Page:The Cannery Boat.pdf/55

Rh five years out of it you were in a pit of darkness, without one chance of ever worshipping the sun—for four or five years!” But, no matter what happened, the capitalists didn’t mind very much, as they could always buy up plenty of new workers as substitutes. When winter came the workers continued to pour into those mines.

There were also “pioneer farmers”—that is to say, farmers who had immigrated to Hokkaido. Through cinema propaganda these poor peasants had been induced to leave their own holding and settle on land which four or five inches below the surface was nothing but clay. All the fertile land was already claimed. There were many actual cases where whole families, buried in the snow without even potatoes to eat, had died of starvation before the spring came. Not until the snows melted and the neighbours—who lived at least a ri away—came to see how they were was this discovered.

When they did manage to escape starvation it was only to face long years of toil. The capitalists—the bankers and millionaires—merely lent out what was really false money, and in course of time the peasants’ barren land, now transformed into sleek, fat acres, passed automatically into these gentlemen’s hands. Imitating them, many sharp-eyed speculators flooded Hokkaido, and the farmers had their property snatched from them, so that in the end they became tenant-farmers just like at home.

Hoping to make even a little money and then go back to their native villages, they had crossed