Teacher on Two Wheels

Above above: Kinsuke Kikuchi, wearing one of his company’s hats, tends the grill. Above: One of Kinsuke’s 5,000 live bee hives. The boxes all bear his family name, Kikuchi, on their bottom panels.

Monday 1/26/09 Realico, Argentina

Kinsuke plucked a bee from the slab of honeycomb that was bleeding honey onto the table. His fingers were sticky with honey from the piece of honeycomb he just ate, so catching the bee was simple. Pinching the insect by its wings, he held it to the surface of his tanned skin. The bee plunged its stinger into Kinsuke’s arm. He looked at me.

“See? Nothing. I don’t feel anything,” he said to me in Spanish. He grinned.

He flicked the bee away and passed me the honeycomb. I ripped a piece off, careful not to disturb the bees crawling about it, and shoved a piece into my mouth.

*****

Kinsuke Kikuchi, a 66-year-old man with silvery hair and a boyish face, likes to let other people do the talking. He listens when you speak, his eyes and smiles registering understanding, and then when you finish talking, he turns toward the window and looks out at his Japanese pear trees swaying the wind. He’s comfortable in the nakedness of silence. Everything I learned of him I had to extract with hooks of gentle questioning.

Kinsuke was born in Yamagata, Japan and moved to Argentina when he was 24-years-old. In the past 42 years of his life in South America, he has visited Japan seven times. All the techniques he uses in his trade, beekeeping, were learned in Japan and the United States. His business is now producing half the honey it did many years ago, and this saddens him. He spends half the year in his house in Argentina and half the year in the countryside with his queens, workers, and hives. He loved hearing about my impressions of life in Japan, about things I noticed in the Japanese psyche and things I missed.

*****

The chicken and squash sizzled on the grill and perfumed the air with the scents of their spices. Flies and moths by the dozens swarmed in wild orbits around the single light blazing overhead, creating a mad ball of life that Kinsuke said reminded him of how nice it was to be in the countryside during summer. Farmers, some from Kinsuke’s spread and a few from neighboring farms, came to the beat-up table, the one with legs made of old bee boxes, just after dusk to eat and talk. Their exhaustion unwound them in their chairs. They all knew each other and all ate with Kinsuke often; none felt uncomfortable gobbling up food from Kinsuke’s plates.

Above: The eating area and the grill behind the employee dorm building on Kinsuke’s farm

Manning the grill, carefully spreading coals under the cooking food to keep the sizzling steady, Kinsuke listened as his friends talked, occasionally interrupting them when something came to his mind. When he spoke up, they all quieted and listened.

“Hey, everyone, listen to what Andrew thinks about how clean Japanese cities are. Andrew, tell them,” he would say, out of the blue. Or, when the talk turned to food, he said, “Oh, Andrew, tell them about Japanese food, tell them what you think of it.”

Hearing my anecdotes and impressions of Japan reminded Kinsuke of the land he missed. He liked Argentina, even going so far as to admit that life in Japan would have been much harder, much more taxing, had he spent his life there instead of in his adopted Argentine homeland, but he openly complained about the aspects of Argentine life that irked him.

“The food people love here is so simple,” Kinsuke explained. “Meat and bread. Nothing more. At least in Japan there is healthy fish to eat. Right, Andrew?” Pause. I nod. He smiles. “See, guys. There’s fish there, like he says,” he continued. “Here, no variety. Here—only meat and bread. And people wonder why we see so many big bellies in Argentina! Ha!”

At one point, the conversation turned to the changing landscape, the ways in which the pampa, in her crops, was beginning to mirror man’s greed and laziness. I asked one farmer with a tangle of black curls atop his head to explain.

“The problem is that everyone is switching to soybeans. Everyone, every single farmer out there, wants to grow soybeans now. They’re easy to grow and sell for a good price. Farmers are giving up the crops their grandfathers grew just so they can make more money. I don’t even know what you can make with soybeans! How do you eat them?! Boil them? Do you crush them? I know my family and I don’t eat them, for sure. What about you guys?” The farmer motioned to the other men seated at the table.

Like the farmer, they too didn’t eat soybeans. Discovering this gave him a surge of energy.

“You see! You see this!” he said to me, pointing to the other men. “None of us eat this stuff that everyone is growing now. That’s the problem. We used to grow for us. We used to grow and raise everything we needed. Now we grow things for people in other countries, things other people eat. Why?” Pause. “You know that Argentina exports 90% of what it grows on its soil?”

I told him I didn’t.

“Ninety percent! Why? We have so much beautiful land here, land that can grow all we need. Instead, we use the land to grow things for other people, things that hurt the crops we love and use.”

Above: One of many fields of sunflowers I passed the day before I met Kinsuke

“What do you mean by ‘hurt’? How are the soybeans hurting you guys?” I asked.

“Just look at Kinsuke! He’s a perfect example!” the curly-haired farmer exclaimed. “He’s running 5,000 hives now. You know how many he had 20 years ago. when farmers around here were growing lots of alfalfa, a plant that the bees love? Ten thousand! His production is half of what it once was because there aren’t enough flowers for the bees anymore. Everyone is growing soybeans instead of alfalfa.”

“Yeah,” another farmer, one with wide old yellowed eyes, chimed in, “lots of things are more expensive now because we can’t easily get them from our neighbors anymore. If lots of farmers switch to one crop, we have to rely on other countries to give us the things we don’t grow.”

Kinsuke spoke up. “This is a problem, of course, but I think the weather is really hurting us the most now. It’s hot when it’s not supposed to be hot. It rains when it shouldn’t. I have that swimming pool over there because the bees don’t find enough water on their own anymore—I need to help them now.”

*****

I was hiding from the sun in the shaded patio of the gas station mini-mart. A short man approached with a soda sweating condensation in his hand. He asked me where I was headed. I told him. He asked me where I started. I told him. When I asked him if it was true what the gas station attendant said, that there was only one camping area in town—in the grassy field behind the gas station, he smiled. “No, there’s another area where you can camp: at my house. I have a farm near here. A honey farm. You can camp there tonight if you like. You can take a shower, swim in the pool, have your own bed if you like. Come on, follow my truck.” Without waiting for me to think over his proposal, the man walked over to his car and started the engine. I hopped on the bike.

*****

In the morning, after a bunch of us huddled around a table and shared rounds of mate, Argentina’s staple drink–a type of tea consumed from a communal cup with a special metal straw, Kinsuke loaded me up with a large jar of honey, half a dozen Japanese pears from his orchard, and his business card. He pointed to the phone number on the card, “This is the important part. If you have any problems anywhere else in Argentina, call this number. Also, if you want to stay with friends of mine in Huinca or Buenos Aires, just call.”