After the replacement of my car to a Mercedes-Benz SLK200, the number of drives increased. Today, I went out for a drive to a scenic place, which had been on air the other day. The destination was a terraced paddy field. That was recently designated by the Government as one of the three scenic terraced paddy fields in Japan. That was 2 hours' drive from my house. The lunch and coffee which I brought there was really nice in the soft breeze.
By the way, I'll quote something from a book which I happened to read as follows. Japan is surely one of the industrialized countries, but the forest area accounts for 68.5% of its land area. Among the developed countries, it's ranked as the third, after 73.1% of Finland and 68.9% of Sweden. The Japanese archipelago accounts for 0.2 % of the global land area and 1.7% of all the human beings live in Japan and 5.6% of the global GDP was produced there.
That can be called "miracle". We Japanese can be proud of that. If you ask me why this miracle was realized, my answer would be like this. It's really simple, but it would be the only single answer. People in Japan have been taking care of nature, while they have developed its industrial technologies.
FYI, the rate of forest area of China, whose GDP is the 2nd of the world is only 21.5%.
車を変えてから休日のドライブが増えた。今日は先日テレビで見た棚田へ行ってみた。写真のように狭い土地で稲作が行われていた。風が気持ちよく、持参した弁当、コーヒーがこの上なく美味しかった。
たまたま読んでいた本に書かれていたのだが、日本は工業国ではあるが、その国土面積の６８．５％が森林。先進国の中ではフィンランドの７３．１％、スウェーデンの６８．９％に次いで３番目。日本列島は世界の陸地面積の０．２％、そこに世界の人口の約１．７％が住み、世界のＧＤＰの５．５％を生み出している。という。
これは奇跡とも呼べる現象で、日本人が誇って良いことだと思う。なぜこのような奇跡が実現したのか、といえば、日本人が近代産業を発展させながら、同時に自然を大切にしてきたから、としか説明のしようがない。支那は森林率は２１．５％ はげ山を見れば日本人なら自然に対して申し訳ないと考えるが、支那人は『自然は人間の必要に応じて好き勝手に利用すればよい』とでも考えているかのようだ。
(読んでもらえるのは２５０単語までという自己規制で最後の部分は英文からは省略)
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