Why I Started Hunting

I didn't decide to get a hunting license for any heroic reason. I simply wanted to protect the rice fields my friends and I had grown, and the children living nearby. That was all.

The rice fields we started together

It was about ten years ago that some neighbors and I borrowed a patch of idle farmland and began growing rice. Drawing water into a field that had fallen out of use, planting seedlings, raising the crop. It took real work — but a rice field that changes its face with every season became something I wouldn't trade for anything.

Then, one year, reports of wild boar sightings began piling up nearby.

Wild boar don't actually eat the rice plants themselves. The trouble is that they wander into the paddies, bathe in the mud, and roll around at play. After one of these "mud-ball" rampages, the carefully nurtured rice is left brutally flattened and trampled.

Fortunately, our own field was spared. But a paddy right next to ours was hit. I still remember the owner — who had raised that rice with such care — standing there, shoulders slumped, grieving over the ruin.

Right up to a child's home

And it wasn't only the crops.

Nearby lived a child who attended kindergarten. The boar had come out to within just a few dozen meters of that child's house.

Having your crops destroyed is painful enough. But if a child had come face to face with one — thinking about that, this was no longer something you could file under "a nuisance."

Fences alone can't protect

The field owners gathered to talk over what to do. Put up fences. Increase the patrols. We carried out the ideas that came up, starting with whatever we could manage.

But as we worked, I think we all quietly sensed it: this was only treating the symptoms. The boar weren't going away. If their numbers kept rising, sooner or later somewhere else would meet the same fate. The problem at the root was still entirely unsolved.

Then let it be me

Among the twenty of us who had gathered, not a single person held a hunting license.

Waiting for someone else to take care of it wasn't going to change anything. So — I would get the license myself, and become one of the people doing the catching. That was what set me on the path to hunting.

If I'm honest, I felt hesitation about taking a life. I still do. And yet, as long as there is something to protect, I couldn't look away.

If sericulture is a life you raise, then hunting is a life you face, and receive. Both are seamless parts of the same thing: living on this land, and protecting the community here.

As the Keeper of Zero, I want to protect what I can — both the things that are vanishing, and the things under threat. Hunting is one form of that resolve.

The road to earning the license, and what happened once I actually set foot in the mountains — I'll write about those in the articles to come.

ZEROSPHERE / The Keeper of Zero