The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
On Nepal’s Himalayan hillside grows raw material for Japan’s bank notes
THE VIEWS are spectacular in this corner of eastern Nepal, between the world’s highest mountains and the tea estates of India’s Darjeeling district, where rare orchids grow and red pandas play on the lush hillsides.
But life can be tough. Wild animals destroyed the corn and potato crops of Pasang Sherpa, a farmer born near Mount Everest. He gave up on those plants a dozen years ago and resorted to raising one that seemed to have little value: argeli, an evergreen, yellow-flowering shrub found wild in the Himalayas. Farmers grew it for fencing or firewood.
Sherpa had no idea that bark stripped from his argeli would one day turn into pure money — the outgrowth of an unusual trade in which one of the poorest pockets of Asia supplies a primary ingredient for the economy in one of the richest.
Japan’s currency is printed on special paper that can no longer be sourced at home. The Japanese love their old-fashioned yen notes, and this year they need mountains of fresh ones, so Mr. Sherpa and his neighbors have a lucrative reason to hang on to their hillsides.
“I hadn’t thought these raw materials would be exported to Japan or that I would make money from this plant,” Mr. Sherpa said. “I’m now quite happy. This success came from nowhere, it grew up from my courtyard.”
Headquartered 2,860 miles away in Osaka, Kanpou Incorporated produces paper used by the Japanese government for official purposes. One of Kanpou’s charitable programs had been scouting the foothills of the Himalayas since the 1990s. It went there to help local farmers dig wells. Its agents eventually stumbled onto a solution for a Japanese problem.
Japan’s supply of mitsumata, the traditional paper used to print its bank notes, was running low. The paper starts with woody pulp from plants of the Thymelaeaceae family, which grow at high altitude with moderate sunshine and good drainage — tea-growing terrain.
Shrinking rural populations and climate change were driving Japan’s farmers to abandon their labor-intensive plots.
Kanpou’s president at the time knew that mitsumata had its origins in the Himalayas. So, he wondered: Why not transplant it? After years of trial and error, the company discovered that argeli, a hardier relative, was already growing wild in Nepal. Its farmers just needed tutoring to meet Japan’s exacting standards. A quiet revolution got underway after earthquakes devastated much of Nepal in 2015. The Japanese sent specialists to the capital, Kathmandu, to help Nepali farmers get serious about making the stuff of cold, hard yen.
Before long, the instructors went up to Ilam district. In the local Limbu tongue, “Il-am” means “twisted path,” and the way there does not disappoint.
Sherpa hopes to produce 20 of the 140 tons that Nepal will be shipping to Japan. That’s a majority of the mitsumata needed to print yen, enough to fill about seven cargo containers, winding downhill to Kolkata, to sail 40 days to Osaka.
“As a Nepali,” said Shreshta, “I feel proud of managing raw materials to print the currency of rich countries like Japan. That’s a great moment for me.” It is an important moment for the yen, too. Every 20 years, the world’s third-most-traded currency goes in for a redesign. The current notes were first printed in 2004 — their replacements will hit cashiers in July.