2024-02-22
The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s regular column, which closes the issue of Shukan Shincho released today.
This essay, too, demonstrates that he is a journalist without equal in the postwar world.
Essential reading not only for the Japanese people but for people around the world.
The Wolf Is a Great God
The Spaniards who went to the New World inflicted terrible suffering on the local people.
Las Casas described it as “destruction,” and that was by no means an exaggeration.
Indeed, Indigenous men were barely given food and were worked mercilessly, sustained only by coca leaves, until they died.
It was not just the men.
Mothers were killed together with their children, and pregnant women died with their bellies slit open.
Only virgins were kept alive as objects of sexual gratification and abused.
It was destruction exactly like the deeds of the Israelites described in the Book of Numbers in the Old Testament.
Yet the destruction of living beings was confined to the Indigenous people.
What, by contrast, of the Americans who came to North America?
They, too, thoroughly destroyed the Indigenous peoples.
They concluded as many as 370 treaties with them.
With the Dakota, they concluded a treaty promising proper supplies of meat and liquor in exchange for ceding their territory to the whites.
But the supplies were delayed, and even when they arrived, the meat was rotten.
When the Dakota rose up in anger over the treaty violations, the army was dispatched to suppress them, and 38 tribal chiefs were lined up on a huge scaffold in Mankato, Minnesota, and hanged all at once.
They also failed to honor any of their treaties with the Cheyenne and other peoples, utterly destroying the Indigenous peoples.
Up to that point, they were no different from the Spaniards, but the Americans destroyed every living thing in that land.
The bison, which numbered in the tens of millions, provided the Indigenous peoples with food and materials for their dwelling tents, or tipis.
Believing that the Indigenous peoples would also become extinct if the bison disappeared, they slaughtered them relentlessly.
Passenger pigeons, which numbered five billion, migrated south from around the Great Lakes.
It was said that, during their migration, “the sky grew dark for days.”
But their meat was delicious and their feathers were used for bedding, so they were hunted excessively, and the last bird died in 1914.
The thousands of wolves in the Rockies turned to livestock after humans wiped out the bison that had been their prey, and were then slaughtered to the last.
Americans also hunted whales in the Pacific.
Herman Melville describes how whale oil was obtained by “suspending the whale and peeling away only the layer of blubber beneath its skin, as though peeling an apple,” stripping it bare and throwing it back into the sea.
There was not the slightest consideration for the dignity of life, including human life.
Those same Americans now speak of wildlife conservation.
They also made a great publicity campaign out of restoring wolves to the Rockies.
In fact, because they had exterminated the wolves at the top of the food chain, deer were devastating the forests in the Rockies, while coyotes multiplied and foxes and beavers were on the verge of extinction.
So they brought in wolves from Canada, but ranchers immediately shot them dead.
They were Americans, so it could not be helped.
An environmental organization established a $100,000 fund and promised compensation for livestock losses, finally persuading the rough Americans to accept the wolves.
Thus, several dozen wolves were released in 1995, and nearly 2,000 have now been confirmed in and around the Rockies.
As a result, damage caused by deer has decreased, coyotes have disappeared, beavers have multiplied, and the natural order is being restored.
In Switzerland, too, a wolf appeared a few years ago for the first time in a century, and seven sheep were eaten.
The government protected the wolves, and 250 have now been confirmed.
At present, it is attempting to recreate “the Alps with wolves,” on the condition that “shooting is permitted once a specified level of damage to sheep occurs.”
In Japan, wolves have long been regarded as divine messengers that rid the fields of destructive deer and wild boar.
During the Meiji era, however, under pressure from Western Christianity, which regarded wolves as “incarnations of the devil,” the government actively pursued their extermination and wiped them out.
A hundred years have since passed.
Today, deer, wild boar, and monkeys freely ravage farmland and forests, causing damage amounting to 15.6 billion yen annually.
The Japan Wolf Association says, “The trees in the primeval forests of Odaigahara have died because of damage caused by deer, leaving what is now a forest of bleached bones,” and, “The Rockies have already demonstrated that releasing wolves can eliminate wildlife damage and restore greenery to barren mountains.”
Considering the enormous scale of wildlife damage, establishing a compensation fund as in the Rockies would surely more than pay for itself.
Incidentally, the claim that “wolves attack people” is also Christian nonsense, without foundation.
I would, after all, like to regard wolves in the Japanese way—as “divine messengers.”
