2 Visit to a Green Star

2 Visit to a Green Star

Visit to a Green Star

by Sakyo Komatsu

in Here is JAPAN, 1964.

Asahi Broadcasting Corporation, Osaka. n.p.

[COMMENTs follow the text of the story.]

The shock of the landing had made him breathless. It had been a long journey from earth. Now, for the second time, he had landed safely on what he remembered as the “Green Star” isolated on the frontiers of solar civilization.
There will be, he thought, the quiet villages beside their crystal streams amid the neatly-cultivated fields. Only the birds twittering will disturb the music of the people enjoying their old dances and folk songs when the day’s work is done. The shrines to the ancient gods will be fresh with flowers, and the immemorial rhythms of an agricultural race will leave the mysteries of nature unviolated.
But it was not to be like that this time. As he stepped to the ground from his space vehicle, he saw the tall buildings challenging the blue skies. Traffic hummed beneath a network of monorail trains; automatic conveyer systems threaded in and out of factories. He was looking at a passing helicopter when the Old Man came up to him, and said:
“How nice to see you again, my friend from earth”.
The Man from Earth gestured helplessly. “What has happened”, he said. “What are all these changes?”
“New seeds were brought from earth”, the Old Man answered. “Thanks to them, we now have prosperity, as you see”.
“Seeds?” The Man from Earth was puzzled. “What seeds? Wheat? Or maybe sunflowers?”
The Old Man only smiled as he guided the Man from Earth into the fashionable lounge.
“Where is the lovely and peaceful green star I knew before?” the visitor asked angrily. “Where is the beauty of sunlight on the golden seas of ripening rice? Have you thrown away the exquisite fabrics of your festival robes? Does the festival drum no more call the people to their simple and happy pleasures?”
The Old Man was still smiling. “All these things we still have”, he answered gently. “At home, I take off the earthling's clothes and go back to the comfortable old ways”.
“Then I will find the tranquil atmosphere I appreciated so much on my last visit?”
“Of course”.
“Where, in all this concrete, glass, and busy machines? How can the old customs not wither and decay under the smoke and grime?”
The Old Man gestured at the window. “Look outside, and you will see all the things you desire,” he said.
The Man from Earth sneered. “You are joking”, he said. “I see only the same sights of industrialized earth and our colonial stars. These are the things I fled”.
“You cannot see”, the Old Man mumbled sadly. “Because you are so new from earth, you cannot see there is no difference between the old and new. Stay a little longer than you did before. Then you will come to understand”.
The Man from Earth did not answer. But as the days went by, he began to see the details in the streets far below his room on the fourteenth floor of a new hotel. The people came into focus; they were not earthlings, but native to this star. Faces were kin to each other in a gentle absence of expression.
Change, too, was so much faster in the city about him. As a plant mushrooms in a hothouse, the city was growing faster than his eyes could record. Where there had been one factory, now there were two. His hotel had been 14 stories; now it had silently risen to 15, and atop the new height sprouted a roof-garden where there had been only a roof.
Perhaps the whole city was a growing entity, threatening to swell and expand until it floated, freely, skyward. Already the breezes played among the higher buildings.
When the Old Man came back to visit, he spoke with amusement “Soon Will come the season of wind and fire. You will understand everything soon”.
For the Man from Earth had not noticed the brief mention in his guide book of the season of violence. He knew it when the typhoon-like winds howled about the city, dumping their freight of rains until floods raged through the streets The ground began to shake as volcanoes spewed aloft their fiery rocks and white hot lava rained down on the Green Star city. In flood, fire and earthquake, the city shook like a tortured ship in merciless seas. The Man from Earth killed his fear with sleeping pills....
Twittering birds were the sound of the morning. He was no longer in a luxurious hotel room. His bed was the grass beside a humble hut. “What fantasy is this?” he wondered, as he stood up to look where the city had been. There was only fire seared earth between the beds of solidified lava and flood-borne mud.
“Now what do you think?” The voice was that of the Old Man, smiling at him from nearby.
“This is awful”, the Man from Earth said. “Can such things happen?”
“Awful?” asked the Old Man. “We shall see”.
The full warmth of the sun touched the earth. More birds sang, and tiny plants began to sprout from the ravaged land. People appeared, seemingly from the naked earth itself. They bent their backs, working the land. Their songs rose to mingle with the music of the birds. Between each blink of his eyes, the Man from Earth saw first the fields turning golden with ripening rice; then the simple villages building in the valleys; and after, the colourful costumes of the people at a gay festival to celebrate the success of their labour.
“This is what you saw five years ago, isn't it?” the Old Man asked. “It had not really disappeared, had it?”
The Man from Earth made no reply. He watched the rice harvested, and the land plowed anew, and fresh seeds sown. Villages grew into towns, and from some of the buildings came the sounds of simple machinery where only hands had worked before. The buildings grew taller, and just as the natural seeds yielded foods, the mechanical seeds gradually sent out new ribbons of roads; conveyer belts once more ran among the factories; and through the air flew machines to rival the traffic humming along the ground. Once more the great city lived, served by the people.
“Perhaps you understand now”, the Old Man said. “This sight is no different from the previous ones, either”.
The grass hut beside which the Man from Earth had awoken from the night of violence already was a cement and glass luxury hotel. He was back on the fourteenth floor.
“It must be fantasy”, he muttered. “Is this repeated every year?”
“We are not repeating”, the Old Man said. “The storms, the pastoral scene, and this urban community are all the same. Our civilization encompasses all the fundamental elements you have just experienced. Our world is an agricultural community, and our civilization is like that of flowers. I do not say which is better, your civilization of earth or ours. I only say that this is our way...”
When the Man from Earth prepared to leave, he looked back once more at the Green Star city that had seemed to be so much like the life he knew at home. But now he saw the different levels all at the same time—the modern factories inspired by earth, yes; but also the fields of golden rice and the diligent people, between the onslaughts of storm, affectionately caring for their land and its produce. And he knew they would be singing in their festivals as long as the towns bred new towns, just as the pollens renewed the cycles of the plants.

COMMENT

We are given a tour of the Green Star (Japan), a planet separate from, although at times and places resembling, the Earth. A traveler returns. He had visited this place in years past, and is, perhaps, also implicated in the bringing of the “new seeds” from Earth. With these seeds on such soil, the flowers that blossom are factories and high-rise hotels, which, as all flowers do, reproduce themselves as seeds, when the storms (typhoon) and the earthquakes rock the planet. And the peoples themselves, in touch with the same land, grow their rice as joyously as they labor in the factories.

“It is changing so swiftly, this mid-twentieth century Japan that you, the visitor will see. For the Japanese themselves, the pace of change is so swift that they sometimes wonder what they have lost, what they have gained, and what the final balance will be...”
Introduction to the Visit to a Green Star in the book Here is JAPAN, 1964, n.p.

Who are these people? “...they were not earthlings, but native to this star. Faces were kin to each other in a gentle absence of expression.” Their common immutable, and non-transferable status has left them with the same face, and a face characterized by a collective absence of expression.

And the visitor (perhaps something of an anthropologist) longs to see the village festivals; He asks the Old Man, “‘Where is the beauty of sunlight on the golden seas of ripening rice? Have you thrown away the exquisite fabrics of your festival robes? Does the festival drum no more call the people to their simple and happy pleasures?’"

The idea of discarding the past to accommodate the present is presented as a flawed strategy, where what is tossed out is more precious than anything that can be acquired. And so the epic history of the place does not and cannot give way to a novelistic time of modernity.

Here is a tale of an peculiar form of modernity that grows as naturally as flowers from the soil and from the soul of this place and its kin-connected people—a modernity that is at once ancient and new. The myth of a shared agricultural lifestyle of mutual suffering and the shared joy of a good harvest is presented as fully transferable to the construction of cities and the nation itself.

The Old Man puts it this way: “...Our civilization encompasses all the fundamental elements you have just experienced. Our world is an agricultural community, and our civilization is like that of flowers. I do not say which is better, your civilization of earth or ours. I only say that this is our way...”

“...I only say that this is our way.” The traveler must remember his place. He cannot know fully the unified but hidden philosophy that drives the locals to do what is bred in their nature to do. And so he, and they, cannot bring this philosophy and its consequent practices into a discursive arena of judgement and potential reform.

The myth of nation thus seals itself and its people into a silence that cannot easily be fractured. Note here that the buildings and the helicopters are from seeds brought from Earth, although on the Green Star they do not create the troubles and the discontinuities that modernity brings to Earth. Here they are liable to the ravages of nature, and to the seasons that all seeds obey.

‘"You cannot see”, the Old Man mumbled sadly. “Because you are so new from earth, you cannot see there is no difference between the old and new....’ The naturalizing influences of Japan’s racial/cultural heritage is presented as strong enough to change without changing. And so to alter change itself, from the discontinuities of modernization into a change that only reasserts the unchanging nature of the place and its people. Because of its (unique) soil, climate and people, Japan is the place that changes without changing.