HOMEMADE PICKLES

Went yesterday morning to the flea market by the town library benefiting the anti-incinerator action, great to see all the folks out there buying and selling and finding value and worth in used items, unlike the mood toward such things when I first came to Japan, when used things pretty much equalled rotten garbage and Japan was an antique paradise for scavenging foreigners. So much has changed for the better for all (except the scavenging foreigners), and how much worthier can a Saturday morning flea market be?

All the kids were there too, helping out and learning about direct public involvement, no longer being uniformed in school every Saturday as they used to be. It is quite a thing to see country folk becoming activists, obachans (grandmas) out there in their aprons selling their best homemade pickles, such as sliced daikon (major radish) with takanotsume ('hawk's talons': hot red pepper) rings, in opposition to heavy-handed government, one obachan selling an exquisite long-green-pepper picklepaste I've never had before, visually even less distinguished than caviar, but as rich and flavorful and taste rewarding as any delicacy you can think of to defeat political chicanery, she was running out of the pepper picklepaste but said she'd be selling more down at the hot spring baths tomorrow, so I went there this morning to buy a LOT but she was sold out by the time I got there, only had some long-green-pepper-leaf pickles (!!!) which, to my great surprise, are very nearly as good!