Smells, the dutch and the japanese

26 june

There is this bestseller, Shogun. If I remember correctly, some description of feudal Japan is given. Not so much has remained with me, even though I believe I did read others from Clavell’s Asian Saga. One image I do remember poignantly. It is about a westerner starting a travel across Japan’s countryside and being warned that Japan smells like shit. Which is kind of obvious, if you realize that human excrement is a fertilizer, and if we are talking about four hundred years ago, where drain pipes were way ahead in the future, and japanese cities like Edo might had had a million inhabitants. 

One of the funny things of living in The Netherlands and being buddhist is the slow realization that the dutch, in their roaming the oceans, were also one of the first westerners in having contact with Japan. And perhaps because of that, or perhaps because other reasons I can’t fathom, there are these many similarities when describing the dutch, and the japanese. Like the only practicing ordained shinto priest outside Japan being in Amsterdam. Or both japanese and dutch, in very different and almost opposite ways, having great appreciation for radical honesty. 

And of course, the smell of shit that overpowers The Netherlands during pretty much all the summer. If you are a urban being like me, then is not constant but reaches you now and then, with wind flags coming from the farms outside the city.  But also, if you are an outdoor being like me, in the moment that you go for a ride in your bike and get out of the city protection, there is no way around it. It all smells of shit. 

Yet it is not as disgusting as human faeces, and then again, is worse. Because what we smell is the result of manure being processed, concentrated and injected back in the fields. There is a quite specific smell, which I would describe as sour, that does not have the warmth quality of fresh manure. This thing is something different, it is a nasty reminder that in The Netherlands we have way more cows and pigs and fowl than what we need, that we keep them in horrible conditions, packed and concentrated, and that actually, they produce much more shit than what we can naturally deal with. So there are complex laws and methods to deal with the whole… shit. Actually, one of the last revolts of the farmers against the government, which generated cavalcades of angry farmers in big tractors parading across the political capital of the country, started here, due to limits in the nitrogen that farmers are allowed to dump in the soil, lest they cause even more environmental havoc. 

It all comes back to the traveler identity of the dutch. Back 400 years, even if there were already serious attempts at managing the waters and gaining land, most of the country was a swamp, which as a biologist I know stinks. Yet the dutch travel and travel away from their stinking swampy lands, and among other places, landed in Japan, another no-nonsense hard-working agricultural society… that stunk. And now here we are, quite some hundred years ahead, with the swamps gone and transformed in civilized (and in my view desolated) one-crop-field with huge barns containing millions of exploited cows… stinking. 

Where did we went wrong?