When the bartender had set our refills before us and moved out of earshot, my big-eared confidant explained. "Do you know what _bansai_ means?" he asked. "Sure," I said. "That's when the little men come screaming out of the palm-trees, waving their swords." He smiled briefly. "You've got the right string, friend, but the wrong yo-yo. It's Japanese, all right; but spelled with an "s," not a "z." A _bansai_ is a dwarf tree raised for a Japanese box-garden, or _hakoniwa_. They've been growing _bansais_ on those islands for fifteen hundred years: full-grown pines you can put in a flowerpot, oaks two hundred years old and a foot tall, all with perfect tiny limbs and leaves." "A trick?" I asked. "Not exactly," Big-ears said. "Here's how they do it in Japan. You take an ordinary acorn from an oak four stories tall. Plant it. Give the little tree time to get its shell cracked and its leaves unfolded in the sunlight. From that minute on, treat it like a wicked stepmother. Keep it in a plate too shallow for its roots. When the taproot starts twisting around, all frustrated, lop it off. Bend the trunk out of shape with wires, so's it'll look as though it has been bent to the storms off the North Pacific since granddad was a suckling. Takes a long time, like the man said in the poem." * * * * * I made the V-sign for another pair of Billygoat Beers. "Interesting and all," I admitted. "But what does this exposé of Jap silviculture have to do with American television?" "That's where my story gets ugly," said my friend with the ears. His voice dropped low again, confidential. "The Japanese didn't have hormones for their _bansais_. They made their midget oaks and pines and ginko-trees without the help of negative catalysts or anti-vitamins. They didn't even know B-12 from the far side of Fujiyama, when they started their box-gardens. "The people running TV know those things. You never see an announcer on a toothpaste show who doesn't talk like a biochemistry Ph.D. explaining paper chromatography in a kindergarten. You know what I mean. The guys who point their index fingers at you from the screen, all tricked out in doctor-coats with stethoscopes on their necks and reflectors on their foreheads to prove that Science stands behind every tube of their particular gunk. They talk a line that would take the Nobel Prize in Medicine if it meant anything, then rub it in with shots of dancing bears and gnomes and chorus girls six inches tall." Big-ears shuddered. "The people who put the calories in our breakfast woodchips know all about biology, now," he said, getting louder. "They've got laboratories, and even brag about having them. What's more," he said, his voice shrill now, "they use those laboratories of theirs to do their commercials." "Still can't see where you've got anything to be afraid of," I said, tamping a cigarette tight on the bar.