Blackmail for dirt

“Hired” Help and Free Dirt.  My husband said he would “hire” someone to work on “the slope”. In my mind, I’m thinking, hallelujah, he is going to get someone to help me make the rockery in front of the house, where we have a failed slope (it used to be full of flowers and groundcover until he poisoned it and burned it). Wrong. The backhoe driver is going to fix the slope of the field next to the rice paddy to it is easier to maintain. OK, it is an important project. So what will it cost? Nothing?! Who works for free? People with “obligations”.


We have new neighbors, who recently built a house (practically in our backyard); they are a young couple with two small kids. The wife’s father is head of a construction company that he inherited from his father, whom we will call the elder, to protect the deceased and the guilty (anyway, I don't know his name). OK, so the elder construction guy was part of this new company right after the War when there was a lot of building, road construction and civic construction going on. Back then, most of these roads were dirt, there were no dikes or irrigation canals, the schools were wood and Japan was determined to rise from being a third world country in ruins to being what it is today. It would not be surprising then, that there would be some competition for these projects. There were a lot of changes: people had lost land; power and wealth was being redistributed by the interim government; men were returning from a hellish war and tensions were high. Well, as the story goes, my father-in-law happened to witness a murder of one member of the construction group by the previously mentioned elder and some others. Now, my father-in-law had just returned from 8 years in a POW camp in Siberia and he wasn’t about to become a victim of some local crime, so thinking quickly, he told them that he would remain silent if their company would help him out whenever he needed it. A deal was made. Whenever he needed a field filled or dug or rocks dumped or removed, this company would rush to his service. My father-in-law never spoke of the deal until nearly the end of his life and by now, all parties involved have died, but the obligation has been passed on. When the father of our neighbor realized who we were, he told my husband that if we ever needed anything, to be sure to ask. That is how we got 3 days of labor, during a holiday, without having to pay anything. I felt sorry for the guy who had to work on our field though – he had nothing to do with this “deal”.