Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

“Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison.” So writes Evelyn Waugh in his 1928 novel, Decline ad Fall. Those who have been to English public schools and gone through the strict discipline demanded there as depicted, for example, by Charles Dickens in his 1854 novel, Hard Times, will probably concur with him. But how can anyone feel at home in prison? A prison is not intended to be a comfortable place like home in the first place. Moreover, we are amply aware of the cruelty and horror of life there from the fictional stories told by such writers as Alexander Dumas and Victor Hugo as well as from the real-life stories told about such places as Auschwitz and Guantanamo.

There is, of course, an exception to everything we encounter in life. One of the notable exceptions to the conventional notion about a prison being the scene of cruelty and horror is the Bando POW Camp in Naruto City in the closing days of World War I.

The Bando POW Camp was one of the camps set up in Japan to accommodate some 4,700 German soldiers, who were taken prisoners and brought over from China after the Siege of Tsingtao. Bando itself was host to some 1,000 German POWs. Toyohisa Matsue (1872-1956), Director of the Bando POW Camp, is known for his humane treatment of the POWs there. Born in Aizu, where a fierce battle between the imperial army who fought for the establishment of the new Meiji government and the Aizu samurais who remained loyal to the Tokugawa Shogunate took place, Matsue was well aware what it means to be on the losing side of a war. His humane treatment of German soldiers at the Bando POW Camp is said to have been his way of living up to Bushido, or the way of samurais, which required compassionate and merciful treatment of the fallen enemy warriors.

As a matter of fact, Bando became a bustling hub of cultural exchanges between German soldiers and local residents. German soldiers ran a printing shop, a bakery, even a restaurant, and enjoyed playing sports such as tennis, football, and cricket on the Bando POW campgrounds. As for local residents, interacting with German soldiers was an eye-opening experience to be exposed to many wonders of Western culture, for many of them had never seen foreigners, let alone things like German bread and cake. Some German soldiers were invited to local schools to demonstrate Western sports and gymnastics. While they were no doubt POWs kept at a POW camp, German soldiers at Bando even went out of the prison campgrounds from time to time for hiking on the nearby mountains and beaches, interacting with local residents wherever they went.

The legacy of Bando as a model for humane treatment of its prisoners and as a model for friendly interaction between prisoners and local residents lives on in the form of sister-city relationship between Luneburg, Germany, and Naruto City. Another important legacy is Daiku-no-hi, or the Day of Ninth, which the citizens of Naruto City observe on June 1 as a special day every year. The word “Ninth” here refers to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which was performed for the first time in Asia on the Bando POW campgrounds on June 1, 1918.

Performing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in a prison camp? That must have been an enormous feat, considering the high technical demands this symphony asks of the performers, including the synchronization between the orchestra and the choir in the final movement. What about female soloists and female choir? With no female prisoners being kept there, we are told that the first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on June 1, 1918 was done with all-male soloists and choir. To commemorate the centennial of this first performance, a special performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with all-male soloists and choir took place on June 1, 2018, followed by the performance of the full-orchestra version on June 2 and 3.

An important lesson we learn from the continuing cultural exchange between the citizens of Naruto and the citizens of Luneburg, where some of the German prisoners came from, is that a prison can indeed be a place where prisoners can feel at home and free. This reminds us of Thich Nhat Hanh’s message given to prisoners when he visited the Maryland Correctional Institution on October 16, 1999. His talk given there, which was made into a book titled Be Free Where You Are, tells us that we can be free and happy no matter where we are. By freedom, Thich Nhat Hanh means “freedom from afflictions, from anger, and from despair.” And the message Thich Nhat Hanh conveys to us is that “You can practice freedom every moment of your life. … When you eat, eat as a freeperson. When you walk, walk as a free person. When you breathe, breathe as a free person. This is possible anywhere.”²

If it can be done in prisons, that practice for freedom Thich Nhat Hanh talks about can be conducted anyplace, even in English public schools. Indeed, if prevention is the best medicine, reforming schools should be the priority, as John Ruskin had written in his essay, Unto This Last, first published in 1860: “Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.”

1. See: “Naruto-Daiku,” Naruto City-Official Homepage, www.city.naruto.tokushima.jp. 
2. Nhat Hanh, Thich, Be Free Where You Are, Parallax Press, 2002, pp. 16-17.

Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

Do trees celebrate Mother’s Day? The question would have been meaningless for most of us humans, even though we have been aware of the important role trees play for us as the suppliers of oxygen we breathe and logs we use for our houses and furniture. But the question is not totally meaningless for us now in view of the recent findings by biologists and forest researchers about the life of trees.

It goes without saying that the idea that trees can speak is not such an outrageous one, for it has been circulating in the world of mythology, art, and fiction. Thus, in Nihon-shoki, or Chronicles of Japan, we find the following statement: “In that land there were numerous deities (or spirits) which shone with a luster like that of fireflies, and evil deities which buzzed like flies. There were also trees and herbs which could speak.”¹ Turning to Shakespeare, we find the line, “Stones have been known to move and trees to speak,” in Macbeth.²

If trees can indeed speak, to whom are they speaking? Do trees talk to each other? In other words, do trees communicate with each other? The idea that trees talk to each other and communicate, though it may sound far-fetched to the modern rational mind, is actually gaining credibility and support, thanks to a small number of pioneering researchers and scientists.

Peter Wohlleben, a German forester, is one such individual whose book, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, is attracting a huge audience worldwide.³ In this fascinating book, Wohlleben expounds his idea that trees have evolved to live in cooperative and interdependent relationships with a communication network, or the “wood-wide-web,” as some prefer to call it. According to him, trees in a forest are connected to each other and communicate through underground fungal networks. A scientific term for these fungal networks is the “mycorrhizal network,” which is a network of fine, hair-like root tips of trees joined together with fine fungal filaments. Trees and fungi form a symbiotic relationship: fungi consume the sugar trees photosynthesize from sunlight, while trees absorb and consume nitrogen, phosphorus and other mineral nutrients fungi collect from the soil. To communicate through the network, trees send chemical, hormonal and slow-pushing electrical signals.

Suzanne Simard of the University of British Columbia is another individual, who has done an extensive research on the mycorrhizal network.⁴ As a matter of fact, Simard sounds a lot like Dr. Pat Westerford, one of the characters in Richard Powers’ new novel, The Overstory, who discovers that a forest’s trees are all communicating, all the time, via a nuanced chemical language transmitted from root to root.⁵ Be that as it may, Simard identifies hyperlinked “hub-trees,” or “mother trees” in common parlance. Mother trees are the biggest, oldest trees in the forest with the most fungal connections. With their deep roots, they draw up water and make it available to shallow-rooted seedlings. Mother trees help neighboring trees by sending them nutrients, and when the neighbors are struggling, they detect their distress signals and increase the flow of nutrients accordingly.

The conventional view of evolutionary biology would be to argue that each individual root and each fungal filament are genetically programmed by natural selection to do their job automatically. However, we cannot completely dismiss the idea as expounded by Peter Wohlleben and Suzanne Simard that trees talk to each other and communicate. While we tend to think of a transmission of information through some signal when we talk of communication, communication, according to Humberto Maturana, a Chilean biologist known for his work on the cybernetics of living systems, is not a transmission of information. Rather, it is a coordination of behavior among living organisms through mutual structural coupling.⁶

Whether we are ready to accept the view that trees talk to each other and communicate, we cannot dismiss the presence of the intricate web of connections and interactions among living as well as non-living things that defines the world around us. Indeed, to the extent that mother trees exist with their intricate networks of communication, we cannot totally dismiss the idea that young trees around them celebrate Mother’s Day as well, albeit in a way different from us humans. Instead of dismissing the idea that trees talk to each other and communicate as outrageous, it may be about time that we start welcoming Mother’s Day for us humans as an occasion to acknowledge the interconnectedness of our lives with the trees and all the other things in the world around us. It was St. Bernard (1091-1153) who reminded us of the importance of listening to trees and stones: “You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.”⁷

1. Anesaki, Masaharu, History of Japanese Religion, Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1963, p.19.
2. Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act III.
3. Wohlleben, Peter, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2016.
4. Simard, Suzanne, “How Trees Talk to Each Other”, TED Summit, June 2016.
5. Powers, Richard, The Overstory, New York: Norton, 2018.
6. Maturana, Humberto, and Francisco Varela, Autopoesis and Cognition, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980.
7. St. Bernard, Epistle 106.