Faith in the Land

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When Yuko suggested the family turn their farm into a new kind of place, one that uses no chemicals, the reply was a flat no. They would go out of business, her parents said. The land could not support it.

Yuko is hearty and direct, not someone to take no for an answer. On the day that I visited her, she wore thick high heels but still trudged up the hill behind her apartment as if she were wearing work boots. Together we wound along the road to a field of tall weeds, behind which lay her response to the family's decision.

There lay a clearing 60 feet long. Along one side ran a forest of brush; downhill was a trash-strewn cliff that ended in a dusty baseball field. In the middle, though, on two terraces cut into the hill, Yuko had planted pears and peaches: 12 trees in all. It was land nobody wanted -- for farming or anything else -- but that was a good thing. Isolation meant the trees would never be threatened by drifting chemicals.

As most Japanese orchardists would, Yuko had secured the tree limbs onto overhead trellises. The branches were meticulously arranged in a fan pattern so their fruit would get maximal sunlight and thus grow larger. But below the trees, the earth was wild with grass and clover, the air speckled with falling petals.

When we arrived, Yuko stopped at her shed there. She picked up a cottony wand and a tin can full of pink powder, strapped the can over her shoulder with a loop of string, and slipped under the pear trees. Every few feet she would dip her wand into the can and reach up to anoint blossoms with the powder. A fairy in muddy high heels.

She explained that because space is limited, she could plant only fruiting trees, not the usual companions that provide pollination. So she acts as a surrogate bee: She collects blossoms from pollinators at the family farm, pulverizes them, puts the powder into her can, and dabs life onto the flowers herself.

Yuko knows this land will not fail her. Instead, the big question, the one that decides her fate, is whether the consumers will fail her. I imagine she would gain the allegiance of every shopper in Japan if each one could sit there as I did: with white blossoms falling into my hair, watching pink powder rain back down on Yuko's face. But at the supermarket, who would ever know? By the time her pears sit on the shelf with all the others, they have lost the sweet air of that clearing, the soft green of its clover, the genius of that place.

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