What the Grapevine Tells us About Japan’s Success with Coronavirus

Hayashi-san lives alone in a grand, dilapidated old farmhouse surrounded by vineyards on three sides. Overhead grape trellis extends from heavy slate eaves. She is out and about at 5.30 am and spends most days from spring to autumn tending to her vines. She does not know the price of vegetables because she grows them herself or exchanges them with friends. She treats herself to a glass of wine in the evening and once in a while she cycles into town for karaoke. At 87 years old, Hayashi-san is a fairly typical Koshu grape farmer.

She has an acquaintance in her 70’s who helps with pruning and a man in his 60’s who cuts the grass and sprays the vines. At harvest time her daughter, also in her 60’s, visits from nearby Tokyo. She sells her grapes to a cooperative winery a short walk down the street, headed up by a man in his 80’s. The spritely and formidable Hayashi-san is the last person you would describe as “vulnerable”, but to Covid-19, she and all the key people who support her crop of grapes, are just that.

In Koshu, there has never been a trade-off between health and the economy when it comes to Covid-19. Almost 80% of farmers are over 60. A local government announcement listed a woman in her 90’s who tested positive for coronavirus as “unemployed” – the words “retired” and “pensioner” are not in common Japanese parlance. It may be younger generations who are increasingly consuming Japanese wine, visiting the region as tourists and manning the wineries, but the backbone of the local economy is the increasingly hunched backs of a community of farmers. This is living – and working – heritage.

Yamanashi, where the Koshu Valley lies, borders the largest metropolitan area in the world. In the most vulnerable of situations, the prefecture has lost one person to the virus and recorded only 72 cases in total. So what can these over 60’s and their way of life teach us about how Japan, a country of 126 million and the oldest population in the world, has so far kept coronavirus at bay? For clues, we turn to the community spirit and humble, cautious attention to detail that goes into growing grapes in Japan.

If profit and growth were your sole aims, you would not choose to be a Japanese grape farmer. The process is predominantly manual, highly laborious, seemingly inefficient, and impenetrable to the outside world. The land is a patchwork of small plots that do not easily lend themselves to economies of scale or automation, a legacy of land redistribution after the Second World War. The grapes may sell for high prices, but money is ploughed back into the fields. Like many revered Japanese crafts – swords, sushi, silk, lacquer – Japanese grape-growing is an oral tradition passed down through generations, a culmination of many years of human investment, self-discipline, quirky customs and thankless work behind the scenes. It requires a focus on cleanliness and order, much trial and error, and many small acts of great attention to detail. In the Japanese language it is, after all, God who is “in the details”, not the Devil. The work is often solitary but it relies on a web of interconnected people and organisations with more unspoken values than written rules, many of whose jobs and worries appear unnecessary until the day they are essential, many academically overqualified for the labour in which they are employed.

As the country has fought coronavirus, Koshu grape farmers have taken the same methodical approach in their ongoing battle with another foe – downy mildew. Very much the ‘coronavirus of the grape world’, downy mildew is a plant fungus for which there is no cure. Your only hope is to prevent its occurrence, catch outbreaks early and stamp them out before you lose control – and with it the vineyard and your livelihood. Prevention begins by keeping grapes away from the moist ground on overhead pergola trellising. Careful pruning and trellis sanitisation remove fungus-harbouring dead leaves and vine remnants. Canopies are meticulously thinned to prevent the build-up of moisture amongst the leaves. Grape clusters are spaced to allow air to circulate. Throughout the season the vines are monitored closely, the farmer’s experienced eye spotting traces of the fungus early and isolating the infected areas quickly in such a way as to minimise the spread of spores.

With individual plots of land so close together, you keep your patch healthy not only for your own sake but that of others. If anything appears amiss, you will quickly be reminded by neighbours well in advance of it becoming a problem. Individual actions are supported and guided by the Japan Agricultural Cooperative (JA), a national organisation with a local network deeply ingrained in the rural community. Through loudspeakers around the villages, JA gives detailed recommendations on what to spray on your vines and when. Redundancy – in the engineering sense – is built into the process: as an extra precaution, many farmers laboriously place little white hats on each bunch of grapes to protect them not only from rain but spores.

The same loudspeakers that keep the grapes healthy broadcast regular public health announcements. Over the past months they have crackled into action to remind people of social distancing measures and inform them when someone from the area has tested positive for coronavirus, including where they have recently spent time. A population of only 8,000 doesn’t stop Katsunuma, where grapes were first grown in Japan, from complementing this with its own TV station for local news and public service announcements. Just as JA is built into the fabric of the farming community, so too are other provisions in the wider community. In the neighbouring town of Yamanashi-shi is one of five local health care centres that reports into the Yamanashi Prefectural Infectious Disease Surveillance Centre, part of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases that is integral to combatting coronavirus.

Japan’s hot and humid summers may put the country at a natural disadvantage with downy mildew, but it is not the only natural phenomenon to regularly remind you of your place in the wider scheme of things. When the sleeping giant Mt Fuji soars above you and earthquakes, tsunami and typhoons are a constant threat for which no one individual can expect to suitably prepare, nor recover from alone, you do not easily forget your reliance on collective prevention and preparation for the worst-case scenario. This is something Japan has learnt from experience and it is imbedded in local culture and education, in public institutions and in the collective consciousness. Is the country’s achievement with coronavirus to be put down to luck and resigned to the annals of mysterious contradictions that so often characterise Japan, or has the whole been held together by the sum of its extra fail-safe parts, enabling success to seem effortless?

The grapes wear hats and the public wear masks. The farmers preen and monitor their vines, as the wineries disinfect their Enomatic machines and take the temperatures of visitors. The breeze that ventilates the grape canopies flows through the open windows of the cafés. Social distancing has not prevented farmers tending to their vineyards and whilst the world around them paused, the buds broke, the tendrils spread, the grapes flowered and the fruit formed without a care in the world. With redundancies in place and a robust local health network quietly monitoring the situation behind the scenes, the Koshu Valley cautiously welcomes visitors back to a community where the vulnerable have never been more valuable.