I often go for walks in the local hills.
This isn’t a serious mountain climb. It’s a low mountain that’s easy to climb.
Even so, as I walk along, I sometimes find myself stopping to wonder, ‘I wonder who did that?’
The day after it has rained, the muddy path is sometimes strewn with walnut shells.
These are the traces left by someone who laid out shells one by one on a slippery slope. I don’t know who it was. Nor do I know when it was done. But I do know one thing: there was someone who thought of the people walking along that path.
A short walk away, in a spot where you just feel like taking a break, there is a small chair made of logs. It’s positioned at just the right height and angle for when you’re tired or want to take in the view. I imagine someone must have placed it there whilst picturing the people who would rest here.
The person who scattered walnut shells along the mountain path will probably never receive an award. They won’t appear in the newspapers either. Their name won’t go down in history. But it was thanks to them that I was able to walk without falling.
To begin with, mountain paths were not paths from the outset.
At first, someone began to climb. Then someone else followed in their footsteps. The trampled earth became a path; someone reinforced the sections that looked as though they might crumble, whilst another placed markers at the dangerous spots. Some scattered walnut shells; others placed log chairs. Each of them had, over time, carried out small acts for the sake of someone whose name they did not even know.
Whenever I walk along a mountain path, I find myself thinking: the path wasn’t created by nature. It was someone’s sense of ‘I can’t just leave this as it is’ that turned it into a path.
What we now take for granted stems from the fact that someone simply couldn’t bear to leave it as it was.
The moment walking becomes something we take for granted, the presence of the person who scattered the walnut shells becomes invisible. When something becomes a matter of course, we cease to see the reason why someone began it, or the time someone has spent preserving it.
Take irrigation channels, for example. Whether it’s the system for channelling water into the rice paddies or the local festivals, they all began because someone simply couldn’t stand by and do nothing.
The Nagaoka Fireworks are no exception.
In a town reduced to a wasteland by air raids, there were still people who tried to look to the future.
This fireworks display was launched to commemorate the victims and express hopes for reconstruction.
Nowadays, it attracts over a million people. But it all began with someone—whose name has been lost to history—who simply couldn’t stand by and do nothing.
We call that ‘a matter of course’.
But the moment it becomes the norm, you can no longer see where it all began.
When you look at the local area from this perspective, the view changes.
Things that seem to simply be there begin to appear as things that someone started, someone else continued, and someone else has preserved.
And that also means it is something ‘held in trust’.
We are now the custodians of something that was created by someone’s sense of responsibility and has been safeguarded by others ever since. When I walk along the mountain path, crunching on walnut shells beneath my feet, I feel myself part of that chain. I have received it from someone whose name I do not know, and I shall pass it on to the next person, whose name I also do not know.
It is the people we cannot ignore, right here and now, who will shape what becomes the norm in the future.
Right at this very moment, there are people in the local community who feel they cannot simply stand by and do nothing. That sense of not being able to stand by translates into action, and over time, it becomes the new norm.
The person who scattered walnut shells may never have known what they were leaving behind for the future. Yet even today, I am still walking along the path they left behind.
ATSUSHI KABASAWA
FARM8 Co. Ltd.,
