I laughed in spite of myself. "The Bryant & May elf? Afraid of him? Man, that's like being scared of Santa Claus."
"It's not that simple," he rapped back. "It's not only fear those commercials inspire, but pity." I stared at him now, thinking maybe he was a recruiter for a nudist colony or a ward-worker for the Vegetarian Party, or some other sort of fanatic peddling his exotic ritual. "Let me explain," he asked quickly, seeing my hesitation. "Want another beer?" I reflexively named the beer my agency handles, smooooth Billygoat Beer.
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.