before the days of pesticides, if a tree appeared which bore sweet fruit following variety improvement, it could not be cultivated if the tree was still prone to disease and pest damage. The advent of pesticides, however, meant that this was no longer a problem. The job of fighting pests and disease was taken on by pesticides. Variety improvement aimed at growing trees which produced larger, sweeter apples, could now proceed without having to worry about resistance to disease or pests.

Indeed, virtually all the apples we eat today are varieties which were developed following the introduction of pesticides. They are varieties produced by improvements which have depended on the use of pesticides. This has resulted in the gigantic apples we have today. They bear no resemblance to their distant ancestors, the wild varieties from the Caucasus Mountains. Moreover, apples have lost their inherent resilience. They have become an extremely weak tree incapable of withstanding diseases and pests without the help of pesticides.

The fruit we know as the apple is highly dependent on agrichemicals, and stands as a symbol of farming today.

However they came about, every apple farmer knows from experience how easily their fields will become prey to disease and pests if they don’t spread pesticides. If they use pesticides, but they apply them at the wrong time or use the wrong methods, disease and pests will flourish. What’s more, children of apple farmers are regaled with stories about what a struggle cultivating apples was for their ancestors in the days before the spread of pesticides. In spite of the sort of efforts we find hard to imagine these days, apple growing in Aomori Prefecture has been on the point of collapse numerous times.

Attacks by huge swarms of destructive insects, diseases spreading like wildfire … the history of apple growing is also one of the futile battles against insects and disease. One ray of light illuminating the battlefield was pesticides. Had pesticides not been developed, apple growing would have disappeared in Aomori Prefecture ages ago. The idea of growing apples without pesticides is nothing but nonsense. All apple farmers are convinced of this. The question is, why was Kimura taken in by it?

The man’s name is Akinori Kimura. The first time I met him was at the end of 2006, some twenty years after the time he’d spent days staring at inchworms under his fruitless apple trees.

‘Miracle apples’ was what people called them. Miraculous or not, getting hold of them was certainly difficult. With a third of the apple juice made from his apples being bought by a certain politician, and a French restaurant in Tokyo serving an exquisite soup made with his apples, his order books were full for one year ahead. I’d heard endless such rumours. He has spent the best part of thirty years growing apples without using pesticides. I was sure he’d be the cranky type, but when I called him from Tokyo to ask for an interview, he sounded charming.

Kimura’s home is in Iwaki-chō, about thirty minutes by car from the Japan Railway’s Hirosaki station in Aomori Prefecture. It used to be an independent town known as Iwaki-chō in Nakatsugaru District, but in February that year it had become part of Hirosaki City following municipal reorganization.

He said he would come to the station to meet me since his place was difficult to find by taxi. I arrived at the agreed time but there was no sign of Kimura. His home phone was continuously engaged and his mobile just rang and rang. I eventually got through after an hour.

“Sorry, sorry. Someone just dropped in. I’m on my way now, I’m really sorry.”

Kimura’s voice at the other end was so loud I instinctively jerked the phone from my ear.

There was no need for him to be so apologetic. I was the one who had requested the interview. On top of which there seemed to be something in the intonation in his strong Tsugaru accent that could melt the heart. I completely forgot that I’d been made to wait for an hour in the falling snow on the roundabout in front of Hirosaki station.

Kimura said he’d come and meet me straight away but that I’d still have to wait twenty minutes or more. I eventually decided to get a taxi to his house.

Leaving the centre of town along a road which runs beside the moat of Hirosaki Castle, famous for its cherry blossom, and crossing a bridge over the Hirosaki River, a breathtakingly beautiful, majestic mountain dominated the horizon. Mount Iwaki.
As its nickname, Tsugaru Fuji, suggests, the shape resembles Mount Fuji. A so-called ‘composite volcano’ formed by volcanic activity, it may well be a sibling, but Mount Iwaki is Mount Fuji’s younger sister rather than a younger brother. The graceful flanks of the mountain, which descend to the plains in a gentle arc, are frequently compared to the formal, twelve-layered kimonos worn by princesses in the Heian Period (794-1185). The mountain has special significance for those who live in the Tsugaru Plain area, and has been an object of worship since the earliest times. Iwaki-chō, the town where Kimura’s home is located, lies at the foot of the mountain.

When their town was merged with Hirosaki City, nothing changed in the way folk in Iwaki-cho made their living from agriculture based mainly on growing apples and rice. Typical Tohoku scenery studded with farming villages surrounds Iwaki-cho in every direction.

He said it was difficult to find his house, so Kimura came out in the snow to meet me at a nearby petrol station. He seemed to be in his late fifties, with a sprinkling of white in his short hair. Of medium build, he was typical of his generation, with a lean, tough frame characteristic of those who spend much of their life doing manual labour. This might give the impression that he was the reticent, impassive type. His character, however, was further from your typical Japanese than you could possibly imagine. Although it was our first meeting, he greeted me with an open, beaming face. From the moment I met him, he gave me the feeling he was an old friend I’d known for many years. His cheerfulness was infectious. Kimura radiated good-humour.

Being taken through the living-room-cum-work space in Kimura’s house, I realized why phone calls didn’t get through. Faxes were coming through non-stop. Kimura’s apples weren’t distributed through the usual channels. He sent them directly by courier to customers who ordered by postcard or fax. From grower to consumer, direct from the farm.

Being so famous, production had for many years been unable to satisfy the demand. Faxed orders didn’t stop the entire time I spent interviewing him that day.

I’d heard stories of how, as a result of their struggles with organic apple growing and other difficulties, the Kimura household had endured a life of poverty for many years. But this had been more than a decade earlier. He was now famous enough to be featured in newspapers and on television, and had devotees throughout the country. He was in fact travelling overseas, as well as around the country, to teach agriculture. On top of which, sales of the apples he produced were soaring. He should have been making money, but looking around the room there was no evidence of this whatsoever.

Akinori Kimura had absolutely no interest in luxuries. His was the life of a simple farmer. It looked as though he hadn’t changed the tatami mats or fusuma sliding doors for years. He would look after every stray cat in the neighbourhood, with the result that their house was full of them. He probably didn’t bother changing the fusuma or renewing the tatami because, even if he had, they would have been promptly savaged by cat claws. An ancient computer used for managing clients stood on a low table. He still used an MS-DOS machine. Apple orders lay piled next to the computer. It appeared that the volume of faxed messages of encouragement and requests for advice addressed to Kimura had escalated dramatically in the recent past, along with the apple orders.

‘Phone calls and faxes from all sorts of people started after I appeared on TV.

Loads from young people, and others from folk in various lines of work – head priests of temples, doctors. Then, the other day, there were these three scary guys who turned up at the house in a big foreign motor. It was really creepy. I had no idea what they were up to …’

Kimura mentioned the name of a big city in Aomori.

‘They said they’d come all the way just to meet me. When I asked them what they wanted, they handed me a mobile phone and said “Could you have a word?” The person on the other end sounded like their boss, and I was just wondering what we would talk about when he said “Watching the television brought tears to my eyes”. It was the first time he’d shed a tear in ages. He said he’d sent these three over to say this. “You and me should have a drink some time” he said.’

Kimura’s life had been introduced on the NHK program ‘Professional Shigoto no Ryūgi’ at the beginning of December that year.

‘You know, all sorts of people told me they treasured every word I said. What had I said? Silly me couldn’t remember all that clearly!’

He gave a broad, toothless laugh.

Kimura was still in his fifties, but had already lost most of his teeth. The few remaining teeth were whittled down and now looked like brown apple cores. It seemed that chewing would be difficult. He could well have done with dental treatment or false teeth, but he hadn’t bothered.

‘I decided to swap my teeth for apple leaves’ , he said, laughing loudly at his droll joke. He hadn’t paid any attention to looking after them whatsoever.

I’d never heard such an engaging laugh. I only wish I could describe it. ‘A a a a a a.’ Lacking an ‘h’ sound, the laugh was a succession of ‘a’ vowels, vaguely reminiscent of the way Eijiro Higashino laughed when he played Mito Komon. Remove the pomposity from Mitsukuni’s laugh, add fifty percent more warmth, and you’d end up with Kimura’s laugh.

For a year or so after that snowy day, I would use any free time I had to visit Hirosaki. My wanting to visit was as much about hearing his laugh as much as anything. It was not only full of joy; there was a profound strength in his laughter. The stories he told, though, were not just amusing ones …

‘I’d a call from a young person considering suicide you know. He was a post-graduate. His parents had spent a lot of money on his fees and other things. He was at his wits end. Couldn’t find work, couldn’t go home. He was thinking about dying, but then changed his mind after seeing that TV program, and his will to live eventually returned.’

It seems that the young man had concluded that, compared to the great suffering and the setbacks Kimura had experienced, his own problems were insignificant. When I asked him what he said at times like that, Kimura became thoughtful.

‘… Well, I think I just told him it was great he’d changed his mind. Then I told him it was alright to be crazy. You’d understand if you tried, but being crazy is not so simple. If it’s a question of dying, well it would be worth trying going crazy once first. That’s the point. Having been there myself, there was one thing I’d learned; if something drives you mad, sooner or later there will be an answer.’

If something drives you crazy, there will be an answer.

What Kimura said, and the way, he lived amounted to one and the same.

The Japanese word for tooth and leaf is the same, ‘ha’. The characters are different, but have the same pronunciation.

In Aomori, Japan, Mr. Akinori Kimura (after years of determination and trial and error) now miraculously grows delicious MIRACLE APPLES completely organically, in harmony with nature, without the use of pesticides or fertilizers.

Yoko Ono says: “Miracle Apples do not deteriorate, since there is nothing bad in them. I think that’s how our bodies could be if we didn’t have any poison in them. If his method is used to raise fruits and vegetables, it will save our children, our grand children, and us, from getting unnecessary illness. That’s why I call this book a revolution. I hope you will feel the same.”

Read the rest of Yoko’s introduction here.

Read the Foreward by Shūhei Shibata, programme director at NHK, who first made a TV documentary about Akinori Kimura.

And read the Prologue by MIRACLE APPLES author, Takuji Ishikawa.

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Akinori Kimura’s MIRACLE APPLES

Written by Takuji Ishikawa.
English translation by Bob Heffill

Presented and sponsored by YOKO ONO
for friends and readers of www.IMAGINEPEACE.com

Published weekly in serialised form, beginning 16th July 2010, here at http://IMAGINEPEACE.com/miracleapples/

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