Roger Pulvers' Sept. 21 article, "In harmony with all creation," was a reminder that not all Japanese blindly embraced industrial "progress" in the 20th century, although there are still far too many salarymen today who devote their entire drab, gray lives to fluorescent-lit corporate plantations.
Writer Kenji Miyazawa would be deeply troubled to learn just how far mankind has abandoned the idea of harmony or balance with nature. Environmentalists and ecologists now warn that in the next 40 years more than 50 percent of all species on the planet may be wiped out by global warming and various toxic pollutants that are spewed into the atmosphere every day.
Pulvers writes that Miyazawa was sensitive to the "brutally inequitable selfish and callous" era in which he lived. How little things have changed. Miyazawa was a deeply compassionate figure in a time when Japan embarked on a war of aggression in China. He was a vegetarian in a world where most men thought a good diet consisted solely of beef steak and potatoes. He was marching to the beat of a different drummer for sure. Whitman and Thoreau would have appreciated his struggle to find inner peace and harmony with nature. Few of us find such a state in this day and age.
Miyazawa is a voice for the ages, but how many Japanese today bother with such literature? Miyazawa would be disappointed that today's school-age kids spend much more time playing computer games and/or reading manga than they do exploring the woods near their homes. In large cities like Tokyo and Osaka, many children rarely have any adventure with the natural world. Such isolation doesn't bode well for Japan's goals of fostering social harmony in the future and preserving nature. The same sort of disharmony is seen in Europe and America.
Japan has paid a terrible price to become the world's second-largest economy. Now China seems to be following Japan's economic growth model.