Ninoshima

follows the same route asyesterday to Hesaka Elementary School and carries out feces sampling of all the patients there. They then visit the agriculture cooperative office. The young clerk whom they met yesterday guides them around.

The road, not wider than for a two-wheeled cart, follows mostly along side of a low stone wall built up on a slope. Several farmhouses are located beside the road. Behind the house there is another stone wall which supports the house, with a small vegetable field upon the slope. The village is formed this way on the terraced slope.

Sometimes parallel to the road in the village, a steep path goes up to the houses on the upper slope.

Along the path, a narrow stream flows down a stone-made or cement waterway, which seems to supply the water to the farmhouses in the village.

Every house has a well or a spring near its backdoor. Water seems to reach there through narrow streams, on the upper slope, after passing underground.

In other words, the whole village is located on a sort of mountain stream on a large slope and this well-made waterway network from the mountain stream seems to distribute water to each house.

Fujimura cannot help but worry if somebody in the upper houses is using human waste to fertilize his field and washing the his dipper he’s using to scoop up the human waste carelessly in the stream, even though a part of that water risks flowing under ground and reaching a spring or a well of the lower houses on the slope.

Even if the Second Private pours the hypochlorite powder out of the big paper bag he carries into a well, the powder immediately flows down and away.

They, nevertheless, continue their disinfection operation for each house, recognizing that they are merely pouring the powder into the large mountain river at random.

A farm woman appears in their path.

“The villagers are upset to see soldiers pouring what looks like poison into the wells since the war has ended. Please stop it!”

Other tough-looking women join her to bar their way and prevent them to take even one step ahead.

The clerk of the agriculture cooperative explains to the women what the soldiers are doing and shows the women the hypochlorite powder.

“Why don’t you make some tea for the soldiers with the water they have disinfected? Let’s ask them to take a test and see if there’s poison in the water.”

His words make Fujimura and his party burst out laughing.

They visit a house near by of one of the women and are served tea with water disinfected by hypochlorite. Although tea with the chlorine odour is not good at all, they pretend as if they enjoy the tea. They accept steamed sweet potatos with the tea and leave the farmhouse.

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