AVANT GARDENER
Last week, the anime world mourned the passing of Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dragon Ball Z (DBZ). I’ve only seen parts of it in passing, just enough to be familiar with some characters and to know what the Kamehameha (Kamehame wave in the Filipino dub) energy wave attack is and to have wanted Gino Padilla to sing the DBZ theme song when he sang at a Christmas party I attended last year.
I mention this because a friend joked that I should put it in my column because the main character Son Goku was at one point a radish farmer. There’s a recurring character who farms ostriches, and the Saiyans, one of the alien races in the anime, are mostly named after vegetables (exceptions include Son Gohan, Goku’s son, who was named after cooked rice, which is a grain, not a vegetable). Growing up, I thought names like Kakarrot, Broly, and Vegeta were part of the Filipino dub, sort of like a Ghost Fighter situation, where the characters were given Western names. And since I haven’t thought about DBZ in decades, it was only after Toriyama’s death that I realized that some characters were named after vegetables!
Now that I’ve embarrassed myself after admitting how long it takes me to realize the most obvious things sometimes, let me tell you why I began this column with an anime. There’s more to my mentioning DBZ than vegetable names. In the cartoon, Goku becomes a radish farmer because his wife Chi-Chi wants him to make more money. Imagine that! That storyline wouldn’t work in the Philippines. That’s because in Japan, the agriculture industry is well funded and well respected, with farmers earning a decent living — enough to make it an occupation to aspire to in popular culture.
Not so in the Philippines.
Also last week, I bought a copy of Libing Isa, a horror comic by Malayo Pa Ang Araw. It’s 11 eerie flash fiction stories accompanied by cute and creepy illustrations often starring children reminiscent of Edward Gorey.
The fourth story in the book is called “Ang Kasaysayan ng Bigas,” a blind child asks his father where the rice they are cooking comes from and his father tells him a straightforward story of how rice is produced. It’s a pretty good explanation of how rice gets from seed to the table. However, the pictures tell another story. When the father tells his son that rice starts from buto (seed), it’s an illustration of what’s obviously crushed human bones (buto) falling into a hand. When the father talks about how farmers are dependent on rain instead of irrigation, it’s a rain of bullets that we see flying into the rice fields. When the father talks about drying palay in the sun, we see farmers’ bodies covered with the same woven mats that’s used to shield the drying palay from the ground. This is what farming is like in Philippine pop culture. For most farmers, it is a dangerous, thankless job that ends in poverty or, if one happens to go up against the wrong people, death.
That situation doesn’t apply to all farmers, of course. There are farmers who started with very little and who have managed to earn a good income, but these folks seem to be the exception more than the rule.
How can we encourage people to enter into agriculture when it is (rightly) associated with poverty and violence in the public consciousness?
How can we encourage the youth to go into agriculture when they experience the effects of their parents being unable to climb out of poverty? A lot of the current sentiment is aimed at showing young people that agriculture can be lucrative, but as I’ve said before, I think this is the wrong way to go about it. If we want to encourage young people to go into agriculture, their parents have to experience that it’s lucrative. Farmers are famously “to see is to believe” type persons and well, to see lots of money is to believe in agriculture as a viable career choice.
A good indicator of what the public thinks of something is to observe how it is depicted in pop culture. In Japan, farming is what a member of a powerful alien race turns to when he needs to make enough money to feed his growing family. In the Philippines, it’s quite literally a horror story.