BETWEEN FOUR WORLDS: CHINA, RUSSIA, JAPAN AND AUSTRALIA.
BETWEEN FOUR CAREERS and FOUR LANGUAGES

1. Paradise Sought 
2. Paradise Found (plus some thoughts on economic development) 
3. Yoro Keikoku 
4. Becoming a Land Owner (plus some thoughts on how to learn English)

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For years Yasuko and I had enjoyed weekend hikes in the hills and mountains around Tokyo.

We knew vaguely that Boso existed – that it was a large peninsula jutting out into the Pacific south of Chiba city which itself was just to the east of Tokyo.

We had gone swimming once or twice at the Kujukuri beach at the north-eastern end of the peninsula. 

But we had never ventured further south

Our weekend hikes had always been to the west and south-west of Tokyo – Oku Tama, Chichibu, Tanzawa.

Like most Tokyoites, we assumed that Boso was little more than a large blob of featureless land lying somewhere beyond a wasteland of factories, steel mills and unremarkable urbanisation spreading towards and beyond Chiba city. 

Narita airport lies just beyond this urban-industrial eyesore. 

But what they do not tell you (though it should be visible from the planes as they fly into Narita) is that south of the ugliness lies a vast and largely undeveloped expanse of lush, semi-tropical hill country rimmed by tiny fishing villages and a string of southward-facing surfing beaches. 

Inland is mile after mile of undulating, forest-covered hills sprinkled with isolated farms and villages.

The southern end of the peninsula is bathed by a warm current – the kuroshio. There they can grow flowers and vegetables for the Tokyo market right through the winter. 

Boso has space and depth. Unlike almost anywhere else in Honshu Japan (Kii Peninsula is one exception perhaps) you can walk for hours without seeing humans, and drive for hours without seeming to get anywhere. 

It is a paradise waiting to be discovered. 

1. Paradise Sought 

In the late seventies we found ourselves saddled with two small children. Literally saddled. 

In addition to Dan we now had Ron.  (Ron is an unusual name in Japanese but Yasuko’s father, a classical expert,  had discovered an ideograph for it that made sense.) 

Whenever we went to climb hills and mountains around Tokyo we had to carry them on our backs. 

We needed a piece of countryside for ourselves where we could go weekends, do a bit of farming maybe, and generally enjoy nature without being ‘saddled.’ 

But where, and how? 

My Japanese Tribe book had only just been published. I was not feeling very rich. 

Besides, “Land for Sale” signs are rare in the Japanese countryside. 

Most Japanese farmers seem to believe that selling part of the family estate is a sin against the ancestors who looked after and developed that land for centuries before them. 

They are right, unfortunately.

…

In the fashionable, fat-cat foreigner/Japanese holiday areas of Izu and Karuizawa, much further from Tokyo than Boso, there was weekend resort land for sale. 

But in those Bubble years land prices were already in the 100,000 yen a tsubo (3.3 square meters) range, and that did not include the cost of a house. 

One could end up having to pay close to one million US dollars, all for the privilege of having to travel several hours each weekend to get to an expensive house and block of land facing directly onto someone else’s expensive house and block of land. 

I had to look somewhere else. But where? 

2. An Advertised  Chance? 

I had come across an advertisement offering small houses on small blocks of land in the Kujukuri beach area just to the south of Narita. 

Price: about two-three million yen apiece – unbelievably generous, even by Australian standards and certainly by Karuizawa or Izu standards. 

Kujuku means 99, and li (ri) is the Japanese mile. 

The name is no over-statement – a wide strip of unspoiled beach facing due south onto Pacific surf and running close to 100 kilometers in length — all the way from Choshi in the east and down to Ohara in the south-west.

That a beach of this quality could be largely deserted, even in the middle of Japan’s hot summers and even though it was only an hour or so from many of the 30 million souls living in the Tokyo conurbation, was, and remains, a mystery. 

(It was also, paradoxically, the key to Japan’s economic problems. Reluctance to spend on leisure was the major reason for Japan’s chronic lack of demand, which in turn explained both the vulnerability of the economy to recession, and the chronic trade surpluses.)

At the equidistant but far less attractive Shonan beaches the other side of Tokyo, the summer months would see bodies jammed together like seals on a rock.

Maybe Kujukuri was deserted precisely because it was deserted.

(There is the story about how they advertised Saipan as a resort.) 

(In the Western-oriented media they showed a beautiful tropical beach with just one or two people on it.) 

(In the Japanese media they showed a hotel beach crowded with other Japanese.)

Japanese people like to go where other Japanese people like to go. 

…

The Kujukuri hinterland was even more undeveloped. 

Wartime Japan had assumed that Kujukuri would be the natural invasion route for an American attack on Tokyo. 

The complicated, roughly-built road system there was deliberately designed to confuse and delay the Americans once they landed, it is said. 

True or not, it was still able to confuse a lot of Japanese. 

But amongst the road confusion are farms growing decorative trees for the Tokyo and Chiba markets.

… 

The Kujukuri area also had a cultural attraction.

Aoki Shigeru’s famous painting of fishermen going naked into the sea to haul their fishing boats and catches on to beach was a Kujukuri scene of only a generation or so earlier. 

To the south, the ama-san women (abalone and lobster gatherers) used to dive semi-naked below the Onjuku cliffs. 

The west side of the peninsula had harboured a colony of progressive painters earlier in the century. 

Maybe that advertisement would give us access, not just to some cheap real estate but to a new life in some kind of beach-bound paradise. 

Paradise Lost 

We were wrong. 

The advertised ‘houses’ turned out to be shacks.

The land attached was little more than 60-70 square meters of flat sandy soil surrounded by other shacks.

And it was a distance from the beach. 

…

What to do? 

As I stood there mumbling some negative words to the salesman I noticed a low line of wooded hills in the distance.

Pioneering instincts were triggered. Maybe there would be some land up there in those hills that I could buy and develop.

‘You want land over there?” said the salesman in some kind of awe. “Snakes, jungle, … ? 

None of his Japanese clients had ever shown any interest. But if we insisted he would find out for us, but…. 

We decided to check out that situation too, by ourselves. 

2. Paradise Found 

From Kujukuri we went directly into the hills we had seen. 

There in the Tsurumai area, wedged between two main highways running down both sides of the peninsula, we discovered a small Shangri La of unspoiled hillside beauty, carefully-tended farms and old-world villages, all seemingly cut off from the rest of the Japan but only an hour or so from Tokyo as the car runs. 

There were no buses or trains. 

But for us this was Japanese countryside at its best – much more attractive than the more developed countryside to the west of Tokyo in Oku-Tama or Chichibu. 

Enamoured, we even tried to rent an abandoned, thatched farm house we discovered there. 

(Some thoughts on the Economic Development Process) 

(When rural Japanese communities are left free to organise themselves, they can do so with a perfection rarely seen elsewhere.

(One reason could have been the long years of feudal isolation, particularly in Boso where defeated refugees from the Genji-Heike wars were said to have settled. 

(There is a message here for our globalisers and free traders trying to impose outside values and influences on the rest of the world. Leave people alone and they will progress naturally, of their own accord.

(People are not stupid. Provided they are protected from outside disturbance, they will develop naturally and organically the social structures and industries they need.

(Japan did just this during its long period of Tokugawa isolation, when not just the countryside but a range of local industries were able to develop free from outside competition and intervention, laying the skills and entrepreneurial basis for the highly competitive Japanese industries of today.

(Even now in many villages you can find quite sophisticated metal working factories turning out implements needed by local communities. 

(Competition from large-scale plants have since forced some to close down. But many have survived, and modernised – NC lathes, overhead cranes etc.  

(And those large-scale plants themselves also relied on those small rural plants for some of their skilled workers.

(It is the careful balance between protectionism and competition that allows economies to progress. Japan has been successful in keeping that balance. 

(But first you must have some kind of protectionism – in the past in the form of feudal isolation, today in the form of tariffs or cheap currency – to allow domestic industries to get up and survive in the first place. 

(If other developing peoples, Africans especially, had been allowed to develop the same way, at their own pace and time, the world today would be a very different place). 

3. Yoro Keikoku 

A few weeks later the phone rang. 

Our salesman had found a block of land near Yoro Keikoku (Yoro Gorge) in the middle of the peninsula and not far from our Tsurumai discovery. Could we come and look at it. 

We were more than willing.

The Yoro Keikoku area was much wilder than Tsurumai, but also enticing — steep, heavily forested hills rising to 300 meters at the head waters of the Yoro river as it cuts its way through the middle of the peninsula on its way to the ocean. 

It reminded me a lot of the Austrian countryside I had seen as a student wandering around Europe. 

 Tokyo seemed a thousand miles away. 

The land for sale was six thousand square meters (about two acres) of fertile land, largely covered with bamboo on some flat land at the top and hinoki (cypress) forest on the slopes below. 

Total price – only 3 million yen, or around 1,500 yen per tsubo (3.3 square meters) – not much more than what the land sharks were charging gullible Japanese city-dwellers for useless rocky hillsides in distant Hokkaido 

Certainly it was also a lot less than what hard-headed Australians were happily paying for weekend shack land an hour or so out of Sydney, Brisbane or Melbourne. 

(As I have been happy to tell unbelieving Japanese audiences ever since, a major reason I have wanted to stay in Japan so long is because the land here is so much cheaper than in Australia.) 

At first I could not believe that prices for such attractive land so close to Tokyo could be so reasonable. 

The hinoki (cypress) trees alone must be worth more than 3 million yen, I thought fancifully (timber prices were soon to fall heavily as the yen values soared and imports flooded in). 

True, much of the block was steep slope running down to a tiny stream cut deep into the layered mud-rock that makes up most of Boso.

But that simply added to the attraction and the mystery. We had our own private canyon. We could spend days exploring it. 

We even managed to find our own private waterfall hidden away at the bottom of our land. And the small patch of flat land at the top could be cultivated and built upon, provided we cleared the bamboo. 

(The Boso Peninsula is a geological anomaly. 

(Originally a deep bay filled with mud and sand washed down from surrounding volcanoes, it was compacted and uplifted in recent geological times as the Pacific plate continued to push up against the Japan plate.

(Much of this sedimentary rock still lies in thick, horizontal layers, with the layers clearly displayed along the sides of cutaways and canyons.

(Some Boso rivers are unusual also. Their lower reaches were flooded as the oceans rose after the Ice Age. They then filled with silt to form wide flood plains on which the original hills sit like islands surrounded by oceans of green rice fields.

(Another feature is the patches of very fertile soil hidden away at the tops of the hills. 

(It seems that dust and ash from Mt Fuji and other volcanoes continued to rain down as the peninsula was being uplifted.

(Today that fallout has turned to fertile loam.

(In the valleys it has been largely washed away. But it remains on the non-eroded hilltops, similar to the fertile volcanic loam that covers much of the Kanto Plain.) 

(So the tops the hills have plantations of vegetables and fruit trees. The valleys have infertile clay.

Primitive Pleasures

Getting to primitive land was a bit of a problem – about two hours by train from central Tokyo to Goi – an industrial town on the JR Uchibo line the west side of the peninsula.

From there take the very local Kominato train line to Nakano station terminus (40 minutes).  Next walk, or take a taxi, to our Otadai village about two miles distant.

Later I decided to buy a car.  That made it much closer – about 90 minutes from central Tokyo.

…

True, our little piece of Boso paradise had no water supply, gas or electricity. And to get there we had to walk several hundred meters along a dank forest track leading in from a narrow, little-used road. 

But that just added to the mystery of it all. 

As we disappeared down that forest track after our long trek from Tokyo we could feel we were entering another world, our own. 

Besides, we could draw water from the stream below, or from the roof of the pre-fab shack we were to build. 

Log-fires and kerosene heaters looked after our other needs. 

And just a few hundred meters down the narrow road was the charming village of Otadai, filled with dear hearts and gentle people. We were not totally isolated. 

In the other direction the road went for miles along a high narrow ridge, with forested slopes falling away on either side, till it eventually came out at the Mamenbara temple area with its famous ajisai (hydrangea) hillside gardens. 

(Mamenbara had been famous as the hilltop where the 13th century Buddhist sect founder, Nichiren, was said to have seen the New Year sun rise.

 (But it was being eclipsed by a rival hilltop temple, Kiyosumi, nearby making the same claim.

(Both competed for pilgrims over the New Year, with Kiyosumi having unfair access advantages.)

… 

There had to be some catch, I reckoned. Such attractive land could not possibly be going so cheaply. 

I had yet to realise that while Australians might relish the idea of having their own little acre of wilderness, for most Japanese this kind of land had zero attraction. 

Their loss was clearly my gain. 

Perhaps the most amazing thing for me as a foreigner was the fact that I was being allowed to enjoy the handiwork of farmers going back hundreds of years into Japanese history. 

Generations of Japanese had tended those hillsides, levelled out those fields and dug the irrigation tunnels and ditches.

Here was I, an interloper, and a foreigner, able to enjoy the fruit of their labor, without charge.

There should be a law against it, I used to think.

4. Becoming a Land Owner 

Like most foreigners in Japan I had had the usual prejudices about it being almost impossible for foreigners to own land in Japan, rural land especially – that the rules and regulations were designed specifically to keep us at bay. 

But sure enough, there in front of me were the documents proving that with little more than a stroke of the pen – or rather the thump of an inkan (seal) – we would become the owners of this small corner of Japanese paradise. 

To discover that as a foreigner with only a temporary visa I had exactly the same rights as any Japanese to own and develop my own piece of land seemed a miracle. 

The kindness with which our neighbours welcomed us would also to do much to force me to examine many of the other myths about alleged anti-foreign exclusiveness in Japan. 

For months I used to gaze at the small, pencilled-in patch on the area map covering our land, which showed how I, as a total foreigner, had actually come to own part of Japan, a nation which I liked and with which I was already deeply involved. 

Only after many years, and many Chiba land purchases later, could I shake off the surprise. 

Finding Funds 

True, the money to buy the land had not come easily. I was still some way away from that lucrative lecture circuit. 

Fortunately, I had just made 3 million yen from an outfit called Academy Shuppan. 

The owner had commissioned me to write a small booklet saying small children could easily learn two languages simultaneously. 

(Thoughts of How to Learn English) 

(The company was being bitterly criticised by conservatives for its efforts to sell English language listening materials to the parents of small children. 

(Its sales pitch had said that one’s children would be permanently handicapped in the education race if they did not begin learning English early.

(The conservatives were saying the minds of the young children would be permanently damaged if they began to learn English while they were still trying to master Japanese.

(Academy Shuppan had asked me to write something to rebut the conservatives – something I could do easily simply using the experience of raising my own children bilingually and which anyone else who has seen small bilingual and trilingual children in other societies can also do easily.

…

(Later I was to give Academy Shuppan a much better idea for making money.

(I told them their real market was adults, not small children. 

(And they could tap that market easily by creating a set of tapes recording a mystery story written in simple English, and then market the tapes together with the text as a set – a novel idea in those days.

(They did just that, and more. 

(The owner of the company caught a plane to New York, got Sidney Sheldon to write a mystery story with a Japanese hero.

(He had an even better idea —he got the deep, attractive voice of Orson Welles to record it, and had been making a fortune ever since.

(For long after, Japanese print media were plastered with the company’s half and full page ads for their story-listening sets of tapes.

(I should have got a small percentage myself for having given them the original idea. If I had I would be a very rich man today.)

Cultivating the Wilderness 

For the next few years that little patch of Yoro Keikoku (gorge of the Yoro river) paradise came to dominate our lives. 

Fridays saw us waiting impatiently to make yet another of our regular weekend trips out there, even though it would involve a three hour marathon journey by train, bus and foot in one direction, and another three hour journey back. 

But all that simply added to the anticipation. We wanted to see how our tiny vegetable crops were growing and the seasons were changing. 

(If I had had a car the trip would have been much easier and quicker. But partly for financial reasons and partly for rather foolish ideological reasons I had refused to buy one.) 

(I had seen how in Moscow the use of public transport had helped give the society a sense of community. Somehow I thought the same could happen in vast, cosmopolitan, busy Tokyo – provided everyone else thought like I did.) 

(It took me some time to realise my Canutian efforts were doomed to failure.)

… 

Having finally arrived at our patch of jungle, we would then set about removing bugs and planting more vegetables, with the children left to play among the thick bamboo we were trying to clear. 

At night we would all sleep together on the floor of the little six-mat prefab hut we had had built for us on the edge of the steep slopes. 

With its outdoor campfire, primitive toilet and roof-supplied rainwater buckets, it was for us a miniature palace looking out over endless green hills. 

Yama mata yama – mountain after mountain, as the Japanese saying puts it.

…

Surprisingly, Yasuko went along with all this barbarism.

Usually Japanese women flee at the first hint of jungle, bugs and primitive living. But she came quickly to love it as much as I did. 

However the Yoro Keikoku adventure was to lead me to quite a few other land purchase and development adventures in the Boso area. Persuading Yasuko that this was a good idea was much harder, and she could have been right.

The extra Boso land development was to keep me busy for years, when I could have and maybe should have been doing other things. 

To be continued.