TIDES OF DAYS

   

The longer I've lived here, the more I've come to delight in that brief time of Spring when the wintered mountainside becomes more and more facets of blue sky as the paddies fill, until for a brief time before rice planting, from certain perspectives - like my front doorway - the sky is all over the ground.

Then come the little astonishments of lifetimes, like the early Spring morning when you walk out of the house into a mountain mist and behold upon that long watermirror the pale-green rows of just-planted rice shoots, stretching away into the soft wall of cloud right at your door... You can’t help but just stand there looking, letting the sight fill you with the miracle of magnificence just plain happening, in this day-to-day way.  

On the blue days, across that magic mirror glide the clouds that come sailing over the mountain like big baroque pearls, while hawks and swallows dive to snatch food from their reflections; at evening the calm of the mirror is broken into widening rings by a now-and-then rain, or rippled into memory by sudden evening breezes that shiver the silver light. 

From the morning train along the Lake, through Spring and Summer you can see the day-by-day changes all along the line, as the tides of days turn the land to sky that soon turns to rice leaves, the fields growing day by day into perfect levels of deep green blades that reveal the wind as they grow taller, until they begin to nod with the weight of their gold...

TRYING TO SEE

This morning was way over its head in the Spring mist, which is great because when you're moving about in a cool blanket of vapor you have to try and see farther, which would be better to do all the time, but being human we are often too deeply involved with shallow concerns...

Still, it’s always welcome to be challenged by a physical mist, as opposed to mists psychogenic, mediagenic, politicogenic etc., so there I was whiling my time on the train platform, peering at the mountains, trying for the summits, here and there on their faint green slopes a bright cherry or tulip tree exulting despite the curtain of haze; then I turned the other way and looked out over the Lake, the mythic lake, where dragons and silver live in the shimmers, the water surface that morning just disappearing not far into the mist, no one knows how far precisely, all silvergrey and cool, that dull bright disc up there making it all squinty if I looked too high so I looked low and saw that Lakeside rice paddy preparations are well under way, here in the lowlands-- some are even tilled and ready for the planting, their green shoulders smooth as velvet...

Then I heard what sounded like the whine of a weed whacker down there somewhere; I looked to see, and right about where the sound seemed to come from I noticed on the high shoulder of a deep paddy an obachan's (grandma's) walker cart (the commercial euphemism is "Silver Car," but I suspect the obachan underground has its own name for these wheels-- (obaguruma?)) standing there as out of place as can be: what semi-ambulatory grandma would walk her wheels way out there into the weedy unpaved, heavy labor workplace?

Nowadays, all the Japan ladies of a certain age, bent by the tribulations and deprivations of living and childbearing through and after the war, use these wheeled carts to lean on when they amble about the country ways or go shopping at the village stores, and to sit on when they need a rest. Odd to see one of those carts sitting out there...

The grandmas do take part in the work at harvest time, when they can be very useful with their decades of know-how and their long practice at focused energy, but now it’s all muscle time, so what can they do at this point-- and where is that weed whacker noise coming from? 

It was coming from around there... Then in the mist I saw the top of the head of someone above the paddy verge, just one person out there in the mist, working on a bit of a slope that hid whoever it was, the head moved upward, the shoulder was swinging - a weed whacker - then a bit more and it was indeed an elder lady, owner of that cart and bent of back... 

She must have brought that whacker all the way out there on her cart, started that gas-powered tool, bigger than she was, all by herself with a hefty pull or two or more, and was still swinging it back and forth, bent over as she moved up and along the paddy shoulder, working toward her walking cart, mowing down weeds, making way for rice. Those elderladies get more impressive every time I look.

Glad the mist made me try to see.

EGRETS AND GRANDMOTHERS

Now that the rice fields have been planted with long even rows of the faintest wispy green brushstrokes on pale gray silk that are the rice seedlings, and the leftover blocks of unplanted rice shoots remain here and there in the fields and on their edges, the only large living things to be seen in the paddies are egrets and grandmothers.

The egrets, in their turn, with long, slow, careful steps practiced and perfected over eons, elegantly patrol the paddies filled with young rice plants (never stepping on even one tiny shoot) and continue patrolling throughout the growing season, ensuring that proper balance is maintained between the populations of little fish, frogs and insects.

The other large creatures in the paddies, the grandmothers, are out there early in the morning or late in the evening after the machines have gone, to plant by hand here and there in the difficult corners and paddy-edge curves, to use up the last of the otherwise wasted rice shoots. Then the grandmothers come throughout the growing season to pluck the weeds that always, in the history of just about everything, try to take over.

The egrets do it because it feeds them, it's a pleasure and it leads onward. The grandmothers do it for the same reasons.

ABANDONED

Sad truth now so common in the Japanese countryside...

at Walking in Japan

A growing list of inspiring links on Ken Elwood's epic links page...

WWOOF

World Wide Opportunities on OrganicFarms

ORGANIC CHILDREN

The erudite, attractive and tasteful readers of PLM are well aware by now of how much I appreciate my naturally grown produce that the monkeys don't get. Those same perceptive readers also agree with my conviction that the only kind of food to feed oneself, let alone one's children and grandchildren - unto seven generations at least - is the unpoisoned kind. If that's fully possible anymore...

Such readers also likely have, like myself, recently encountered a flurry of articles in the mainstream media attacking organic foods and their proponents. As an antidote to salaried opinion (as Walter Cronkite said "In all my years as a news commentator I was never once able to tell the truth, about anything."), here's a valuable perspective on that ongoing concerted attack against honesty and integrity in the food that will become you and your descendants.

"You may have noticed an uptick this year in news reporting that organic food isn’t really better for you, opinion pieces by conventional farmers saying that they are tired of being demonized by 'agri-intellectuals', and guilt-inducing ads by Monsanto [link mine; RB] in highbrow publications like the New Yorker touting the company’s ability to feed the world through technology.

Though all of this could be disturbing to those of us committed to sustainable agriculture and food that is fair to eaters, animals, workers and farmers, I’m choosing to see this as a good sign. I think it means we might be winning." Full article

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In the same artery:
Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food

RICE FARMING

The older farmer, bent-backed in his worn work-clothes and muddy boots, comes at evening with his young son - who has dyed hair and wears flashy city fashions before his Saturday night date - to unload from the back of the old pickup the trays of rice shoots for planting in a couple of days onto the paddy that is now just a sheet of sky-filled water, waiting.

They are a picture of what is happening here in the countryside of Japan - a scene straight from the ages those two, quietly carrying on with their work by the mountain field in the end of day—the father on one side of each tray, in his head perhaps thoughts of these mountains and this labor, memories of war and hunger - as spoken in his bent back - of perseverance and generations of seasons; on the other side stands his young son: well-nourished, modernly educated, immersed in nights of music and crowds and high-speed city life, now anxious in these moments with his father beside this way-up-here rice field because it's getting late on a Saturday night in the unknown matter of young life—

They are like two mutually alien creatures quietly circling, respecting each other for polar reasons: one not to insist too much on the finer points of farming-- for infrequently pondered and anyway incomprehensible reasons; the other to at least go along with the ritual, it won’t take long, the night is waiting...

It is like watching an ancient river slowly diverge, its flow dividing over a new topography of earth and dusk, of hands and life, seed and springtime, sustenance and education, enka and hip-hop, go and Grand Theft Auto, hard drives and tractors-- who can see and who can say which is the truer nourishment, the truer path, the one that leads to higher places?

Together the two men work, lifting the trays from the truck and arranging them by the paddyside, the older familiar with earth and time, the younger trying to keep his clothes clean, not yet grasping what it means to have food four months from now, his body actions tacitly expressing puzzlement over the true value of this upmountain sheet of water, these repetitive tasks, that are somehow his heritage, as his father bends willingly again to this familiar routine, performed so many lifetimes before even his own, as the older man knows to his heart and hopes one day to pass on to his son, through these trays of life they carry together now...

The sunset panorama of the lake goes unnoticed for the task at hand-- it is only the work of moments; when next I look the two are gone, and there are long new rows of green life beside the water.

The young man, even if he goes away at last, and stays in the city - as so many of his farm generation are doing - may one day remember, perceive the heft of these moments, and return... If not to here, then to somewhere he will find that is as worthy - and if he is so fortunate, he will bring his growing child to lift up the other side.

BEAUTIFUL APPLES

Farmer Akinori Kimura of Hirosaki, Aomori Prefecture,
says to one of his pesticide-free apples,
"Thanks a lot. You did a great job!"

"Able to bear the pressure no more, Kimura one evening resolved to commit suicide. He took a rope and hiked up a mountainside to do the deed, but under the moonlight made the discovery that would save him..."

WWOOF JAPAN