中島正

The net is vast, but even very large things can have blind spots. The Internet has what our wikipedian brethren call a systemic bias — one must own a computer and an internet connection before one can participate on it, therefore all internet content is predicated on that fact. There are few webpages about the amish run by the amish people. Evidence of this bias can be seen in the instance of a singular man, one Tadashi Nakashima of Japan, for which virtually no information is available. The vast majority of all internet queries in English refer back to the following excerpt, which has been distributed by Project Gutenberg in their free translation of his book, Down with the Cities:

Mr. Nakashima (born 1920) is a self-sufficient farmer in the hill country of Gifu Prefecture, Japan. He entered the Army in 1939, and was in Taiwan at the end of the war. In 1945 he returned to his family farm and began farming. In 1954 Mr. Nakashima began raising free-range chickens, and embarked on the long process of developing his method of producing "natural eggs," for which he is now well known in Japan. About 1975 he started studying the writings of the Edo Period thinker Ando Shoeki. He has also written a book entitled "Minomushi Kakumei -- Dokuritsu Noumin no Sho" (The Bagworm Revolution -- A Book for Independent Farmers). The author has also written and published extensively on free-range chicken farming.

Inquiries under Japanese search engines recover only links to this agrarian manifesto of his, reprints of such, and citations. But nothing of the man himself remains; he is a modern-day Socrates, or Jesus Christ. His map far overwhelms his territory. So who is Tadashi Nakashima? I can only speculate from the text.

I imagine a bitter man, someone the Germans would call world-weary. People who always find themselves at odds with an inattentive society are always world-weary. He's the type of person that would die before giving up the farm, the type of person that America has not seen since the Dust Bowl and the subsequent Agricultural Revolution this gentleman would do anything to have undone. He doesn't trust the cities; he's one of those people who thinks technology is not the remedy for problems caused by technology. Even so! This technology-hater carries with him a tinge of outright Objectivism. It is the farmer's crop, he thinks, but the city extorts the farmer's rice from under his nose and promptly wastes it.

That he served in the Japanese military during World War II tells us another hint of what Takashi Nakashima might be like — a man of discipline, willing to eat a cup of uncooked rice a day out of principle alone. Someone who, with the dying spark of nationalism still in his breast, would freely rise up and speak out against the dangers of modernization, even if it would fall on deaf ears. The Internet does not believe in people who do not believe in it. That he exists to us at all is only a side-effect of the journal that published his serialization, not a reflection of himself. Why, he would awfully old these days, even for a Japanese man — for all we know, the poor man and his hopeless fight might already be dead.