YAYOI PICNIC REMNANT

I had a piece of melon just the other day - the summer melons are starting to come in from the farms in Kyushu and further south - nothing like a sweet, cool slice of melon on a picnic.

The same was apparently true a couple thousand years ago here in Shiga Prefecture, just across Lake Biwa in fact, in the small neat and classy town of Moriyama - oddly with no website of its own - which as of yesterday holds the world's oldest melon record.

Moriyama stands on the site where some Yayoi villagers lived and just tossed away the melon rinds on their picnics - who cared in those days, knowing that all would be taken care of by nature - never suspecting the problem that garbage would one day become, or that this particular melon rind, so casually tossed away as Yayoi garbage, would in that very same one day be an archaeological treasure; that a couple of millennia hence a professional in the unknown and as yet unnecessary career field of archaeology would with her trowel painstakingly excavate the melon rind intact and the discovery would be worldwide news, the melon pictured on the inconceivable internet...

Like melons, picnics can turn out to be pretty historic.