ALPHABET

Yesterday when the grandies came and I was to babysit for a few hours, Kaya (9) and one of the twins (Mitsuki, 6) set immediately to playing with the toys, while the other twin (Miasa, also 6) sat quietly at the kitchen table, hunched over a notebook, drawing-- or so I thought.

When I happened to walk by and glanced at what she was doing, at first it looked like English words... But that couldn't be of course, since she doesn't speak English - though she has expressed a desire to learn English... Besides, she's only 6, and 6-year-olds often say things... But they WERE English words, beautifully printed and she was printing them! Beautifully! Huh?

One of her sisters was jumping rope and the other was rolling around the room on the big red ball, which are essential activities in themselves, but have the addictive quality of being fun. In stark contrast, Miasa had, before coming to visit, made ruled lines in her blank notebook, asked someone to print an English word on the left of each line and was now intently copying each printed word carefully and in surprisingly expert fashion, over and over till she reached the end of the line, when she would start on the next line and word. She wasn't having fun or showing off, she was just doing it, and had started doing it the moment she'd arrived. While her sisters were playing noisily, she was quietly studying English!

I... I... I was speechless. I just stood there. I... I had never seen a 6-year-old focus with that much intensity, for that long, on a real grownup study task. I... I waited till she had finished the whole two pages (without looking up even once!), when she ruled fresh lines on the next two pages and held it up to me, asking me to print some new English words on the left. I... I... I said: This is fantastic! You are amazing! You are ... This is... Wow... and so forth, at which the other two girls looked up to see what all the praise was about, and later after dinner, when they were about to watch the Wizard of Oz they insisted on watching it in English.

Later, when Kasumi came to pick them up and take them home across the Lake, they had fallen asleep... Out in the car Miasa lifted a sleepy hand and said "My notebook..." She'd left it by the warm wood stove, where she'd been ruling in more lines, just before falling asleep...

My English fails me...

MOLEHOOD

Every once in a while, because I have been too long at a desk in an office in a building in a city or some other abnatural state of existence and feel as though I am about to dissipate in a cloud of dark vapor like an occult being about to be exposed to sunlight, I step outside the house into the weekend morning garden onto actual earth to existify amidst the sensual actualities of the very nature that begot every basal aspect of my existence, and am surprised by the luxurious softness of the ground that formerly was as hard as winter.

Which is my roundabout way of getting to the subject of the ecstatic Mr. Mole, or Mogura-chan (Molie) as I call him. This morning Kaya and I were outside getting spinach and stuff from the garden when we noticed that over by the stone wall beside the steps Mogura-chan had run around underground in loops and whirls of no particular destination like a madmole, but given the naturalness of his life he was more likely having a party or had just fallen madly in love, it wasn't organized at all-- not that moles have to be organized like a guy in a office or anything, its just that judging by his moundy tracks he looked like he was really letting off some sort of funsteam down there, whirling through the earth like Fred Astaire across a ballroom floor, having the time, essentially, of his life...

Molehood is a worthy ambition.

HAPPY HOLINESS

To celebrate the holiday season and the visiting grandies, we decorated the tree by the stone stairs with all sorts of ornamentations that made a bright celebration out the big window. Yesterday, the festive days being over, while I was out working in the garden Echo began to take the decorations down. She removed them to the extent she could reach and asked me to take down the rest before I came in for lunch.

So just before the grandies arrived to share our noonday meal, as I was taking down the long festoons of gold, red, blue and silver beads and twinkly strings of all sorts, I had to put them someplace safe for the moment, so I just looped the red fuzzy strings and the blue and green twinkly frillies around my neck; then there were the ornaments, which were too big and many to hold-- not into the pockets of course, or down on the stone steps, so I hung them on their loops from my shirt front and pocket buttons, and kept on looping the bright other strands over my shoulders, so by the time the grandies arrived and I headed up the stone stairs with gold, blue, silver and red garlands of sparkle and frilly twinkles high around my neck, over my head and down over my shoulders, loopy festoons of bright beads of all colors reaching to my knees, big round shiny ornaments in both hands and dangling from all the buttons of my shirt, I had come to embody the holiday spirit itself, and as I made my necessarily stately holiday way up the stone steps and into the house there wasn't an icicle of humbug anywhere, so as I opened the door it was impossible to hold back even one of the loud "HO-HO-HOs" that suddenly emerged from that ancient place we all know in the spirit. That's what holidays are for: to bring out the happy holiness in us, each and every one.

As it is in delighted children.

INTELLIGENT EVOLUTION: LEARNING FROM OUR WILD NEIGHBORS

It is good for us to live amongst the wild creatures, carry on with our lives amidst their close vicinity, the better to learn from those evolved beings the truths we need to know about our own proper place in this world of which we fancy ourselves the overlords.

In fact I had such a lesson this morning, when I almost stepped on a baby monkey. The tiny wrinkled creature, even then in the midst of learning to sneak up onto my deck to get as many as he could carry of the winter potatoes that in my negligence (half the soul of human kindness) I had left in a basket there, afforded me some further insights into our respective places in the universe, and how we civilized, hardworking, largely altruistic creatures and the thieving beasts around us fit together in the big picture.

The unexpected lesson (the best kind) began just as I was putting my lunchbowl into the sink, when out the big window onto the garden I saw a bigass monkey ambling like a lord into my garden through the gate I'd negligently left open (I'd just been out there putting some rice straw on a couple places, left the gate open for after-lunch garden tweaking).

I ran out the door at once yelling and handwaving in regard to my respective place in the universe blablabla vis-a-vis monkey lust for my onions, a complex philosophical question that I gave no consideration as I headed instinctively - like a monkey toward an onion - for the little pile of antibeast rocks I keep handy on the deck railing.

Anyway, to get back to the infant thief beneath my foot, as I pounded onto the deck to chase Bigass out of my garden I came within a monkeynose of stepping on the cute little artful dodger wannabe as he was edging toward what were almost his potatoes. You should have seen the look in his beady already criminal eyes-- he had never seen a monkey as big as me, pale face yelling for justice, a huge beast covered in different kinds of multicolored nonfur, in his entire life. He'd just been born of course, so had but a short time range to choose from, but that only magnified the experience for him; he tumbled backward in disbelief and fell off the deck right in front of I guess his mother, who was grubbing among the lily roots and also freaked at sight of her falling child with me above.

At the same time, I saw that Bigass was out there with his numerous tribe (there must have been a few dozen of them, all ages) all around, so I had to yell louder and gesticulate more threateningly until I had reached a crescendo sufficient to dominate that many monkeys (there’s a formula I use) and they all took off carrying babies and other monkey luggage (though not one potato or onion, I’m proud to say), legging it for the property nearby that has a big dog who is nicer to them, only barks and possible bites. No long-distance definite rocks from a big loud beast suddenly out of nowhere.

I learned much from the experience. From the look on that little big-eyed face, for example, I learned that I am in fact the overlord of this particular fraction of the world, and that little brigand had better believe it, like the rest of his tribe. But most importantly of all, I came to realize that the monkeys in their natural state have an ecological role to play when, in the depths of winter - as they have done since the first tick of monkeytime - they subsist on roots, seeds, bark, whatever the wild provides. Like us, however, the monkeys prefer an easier way if there is one, though they haven't the will or the wherewithal to create it themselves, so they want ours. Thus is their natural role - which historically does not include onion consumption - critically unbalanced when they steal my produce; so in yelling at and pelting them with rocks to drive them from the garden (much like ourselves, in our own mythic times), I am doing my part to restore the natural balance, thereby helping forestall the possibility of global warming, among other growing perils.

Yes, it is good, as I say, for us to learn from and teach our fellow creatures our respective proper places in the world. The little crook and I pretty much have that down now. He'll be back. But I'll be waiting. With more than a size eleven.

Doing my part for a cleaner future.

2010: YEAR OF THE TIGER

SUPERVISITATION

Heard an odd sound outside yesterday afternoon, like a small mob of elves sneaking over a field of pink and green marshmallows as quietly as they could while dragging bags full of giggles, hoping to surprise an unsuspecting grandfatherly person who lives in a house on the side of a mountain in an oriental countryside, so I did what any such elderperson would do in similar circumstances: I put my ear to the door, the better to grasp the situation and make counter-surprise preparations, when the bell rang serially just as the door was pulled wide open and the entire living room filled up with squeals as I was engulfed in fresh cold air filled with six arms of three granddaughters who varoomed in through the doorway like a sixlegged yellstorm and whirled around me in the cutest smiling vortex I ever saw, hugging me all over and yelling Bobu-san! and caroming off to bounce around the big room, looking up and down and around to see what had changed and what was still there, while I spun a moment in the vestibule trying to slow my whirl so I could see and walk, talk and so forth. Then we got down to the intense part of the visit, where things happen really fast.

CHRISTMAS CAKES

In Japan, the Yule season is symbolized by the "Christmas Cake," whose origin has escaped me (much like the flavor of the traditional Japanese Christmas Cake) mainly for want of interested pursuit, but these frothy strawberried constructions seem to have come a long way since the amazingly bland (not even vanilla!) cakes of the seventies, when the term "Christmas Cake" horrendously also referred to unmarried women 25 years of age (of no value after the 25th)... What a long, frosty distance we have traveled...

But flavorful as these cakes may have become, I can't help but think it's still just image. I also wonder briefly where the tradition came from, but that's way less important than the fact that Japanese women over 25 are now as valuable as any other. Happy holidays, all.

AZUMA-SAN

One afternoon over the weekend I was at home alone working in my upstairs zone of solitude when I heard what sounded like a truck pull up in front of the house and thought it must be a delivery of some kind, so started to get up to go to the door, when I heard a truck door slam and a loud voice talking, so I then thought it must be a couple of the propane guys come to check the tanks or something, but then the voice went around the front of the house instead of out back where the tanks are, then out in front of the deck I heard this loud conversation, no one from the road ever goes there, because there's a chain across the driveway and its just... private, and privacy is pretty much boilerplate around here, so I went downstairs and looked out front to see who was walking around on our property talking so loud about what, maybe someone from the water committee or something, assuming that we're not home because our car wasn't there (Echo was out doing some shopping and yogaing) but when I looked out front there was no one, the voice had moved elsewhere already, out among the firewood and into the garden, so I went to the big kitchen window and looked out at where the voice now was and saw an agile elderly fellow poking his head in among the stacks of firewood and saying something I couldn't hear, no one else around, he was talking to himself, went here and there looking and talking, then he turned and I recognized him, it was Azuma-san, the elderly expert who felled a few worrisome trees for us, climbs giant oaks like a 12 year old but with a chain saw, then stands way up there and trims the mighty tree to a new and more cooperative elegance, in a display of arboreal agility that would even be impressive in a 25-year-old - he's about 80 now - and there he was, poking around among the wood and talking to himself like a solo lumberjack, so I went outside and called his name, said good day, turned out he'd come to ask about our woodstove, was very curious about how much it cost, how it was made, how well it worked and so on, seems he wants to get one for himself. If anybody can make good use of a woodstove, it's Azuma-san. In a fair exchange, he gave me some good tips on my hiratake mushroom growing. Then he roared off in his big truck, on his way to the next big tree.

DON'T TOUCH THAT DIAL

As earlier readers of these humble chronicles may recall - if they’re still coming back now and then after all this time - each year in Spring when the leaves open they close off my access to satellite television, leaving me only with standard J-tv, which I don't really watch, apart from quick news and weather, otherwise more like peer at and shake my head in amazement maybe an hour a month, just to see if anything has changed in 30 years.

Then in autumn, when the leaves fall in sufficient quantity they restore my satellite signal, which rises from zero over the days till it hits a nice clear high and I can see the bitter faces of Bull O’Really and friends once again. No doubt many of you share that pleasure year round. You have my sympathies. Yes, once again I can wade in the shallows of Samsara that tv seems to represent so well, compared to the mere "vast wasteland" it was back in the 60s.

I'm so old I remember original US tv back in the 50s, when there were actual plays on live at prime time, like Requiem for a Heavyweight, and individuals of deep integrity like Edward R Murrow, programs like the Firestone Classical Music hour, Hall-of-Fame stuff like The Twilight Zone and so on, back when the tv bigwigs were still trying to learn what people liked and hadn’t yet found the moneyed monsters in the basement.

This year, however, in a new act of mercy I cannot yet fathom, all the leaves have fallen but my signal from the sky remains at zero. Somebody up there is perhaps trying to spare me the rigors of the Dark Sea. All I'd have to do is tweak this or patch that, maybe reconnect a wire or two, to bring the basement back into my life, but at some point I became aware of a growing reluctance to lift a finger to resurrect the creatures that come in the day and the night to devour with their manic hunger all of my life they can get.

I know that may be a bit extreme, but when I go outside, the contrast between that dark window and the broad, bright reality of Pure Land Mountain is profound, rich with a joy that will never fit in a tube.

BUBBLE BEN

How have the mighty fallen...

100-dollar Ben (the most frugal of the founding fathers!) was once the go-to guy, the face in demand at every black market in Asia, but has now fallen in value to such an extent that he is not only less desired by back-alley street corner money changers, but has been turned by a Japanese toy company into a soapy parody, a currency bubble bath no less, as a 1000-dollar bill that is nothing but bubbles, popping all over the world...

I remember when a hundred-dollar bill was really worth a hundred real dollars, and reality in general was still pretty common...

ZEN TARGET

On the train tonight a lovely young woman sat in front of me who appeared to be a Zen archer; she was carrying the long bamboo bow, its full length carefully wrapped in a fabric traditionally dyed a splendid rare orange that bore other bright colors, like the bingata of Okinawa, in a pattern that was also traditional, of anciently stylized flowers, birds and butterflies, the bow reaching from the floor to well above the luggage rack.

Affixed to the bow by a wide leather wrapping was the lady's quiver of arrows, basically a capped tube about half the length of the bow. It too was a gorgeous object, finished in a grayish, elegantly patterned cloth and set with silver fittings. Circled at intervals with bands of smooth gray leather, it had a shiny brown hard-leather cap at the top, held in place by finely braided strips of gray leather.

Seated atop the leather cap was a figure I took at first to be a netsuke of an ancient god or something spiritually similar; I leaned closer for a better look, without being intrusive - this was Zen, after all - and saw that it was a tiny figure of Goofy, wearing baggy blue pants.

The arrow and the target are one.

JEFFREY IRISH, SONCHO

"Jeffrey Irish, a 48-year-old American, is the unlikely village chief [soncho] of Tsuchikure, a remote farming hamlet in Japan's southern Kyushu island. The tall, even-tempered Californian got the position because he satisfies the post's main requirements: He hears and sees well.

In Tsuchikure, where the average age is 77 (if you don't count him and his family), that makes Mr. Irish one of only three residents qualified for the job. He spends his days keeping track of the physical and mental decline of the 24 elderly longtime residents of this wilting Japanese village.

Tsuchikure -- a community of modest single-family houses on a hillside about the size of a football field -- is in many ways emblematic of Japan in the 21st century: an advanced economy that must cope with the depopulation of everything outside the urban centers.

It is one of thousands of withering Japanese villages."

The American Who Manages the Decline of a Japanese Hamlet

Jeff is a contributing editor of the Kyoto Journal.

via

LOCAL LUNCH

Yesterday morning when I went out to empty the wood ash onto the fallowing part of the garden, on my way back I grabbed a good couple handfuls of big-leaf spinach and snagged a few large shiitake from the logs, then went inside and for lunch started sauteing some garlic in olive oil while I sliced the shiitake to translucent thinness, then I threw the slices in with the garlic, stirring now and then to softness and even greater translucency while I tore the spinach leaves into mouth-sized pieces, poured some broth into the pan with the garlic and mushrooms, turned the flame high and threw in the spinach, tossed with a spatula till the broth reduced then put it all in a nice local mingei bowl and ate it together with some local rice in another nice local mingei bowl. Boy was that locally delicious.

KANJI AT KIYOMIZU

Each year there is a poll to select the kanji character that best describes the social situation for that year. The selected kanji for 2009, as calligraphed by the chief priest of Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto despite the clouds of scandal over the Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation, is:

Shin (New)

You can sure write that again.

PLUM CAKE

Early Monday morning as I was waiting for the train I saw that the top of the highest mountain was dusted with a little bit of snow, like a holiday plum cake during sugar rationing, but today I notice that there is no plum cake at all, it's just a mountain again. Such are the vagaries of weather these days at the foot of Pure Land Mountain, which should all have been snowed under by now at least once or twice, but it's more like we're heading into Spring, which is unsettling since the body and the spirit are all prepared for what keeps on not coming.

It's like a constant disappointment you're not really aware of but can't spend much time thinking about, because after all there's living to be gotten on with, work to be done, errands to be run, folks stop by. But something isn't quite right, then you're standing there paused in some activity when the non-plum cakeness of the scene suddenly catches your eye and it all comes back, it's December again and you stand there just staring at the big fact hanging there in the air.

But such pauses don't last too long, because in some ways it's quite nice, this December springtime in snow country, where folks now get to do a lot more stuff than just shoveling snow the way they're usually doing about this time, or clearing roofs, hacking at the ice and walking gingerly when not indoors; instead, you see them out harrowing their land, cleaning up the brush, inoculating some mushroom logs, cleaning the rain gutters, trimming the shrubbery, small woodfires at home.

The made-up, blow-dried heads on tv point at the big red suns all over the country on their weather maps and talk about global warming, carbon footprints and suchlike terms they seem so fond of, and they may well be right, the world may be heading for a warm ending in a few years, decades, centuries, millennia, the terms are vague, but it's happened before, we all know about the ice ages and the weather cycles, the highs and lows that went on before history got going, and there very likely are more of those coming down the big pike, but folks around here aren't fretting too much; they're close to the land and the weather, they have a big sense of such things and are used to adapting, though it is a bit disappointing not to have a sky-high sugared plum cake for the holidays.

HIRATAKE

I now have enough inoculated shiitake logs to supply me with those exquisite fresh mushrooms for the foreseeable future, so I decided to try something a bit more difficult, the silvery Japanese mushroom hiratake (a variety of oyster mushroom - Pleurotus ostreatus). Like shiitake, hiratake goes well with just about everything, but it has different subtleties of flavor and texture. It is also a valued as a medicinal mushroom.

I've seen folks try to grow it on tv programs, and it appears to be rather fussy, but I thought I'd give it a try anyway-- I've got some nice rice straw to store the inoculated logs on and under, over there by the new cord of wood out of the wind and sun.

So over the weekend I got some hiratake spawn dowels and on Monday sectioned some 20 cm diameter oak logs I felled a few weeks ago into about 30 cm lengths, then today drilled them all over, inoculated them and stored them on a mat of rice straw over by the firewood, covered them with more rice straw and fallen leaves,and watered the pile with the hose for quite a while.

Will post again when there are results, however it goes...

Further info:

On Japanese mushrooms

International hiratake spawn source+instructions (looks like a slightly different variety than the one I just started)

Detailed info on hiratake as 'gourmet' mushroom

Helpful site on wild mushrooms of Japan

STARS ON THE GROUND

Interesting, watching western celebs get interviewed for Japanese tv by reporters who don't speak English or respond to English or its tonal, facial, manual gestures and intimations, but work through an interpreter on the side whom the audience does not see and the celeb does not address, so for the less manic celebs the general PR boilerplate is thereby minimized and the usual dross falls away so you hear only Japanese questions asked, with the celeb's English replies and subtitles edited in for the response, and as all the usual nuancing is no longer of value, the celebs become more neutral, culturally isolated, no longer rely on polemic manipulations etc., so are more personal, open and 'normal,' less guarded, like Michael Moore the other night, he wasn't 'on' the way he always is, thinkingagendathinking, he just chatted, no psychic drumrolls, no showmanship, seemed like a nice concerned guy you might have sat next to in a bar in Flint...

THE BLISS OF FERMENTATION

Katz mentions miso, tempeh and kombucha, among many other fermented foods we enjoy here, but not natto...

"Fermentation pre-digests foods, breaking down compound nutrients into more elemental forms and making them more available to us. Minerals in particular become dramatically more bio-available. Fermentation also produces unique micronutrients not found in the original ingredients but rather produced by the fermenting organisms. Some examples of these are anti-carcinogenic isothiocyanates in fermented vegetables, or dipicolinic acid in miso, which draws heavy metals out of our cells, binds with them, and removes them from our bodies. Ferments also detoxify certain foods. But the most profound benefit of fermentation is the live-cultures themselves, not present in all fermented foods but only those not subjected to heat after fermentation. The bacteria in these live-culture ferments replenish and diversify bacteria in our digestive tracts. These bacteria enable us to effectively digest food, assimilate nutrients, and create a competitive situation that helps protect us from pathogenic bacteria. Ferments have numerous benefits to our health."

Why Fermentation Is the Key to Local Foods and Good Health

Wild Fermentation

KAKISHIBU

Because I wanted to refinish my deck before winter, am looking to avoid the ubertoxic commercial products and have tried the uberexpensive (and pretty much untereffective) wood treatment products available on the naturo-altermarkets, I've been looking for the traditional Japanese wood treatment known as kakishibu, which is made by naturally processing a certain type of persimmon to obtain the ultimate in shibui (astringency), as I think of it.

You'd think that "traditional" pretty much says it all, but I had no idea. Oozing the usual newbie optimism, I went to the wood treatment section of the nearest farm store, which is pretty traditional, to my mind - they sell handmade tools, baskets, cord and such like - and asked the elder man there (thinking it likely that no one under 40 would have ever heard of kakishibu) if he had any kakishibu.

He instantly acquired that Dealing-with-eccentric-foreigner look and said What? I repeated my question, he said Huh? I mouthed the identical phrase once more, when he began to realize that I was in fact using a Japanese term there, and a deep light began to come forth from long ago, as he shook his head and gave the kind of small laugh you give someone who says Look there's a flying elephant throwing money! And said Nooo, we don't have any kakishibu, without actually saying the Are you out of your mind part.

I also tried at the second-closest, more commercial, but larger and more broadly shelvy farm store. Got the same response, though this elder man had the amazed Foreigner-who-knows-about-unobtainable-traditional-substances look.

Then a few weeks later, when I was up in the woods sectioning a big oak log with an upmountain friend who resides in Kyoto and is the 8th generation of a traditional Kyoto bamboo craft family, during a rest break we naturally got to talking about wood, tradition, craft and bamboo, so I asked him offhandedly if he might know where I might be able to get some... kakishibu? He got a look on his face like I'd asked if he'd ever heard of a thing called 'water,' said Sure, there's a kakishibu store not far from my house.

My subsequent related research led me not only to a traditional kakishibu store in Hyogo Prefecture that deals online (not quite fully yet, it seems), there's also a kakishibu enterprise in the US! It also turns out that kakishibu has many uses.

Fascinating little mind journey, but too late to do the deck this winter, though that pain is eased a great deal by my new knowledge. Kakishibu really is miraculous stuff.

(Plus, there's a heavily bearing wild tree of that same variety of persimmon growing on the edge of the forest, just up the road...)

TENNESSEE TRUFFLES?!

Hmmmm... wonder if I could grow truffles here in Shiga...

via

GO FIGURE

Here it is December 1 and there's no snow on the mountains! No frost yet, either! I'm wearing shorts! Most of the leaves have fallen and everything's waiting, but nothing's happening! Skiers are standing on grass, sweating in t-shirts! Ice skaters are swimming instead! Spring flowers are asking questions and birds are singing summer medleys! What is going on? While you figure it out, I'm gonna go lay on the beach.