Growth startup

A hunger for growth in Oita

The farming village of Obasama, where we lived for 15 months, consisted of thirty-two wooden farm houses spread out on the mountainsides among terraced rice paddies. The houses had straw tatami-mat floors in the living areas and wooden floors in the dining and new kitchen areas, but still retained their old dirt floor kitchens with wood-fired stoves (kamado). Their white walls and gray tile roofs were scattered among the terraced rice paddies. Mossy gray lines of stone walls terraced the oblong rice paddies that climbed the mountain slopes. The paddies were emerald green in spring and summer, straw brown in fall and winter.

Before the Second World War, village life had been very humble. Villagers lived on what they grew - barley, rice, bean curd (tofu), vegetables. Only the rich peasants could afford to eat rice. Most ate barley, and gave the rice they grew to their landlord. Villagers got fresh fish only occasionally. A traveling merchant, usually a retired sumo wrestler, occasionally walked over the mountains from Beppu carrying 130 pounds of it on his back. More distant villages could only get salted fish. Back then, the farmers thatched their roofs with straw. Only the village headman, a large landowner, had a bath. This bath was a gigantic iron pot (goeimon buro) heated from below by a fire. After the headman's family finished bathing, the other villagers filed in to bathe with the same hot water.