日本女子大學 2008年出題の問題文です。まづは全體を提示し、次囘より毎週月曜日と金曜日にパラグラフ毎の解説を掲載する豫定です。
The culture of Edo Japan differed completely from the cultures of mass production and waste typical of modern civilization. The city of Tokyo, then known as Edo, was superior in many ways to London or Paris at that time. One historian has examined the example of water systems, noting that in the mid-eighteenth century, while Londoners had water supplied to their homes only seven hours a day, three days a week, fresh water was available at all times in Edo.
Yet what was most impressive was the recycling of resources that went on. Japanese in the Edo period wasted very little. The capital’s approximately one million inhabitants skillfully reused energy, kept their environment clean, and did not use up natural resources. Human waste was bought by farmers from the countryside for use as fertilizer*. Prior to the Edo period this waste was usually dumped in rivers, but such practices were prohibited in the seventeenth century, and agricultural communities were required to buy the material.
In Edo, not only human waste but all kinds of garbage produced by the city dwellers were used as fertilizer. The ash obtained from burning wood, for instance, was bought by ash collectors who visited each house. This system for recycling organic materials served to drastically reduce the amount of garbage produced. Clothes were resold through second-hand stores and reused any number of times ― the everyday wear of ordinary people was, indeed, used clothing. Even when these clothes could no longer be worn, they were not thrown away, but turned into “Asakusa paper” － toilet tissue made from scraps of paper and cloth.
Objects were carefully repaired when they became unusable. There were professional menders of every imaginable sort, from knife sharpeners to potters who mended broken earthenware*. There were even wax collectors, who bought drippings from paper lanterns and candlesticks and used them to make new candles. This was all part of the wisdom necessary for Japan’s thirty million people to survive on the country’s limited resources.
Now the lives of the Japanese people are marked strongly by Western trends － by the culture of throwing things away after use. This is not at all like the lives the Japanese people led in the Edo period. The loss of traditions, which began in earnest in the 1960s, was one result of the mass society that developed in Japan’s high growth period. For while Japan’s culture was one that gave deep thought to harmonious living with nature, the modern focus on mass production has eaten away at the foundation of that culture. The petroleum-based civilization of the twentieth century has produced vast quantities of products made of plastic and other materials that cannot be naturally recycled. However, by planting trees, harvesting them after they have grown, and making full, appropriate use of the wood obtained, we can enjoy a limited supply of forest resources that takes nothing more than the heat of the sun to produce. This is not the case with oil and coal, which run out as we take them from the earth.
Despite being shut off from the rest of the world during the Edo period, Japan’s thirty million inhabitants enjoyed the highest standards of welfare and levels of cleanliness of anywhere on earth. This was due to the existence of a society that made efficient use of its resources, provided its people with a tough but healthful lifestyle, and created a culture that made this lifestyle unique.
Today, though, our lives are such that we cannot live them without relying on the fruits of scientific and technological progress. Modern people would find it difficult to live a life without electricity, for instance. It will not, of course, be possible to return completely to the lifestyles of pre-electric Edo, but we have much to learn from the wisdom and ways of life of that earlier age. Japan’s ideal vision for the future may well lie in a blending of Edo culture with today’s civilization. [659 words]
*fertilizer：肥料
*earthenware： 陶器
