The Monument
[What is written here applies to the whole of Japan, and not merely to a certain district or village.—Author.]
Osawa is a mountain village in the province of Shiga. In the winter it is half-buried in deep snow-drifts. It contains five hundred houses, and about two thousand inhabitants.
In this village there are a hundred and seventy homesteads of “despised peasantry.”[1] They settled here more than forty years ago, on the high valley to the west of the village, and formed a closely-knit society of their own. The place where they live is called “Yotani,” or “the hermit’s valley,” and is held in low repute by the whole village.
But suddenly radio-active springs gushed out in Yotani.
About a hundred and fifty of the houses in Yotani were let to tenants.
Igari Ihei was the hereditary elder of the village and at the same time a big landowner. A hundred and fifty peasants rented land from Igari. Igari grew fat and round on the rent they paid. He
- ↑ There are over three million craftsmen in Japan, engaged in trades that are considered disgraceful, such as tanning. They are contemptuously named “Suihei,” the despised, and are even poorer and more completely outlawed than the rest of the Japanese proletariat.
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