Part 31: What Happened to the Frontier

What Happened to the Frontier

For several days snow continued to fall on the land made foul by the beast, and a number of the frontier folk cast their land away, calling on friends or family and hurriedly departing. However, those who left the frontier in this fashion were those blessed in life. For most, they had no place to go on this bitter years’ end.

First and foremost the destroyed and totaled houses had to be rebuilt, with neither time nor carelessness to spare. Had the incident not happened, the villagers would have been on the brink of beginning preparations for New Year’s festivities.

Some women and children were plagued by bad dreams. If the wind would blow they might recoil and cry, “Oh no! It’s a bear!” Even snow falling from tree branches could stand their hair on end. But the frontier folk helped each other get through it, and they finished the village work, at least for New Year’s Eve. But for the frontier folk, no matter what welfare or donations they received, it was an all too cruel, secluded winter.

With no clothing to their name, there were those who kept fires going all night, substituting that warmth for clothing. One person, discovering that keeping livestock in the house kept it warmer, acquired a number of chickens. The schoolhouse, which had been closed since the incident, came back into session a few weeks later.

It was about this time that the villages became able to laugh again. The long-awaited spring approached. The chickens’ chicks grew bigger. But outside were the snowy mountains, which would show no signs of shedding their snow even in May. At some point the criss-crossing tracks of foxes and rabbits looking for lures spread by the frontier folk appeared across the snow. It was now that bears, too, began to awaken from hibernation. An anxiety about whether this sort of thing could happened again passed through.

At the edge of the swamp, buttercups (Ezo marigolds) burst into bloom, butterbur made its first appearance, and the occasional warbling of wild birds could be heard. Spring was almost here. But with May half over the urge for the wasteland to open up had waned, and it was all the villagers could do to blearily look at their surroundings. The wounded in heart Ōta Kazuo burned his house down the following spring and went to live with an acquaintance in Haboro, but apparently he later returned to his hometown of Kabe to the northeast. It was rumored that he died of sickness shortly thereafter.

People left like this, in ones or twos, until by the spring of 1916, there was only one home downstream from the home of Tsuji Hachikura, and the Tsuji house was second from the top. The fields continued, but the families moved away; they became commute famers.

For Tsuji, farming this vast wasteland, his long struggle with isolation had only begun. Even the Matsumura and Yoshikawa families, whom among the frontier folk loved the land more than others, moved away out of fear.

After the frontier folk scattered to the four winds no one came to call on the Rokusensawa River. The fields were left to fend for themselves against the wilds. At last, in 1946, when the incident had long been forgotten, six families from Ōsaka came to settle the area under the banner of the “Nanba Settlers’ Association.” For those who had languished in the underfed and underpaid pre- and post-war years, this new land was not barren; on the contrary, it must have been rich indeed.

Not one of these six families knew of the terrible events that had occurred on the land. But even among these newcomers, who had left their hometowns bright-eyed and bushy tailed, eager for something new, the turnover was great.  They left, again in ones and two, until in 1968 barely three families remained. This was not just because of the difficulties in farming and cultivation due to long winters and severe cold, but because they had learned of the tragedy of forty years ago. And though no bears had actually come into the frontier, there were constant sightings of brown bears in the national forest surrounding the settlement. Every sighting felt like an omen. And the final straw was the question of medical care.

The closest hospitals were 19 and 30 kilometers away, in Kotanbetsu and far-off Tomamae, respectively. But in the winter months such a trip would require a horse-drawn carriage, and a horse would have to be graciously borrowed from a farmer in Sankei. I have not yet exhausted pen or tongue on the degree of these difficulties.

I worked for the Kotanbetsu branch of the Imperial Family Forest Agency from 1961 to 1966. Three families from the Nanba Settlers’ Association then remained, and they were friendly with those who farmed there but lived elsewhere. However, in 1940, the last of the original families, who had stuck it out for so long, packed up for Ōsaka.

As of late this has become a land where everybody farms, but where nobody lives. But based on the number of families which have been commute farming, the rice paddies are quite productive, and there are also wheat, soba noodles, potatoes, and fruit trees. They are starting to approach the edge of the forest. Gently rippling fields of rice and corn as far as the eye can see. Trucks moving lumber, trucks frequently coming and going, sightseers out on a long drive… Those can only been seen in the past.

After the war, due to the implementation of the national forest system, the road running through Rokusensawa had its course totally changed to prepare for the coming of the planned Tomamae-Obira regional road. Some parts were plowed over, other parts were moved. Of the road which, until now, had run along the fifteen farmhouses on the frontier, hardly anything remained.

However, fortunately, there were still people who came to take pictures of the current state of the frontier, years after the incident. This Sankebetsu was long gone, but in the 12 years between 1941 and 1953, there was the then-principal of Sankei Elementary School, Seki Mitsuo. Working around his busy school duties, in his spare time he would venture out to the nearby towns and villages in order to create audio-visual materials. He took countless photographs: farming towns and fishing villages, the farmers and the fishers, and their festivals, weddings, and funerals. Naturally, he also photographed the great outdoors.

A posthumous collection, The Four Seasons of Sankei, was edited and published by his son, Seki Hideyuki, who works in a frontier museum. In that inter- and post-war era when even feeding one’s family was difficult, a camera was a luxury unknown almost to all. In an era such as that there are hardly any depictions so skillful of the state of ordinary fishers and farmers. Looking at these numerous photographs speaks of the mind of a great teacher and allows us to step back in time to the frontier as it then was.