The views are spectacular in this corner of eastern Nepal, between the world’s highest mountains and the tea estates of India’s Darjeeling region, where rare orchids grow and red pandas play on the green hillsides.
But life can be tough. Wild animals destroyed the corn and potato crops of Pasang Sherpa, a farmer born near Everest. He abandoned these plants twelve years ago and resorted to breeding one that seemed to have little value: the argeli, an evergreen shrub with yellow flowers found wild in the Himalayas. Farmers grew it for fencing or firewood.
Mr. Sherpa had no idea that the stripped husk would one day turn into pure money – the result of an unusual trade in which one of the poorest pockets of Asia supplies the main ingredient for the economy of one of the richest.
Japan’s currency is printed on special paper that can no longer be obtained from 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 profitable reason to stay on their slopes.
“I had not thought that these raw materials would be exported to Japan or that I would make money from this factory,” Mr Sherpa said. “Now I am very happy. This success came out of nowhere, it grew out of my backyard.”
Based 2,860 miles away in Osaka, Kanpou Incorporated produces paper used by the Japanese government for official purposes. One of Kanpou’s philanthropic projects has been searching the foothills of the Himalayas since the 1990s. He went there to help local farmers dig wells. Her agents finally stumble upon a solution to a Japanese problem.
Japan’s supply of mitsumata, the traditional paper used to print its banknotes, had run out. The paper starts with woody pulp from plants in the Thymelaeaceae family, which grow at high altitude with moderate sunlight and good drainage — soil for growing tea. A shrinking rural population and climate change have pushed Japan’s farmers off their labor-intensive plots.
The then president of Kanpou knew that mitsumata had its roots 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. His farmers simply needed lessons to meet Japan’s strict standards.
A quiet revolution began after earthquakes devastated much of Nepal in 2015. The Japanese sent experts to the capital, Kathmandu, to help Nepali farmers get serious about making the cold, hard yen.
Before long, the trainers went up to the Ilam area. In the local Limbu language, “Il-am” means “twisted path” and the drive there does not disappoint. The road from the nearest airport becomes so bumpy that the first jeep has to be changed halfway — for an even sturdier four-wheel drive.
By then, Mr. Sherpa had already entered the business and was extracting 1.2 tons of usable bark a year, cutting his own log and boiling it in wooden boxes.
The Japanese taught him to extract steam from his bark, using plastic bundles and metal pipes. Then follows a painstaking process of stripping, beating, stretching and drying. The Japanese also taught their Nepalese suppliers to harvest each crop just three years after planting, before the bark turns red.
This year, Mr. Sherpa has hired 60 local Nepalese to help him process his crop and expects to earn eight million Nepalese rupees, or $60,000, in profits. (The average annual income in Nepal is about $1,340, according to the World Bank.) Mr. Sherpa hopes to produce 20 of the 140 tons Nepal will send to Japan.
This is the majority of mitsumata needed to print yen, enough to fill about seven shipping containers, heading down to the Indian port of Calcutta, to travel 40 days to Osaka. Hari Gopal Shreshta, the general manager of Kanpou’s Nepal arm, oversees this trade, inspecting and buying neatly tied parcels in Kathmandu.
“As a Nepali,” said Mr. Shreshta, who is fluent in Japanese, “I feel proud to manage the raw materials for printing the currency of rich countries like Japan. This is a big moment for me.”
It’s an important time for the yen as well. Every 20 years, the third most traded currency in the world goes in for a redesign. The current notes were first printed in 2004 — their replacements will hit the tills in July.
The Japanese love their beautiful bills, with their elegant, subtle moiré designs printed on stiff, off-white plant fibers rather than cotton or polymer.
The country’s adherence to hard currency makes it an outlier in East Asia. Less than 40 percent of payments in Japan are processed with cards, codes or phones. In South Korea, the figure is about 94 percent. But even for Japan, life is increasingly cashless. the value of its currency in circulation likely peaked in 2022.
Japan’s central bank is reassuring everyone with a yen for yen that there are still enough physical notes to go around. The banknotes, if they were all stacked in one place, would be 1,150 miles high, or 491 times the height of Mount Fuji.
Before they found the yen trade, Nepali farmers like Mr. Sherpa were looking for ways to migrate. Wild boars hungry for crops were just one problem. The lack of decent jobs was the killer. Mr. Sherpa said he was ready to sell his land in Ilam and move, perhaps to work in the Persian Gulf.
Years ago, Faud Bahadur Khadka, now a contented 55-year-old argeli farmer, had a bitter experience as a laborer in the Gulf. He went to Bahrain in 2014, promised a job at a supply company, but ended up working as a cleaner. However, two of his sons went to work in Qatar.
Mr Khadka says he is happy that “this new agriculture has somehow helped people to find money and employment”. And he is optimistic: “If other countries also use Nepali crops to print their currency,” he said, “this will stop the flow of Nepalis migrating to the Gulf nations and India.”
The warm feeling is mutual. Tadashi Matsubara, the current president of Kanpou, said: “I would love for the world to know how important Nepalese people and their mitsumata are to the Japanese economy. Frankly, the new banknotes wouldn’t be possible without them.”
Kiuko Notoya contributed reporting from Tokyo.
