Miyazawa looked up from his radish field. The wind carried a train’s whistle across the valley. He held up a dented tin cup.
This is the Miyazawa Tin.
Tin is a modest metal. It does not gleam like silver, nor fight like iron. It bends before it breaks. It protects what is fragile. In Miyazawa’s hands, a tin box became a cosmos: he would line it with poems and give it to a child who had no lunch. He would seal it with rainwater and bury it in a rice field as an offering to the soil’s spirit. miyazawa tin