Today Japan has some of the strictest anti-cannabis laws in the world.
Punishment for possession is a maximum 5 years behind bars and
illicit growers face 7-year sentences. Annually around 2000 people fall
foul of these laws - their names splashed on the nightly news and their
careers ruined forever. The same prohibition that dishes out these
punishments also bans research into medical marijuana, forcing Japanese
scientists overseas to conduct their studies.
For decades, these laws have stood unchallenged. But now increasing
numbers of Japanese people are speaking out against prohibition - and at
the heart of their campaign is an attempt to teach the public about
Japan's long-forgotten history of cannabis.
"Most Japanese people see cannabis as a subculture of Japan but
they're wrong. For thousands of years cannabis has been at the very
heart of Japanese culture," explains Takayasu Junichi, one of the
country's leading experts.
According to Takayasu, the earliest traces of cannabis in Japan are
seeds and woven fibers discovered in the west of the country dating back
to the Jomon Period (10,000 BC - 300 BC). Archaeologists suggest that
cannabis fibers were used for clothes - as well as for bow strings and
fishing lines. These plants were likely cannabis sativa - prized for its
strong fibers - a thesis supported by a Japanese prehistoric cave
painting which appears to show a tall spindly plant with cannabis's
tell-tale leaves.
"Cannabis was the most important substance for prehistoric people in
Japan. But today many Japanese people have a very negative image of the
plant," says Takayasu.
In order to put Japanese people back in touch with their cannabis
roots, in 2001 Takayasu founded Taima Hakubutsukan (The Cannabis Museum)
- the only museum in Japan dedicated to the much-maligned weed.
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The museum is located in a log cabin 100 miles from Tokyo in Tochigi
Prefecture - an area long-associated with Japanese cannabis farming. The
prefecture borders the Tohoku region which was devastated by the March
11, 2011 earthquake - but being inland from the tsunami and shielded by
mountains from radioactive fall-out, it largely escaped the effects of
the disaster
The museum is packed with testimony to Japan's proud cannabis
heritage. There are 17th century woodblock prints of women spinning
fibers and photos of farmers cutting plants. In one corner sits a
working loom where Takayasu demonstrates the art of weaving. He points
to a bail of cannabis cloth - warm in winter, cool in summer, it's
perfectly suited to Japan's extreme climate.
"Until the middle of the twentieth century, Japanese cannabis farming
used to be a year-round cycle," explains Takayasu. "The seeds were
planted in spring then harvested in the summer. Following this, the
stalks were dried then soaked and turned into fiber. Throughout the
winter, these were then woven into cloth and made into clothes ready to
wear for the next planting season."
Playing such a key role in agriculture, cannabis often appeared in
popular culture. It is mentioned in the 8th century Manyoshu - Japan's
oldest collection of poems and features in many haiku and tanka poems.
Ninjas purportedly used cannabis in their training - leaping daily over
the fast-growing plants to hone their acrobatic skills.
According to Takayasu, cannabis was so renowned for growing tall and
strong that there was a Japanese proverb related to positive peer
pressure which stated that even gnarly weeds would straighten if grown
among cannabis plants.
In a similar way, school songs in cannabis-growing communities often
exhorted pupils to grow as straight and tall as cannabis plants. Due to
these perceived qualities, a fabric design called Asa-no-ha based upon
interlocking cannabis leaves became popular in the 18th century. The
design was a favorite choice for children's clothes and also became
fashionable among merchants hoping for a boom in their economic
fortunes.
Accompanying these material uses, cannabis also bore spiritual
significance in Shintoism, Japan's indigenous religion, which venerates
natural harmony and notions of purity. Cannabis was revered for its
cleansing abilities so Shinto priests used to wave bundles of leaves to
exorcise evil spirits. Likewise, to signify their purity, brides wore
veils made from cannabis on their wedding days. Today, the nation's most
sacred shrine - Ise Jingu in Mie Prefecture - continues to have five
annual ceremonies called taima dedicated to the nation's sun goddess.
However many modern visitors fail to connect the names of these rituals
with the drug so demonized by their politicians and police.
Early 20th century American historian George Foot Moore also recorded
how Japanese travelers used to present small offerings of cannabis
leaves at roadside shrines to ensure safe journeys. Families, too,
burned bunches of cannabis in their doorways to welcome back the spirits
of the dead during the summer obon festival.
Given this plethora of evidence that cannabis was essential in so
many aspects of Japanese life, one question remains in doubt: Was it
smoked?
Takayasu isn't sure - and nor are many other experts. Historical
archives make no mention of cannabis smoking in Japan but these records
tends to focus primarily on the lifestyles of the elite and ignore the
habits of the majority of the population. For hundreds of years,
Japanese society used to be stratified into a strict class system.
Within this hierarchy, rice - and the sake wine brewed from it - was
controlled by the rich, so cannabis may well have been the drug of
choice for the masses.
Equally as important as whether cannabis was smoked is the question
of could it have been? The answer to that is a clear yes. According to a
1973 survey published by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime,
THC levels of indigenous Japanese cannabis plants from Tochigi measured
almost 4%. In comparison, one study conducted by the University of
Mississippi's Marijuana Potency Monitoring Project found average THC
levels in marijuana seized by U.S. authorities in the 1970s at a much
lower 1.5%.
Until the early 20th century, cannabis-based cures were available
from Japanese drug stores. Long an ingredient in traditional Chinese
medicine, they were taken to relieve muscle aches, pain and insomnia.
Meanwhile the Tohoku region was renowned for wild wariai kinoko
(laughing mushrooms). In a country in love with its fungi - think
shiitake, maitake and thousand-dollar matsutake - the sale of a range of
psychedelic mushrooms was legal until 2002 when they were prohibited to
improve the country's international image prior to the Japan-South
Korea World Cup.
The prohibition against the Japanese cannabis industry also has a foreign origin.
According
to Takayasu, the 1940s started well for cannabis farmers as the
nation's military leaders - like those in the U.S. - urged farmers to
plant cannabis to help win the Asia-Pacific War.
"The Imperial navy needed it for ropes and the air force for
parachute cords. The military categorized cannabis as a war material and
they created patriotic war slogans about it. There was even a saying
that without cannabis, the war couldn't be waged," says Takayasu.
However after Japan's surrender in 1945, U.S. authorities occupied
the country and they introduced American attitudes towards cannabis.
Having effectively prohibited its cultivation in the States in 1937,
Washington now sought to ban it in Japan. With the nation still under
U.S. control, it passed the 1948 Cannabis Control Act. The law
criminalized possession and unlicensed cultivation - and more than 60
years later, it remains at the core of Japan's current anti-cannabis
policy.
At the time, the U.S. authorities appear to have passed off the Act
as an altruistic desire to protect Japanese people from the evils of
drugs. But critics point out that occupation authorities allowed the
sale of over-the-counter amphetamines to continue until 1951. Instead,
several Japanese experts contend that the ban was instigated by U.S.
petrochemical lobbyists who wanted to overturn the Japanese cannabis
fiber industry and open the market to American-made artificial
materials, including nylon.
Takayasu sees the ban in a different light, situating it within the
wider context of U.S. attempts to reduce the power of Japanese
militarists who had dragged Asia into war.
"In the same way the U.S. authorities discouraged martial arts such
as kendo and judo, the 1948 Cannabis Control Act was a way to undermine
militarism in Japan. The wartime cannabis industry had been so dominated
by the military that the new law was designed to strip away its power."
Regardless of the true reasons, the impact of the 1948 Cannabis
Control Act was devastating. From a peak of more than 25,000 cannabis
farms in 1948, the numbers quickly plummeted - forcing farmers out of
business and driving the knowledge of cannabis cultivation to the brink
of extinction. Today there are fewer than 60 licensed cannabis farms in
Japan - all required to grow strains of cannabis containing minimal
levels of THC - and only one survivor versed in the full cannabis cycle
of seed-to-loom - an 84 year-old woman.
Simultaneously, a sustained propaganda campaign has cleaved the
Japanese public from their cannabis cultural roots - brainwashing them
into perceiving marijuana as a poison on a par with heroin or crack
cocaine.
These campaigns might have stamped out all traces of Japan's
millennia-long history were it not for one factor - the resilience of
the cannabis plants themselves. Every summer millions of these bushes -
the feral offspring of cannabis legally cultivated before 1948 - pop up
in the hills and plains of rural Japan. In 2006, 300 plants even
sprouted in the grounds of Abashiri Prison in Hokkaido - much to the
embarrassment of the powers-that-be.
Every year, the Japanese police wage well-publicized eradication
campaigns against these plants. On average, they discover and destroy
between one and two million of them. But like so many other aspects of
the drug war, theirs is a losing battle and the next year, the plants
grow back in larger numbers than ever.
Due to the taboos surrounding discussions of cannabis, many people
had been reluctant to condemn these police campaigns. But now critics
are beginning to attack both the waste of public resources and the
needless destruction of such versatile plants.
Nagayoshi Hideo, author of the 2009 book, Taima Nyuumon - An
Introduction to Cannabis - argues for the wild cannabis plants to be
systematically harvested and put to use as medicines, biomass energy and
in the construction industries.
Funai Yukio - another advocate and
author of Akuhou! Taima Torishimarihou no Shinjitsu - Bad Law! The Truth
Behind the Cannabis Control Act (2012) - calls cannabis a golden egg
for Japan. In a detailed breakdown of the potential economic benefits of
legalization, he factors in savings from reduced policing and
incarceration - concluding the country could reap as much as 300 billion
dollars in the long term.
In a nation facing unprecedented economic problems, and at a time
when marijuana legalization is advancing in the United States and other
countries, it appears these arguments are striking a chord. Recently
Japan slipped behind China as the world's third economic power and the
country owes more than ten trillion dollars in debt - double its GDP.
These problems contribute to the human toll of an estimated 6.5 million
alcoholics and a suicide rate that hovers at around 30,000 a year.
The legalization of cannabis could solve some of these problems. By
luring young entrepreneurs back to the land, it could counter
agricultural decline - particularly in post-earthquake Tohoku. It might
improve the quality of care for thousands of cancer patients and halt
the brain drain of scientists forced overseas to research medical
cannabis. Legalization would also prevent the annual arrests of 2000
Japanese people - many in their 20s and 30s - whose lives are destroyed
by their nation's illogical and ahistorical laws.
In years to come, Taima Hakubutsukan might be seen as a true beachhead in this struggle.
"People need to learn the truth about the history of cannabis in
Japan," says Takayasu. "The more we learn about the past, the more hints
we might be able to get about how to live better in the future.
Cannabis can offer Japan a beacon of hope."
Cannabis: What's in a name?
Botanists usually divide the cannabis family into three broad
categories - tall cannabis sativa, bushy cannabis indica and small
cannabis ruderalis. However this simple taxonomy is often frustrated in
practice by the interfertility of these three types, which allows them
to be crossbred into limitless new varieties.
The desired properties of these hybrids tend to determine the name by which they are commonly known.
Marijuana, for example, usually refers to cannabis plants that are
grown for ingestion for medical or recreational uses. Cannabis sativa is
said to give users a feeling of energetic euphoria and can be
prescribed for depression, whereas cannabis indica is apparently more
sedating so can be used as a muscle relaxant or to treat chronic pain.
Hemp, is the name often applied to tall plants from the cannabis
sativa category which are primarily grown for their strong fibres - but
may also contain significant levels of THC.
Most recently, the term industrial hemp has been coined in the U.S.
to refer to cannabis plants which have been specially-bred to contain
very low levels of THC (less than 1%) in order to conform to current
drug laws. Today, many of Japan's licensed cannabis farms grow a low-THC
strain called Tochigi shiro which was first developed in the post-War
period.
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