REQUIREMENT #3

The police in Japan of today aren't nearly as ShowMeYourPapersy as they were back when I first came here in the early seventies and folks in Tokyo used to stare at me in my rareness like folks in China do now to their visitors. Back then the police would stop you on the street or jump out of one of the corner police boxes and with one of those guilt-generating immigration faces ask to see your passport or alien registration, even though world terrorism wasn't yet much of a fad. We foreigners were a threat of some other kind, a threat that's no longer really a matter of papers, but has been reduced to its essence. The fundamental fact of foreignness in this "ethnically homogeneous" society is still here. [Ad before video, but worth the wait]

The other night I got off the train back from work in the big city, went to get my motorbike to head home, and even from a distance could see an ominous yellow tag on the handlebars. Some authority had been here. What had I done now. Untwisting the wire that held the tag in place, I took it off and saw that it contained a list of 9 items, one of which, #3 , had been checked by the observing authority. It was from the police.

A policeman or two had come out here, to this little motor/bicycle parking lot beneath the tracks of this tiny railstation - where at night I often detrain alone - to go from bike to bike and check these 9 items, such as "There is no lock on your vehicle," "You forgot to lock your vehicle," The handlebars of your vehicle are not locked," or (in my case) "The theft insurance on your vehicle has expired." (Bicycle and motorcycle theft insurance is required by law(!) in a country where crime is so rare (relatively speaking) that the police have time to visit little motor/bicycle parking lots beneath the tracks at tiny rail stations to go from bike to bike and observe 9 items regarding your two-wheeled vehicle. This is amazing only to a foreigner, so there is something to this foreignness...

Not that I'm complaining, mind you; it is a privilege truly unimaginable in the West - and just about everywhere else I've ever been - to feel so safe and enjoy such civility-- and by extension, to feel so remiss at having violated requirement #3. I'll get right on it.

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF DISCERNMENT

Choice is not a big deal in traditional Japan and never has been, especially out here in the countryside, where vanilla ice cream is exciting and everybody drives a white pickup truck. I could go on, but then I'd never finish, so I'll stop here if you don't mind, and take a quick right to get to my point.

Every couple of months we ship to Kasumi and Family up north a big bag of the organic brown rice we buy unpolished from Mr. S., an elderly rice farmer who lives across the Lake. We then take it to the community rice polisher down in the village, dump in the rice, use the graduated knob to fine tune the settings for optimal brownricedness, put in the coins (yes it's a rice-polishing vending machine!), then let it run and out comes rice polished just the way we like it. We ship the appropriate portion of the result to Kasumi; the grandies love that fresh natural country rice.

A side benefit of this is that now and then we get to meet various neighborhood folks down there, which can be interesting, plus we can store more rice at home, and for a longer time, because it has the hull still on until we polish it in the village, plus we get the bran and other husky stuff, that's emptied into a large barrel beside the polishing machine. I take the bran home and use it on the garden; it can also be used for making pickles, skin scrubs etc. (A mesh scrub-bag of organic rice bran in the bathtub!) How I dream on...

On Wednesday, a rainy season day, we headed down to the village with a 30kg  bag of rice to polish and send to Kasumi and family, went up to the old rice polisher and found that it was a new rice polisher. Looked real slick. Big, fancy buttons. Maybe even digital. Never had digital rice, no doubt it's fast and convenient. But on closer inspection we found that the concept of fine tuning was no longer appreciated, had been deemed an outdated thing of the past, and was not available. Gone was the big old friendly knob that had enabled infinite polishing choices. In its place were two buttons: 70% polished or Complete Obliteration of Any Indication that This Is Rice. For a higher price, too. Plus in its obsessive efficiency it sucked all polishings into a black hole; no bran was returned. This would not stand. Plus, we'd paid for that bran. (I suspect we may be the only ones around here making that argument.) We put the rice back in the car and headed north along the Lake to find another village rice polisher in an even more rural place where a spectrum of choice might still prevail, a last bastion of preference.

We went on quite a while through the downpour till we came to the egg cooperative, where they have a rice polisher in a shed out front. It was new, too, as it turned out, but offered three choices: 50%, 70% and Complete Obliteration etc. (What are these tiny translucent granules?) We like our rice around 35% polished, so there was no game in town for us, and it was now raining extra hard, which let me tell you makes it difficult to find new rice polishers tucked away up little village side streets, a demanding task at the best of times. So we put in our rice, put in our money, selected 50% and went for it, vowing to find an older, more liberal machine if there was one still around within a reasonable distance, though it probably wouldn't be there long if no one out here was opting for brown rice choices. Who's gonna support that? This sleeker, quieter, faster and more expensive rice polishing machine took our bran, too, and could not be insulted.

It seems that no one wants to choose the degree of polishing anymore, that there is no demand for the full-spectrum brownricedness, that in the new world we are all becoming, deep choice is no longer efficient.

WATERMIRRORS

These are the early days of rice growing season, when the leaves of the new rice are all but invisible upon those many facets of water that just a few days ago were filled only with mountains and sky. Heading down the road these dawns is like traveling through a whole mountainside of optical illusions, passing by mirrors of open water where the farmers have planted their family paddies with the barest of rice stalks that from a distance are invisible, those small leaves placed 30 cm or so apart; in the slanted light it is a visual treat to slowly roll toward the village on my motorcycle and at first, looking down from above each watermirror, see nothing but sky reflected-- then a vague geometric pattern begins to emerge as the light changes and the tiny rice plants become manifest - mere wisps of green, the lines and rows of them curving and turning to fit the shape of the respective paddy - then when I draw to the level of the water there is suddenly a soft green layer floating there at eye level, like a jade mist above a mirror, then I look below to the next paddy and again it is only water, upon which a geometric pattern of green slowly resolves and turns to mist as I descend...

In a paddy here and there along the way stalks a crow, egret or hawk, searching for frog, insect, little fish that live there-- they pause in their breakfast labors, lift their heads above the green to watch me as I pass, then get back to the big menu...

BATHOS

About 11 o'clock this morning as I was clearing the old onion bed and prepping it for what I haven't yet decided (the possibilities in gardening are as many as those in youth, which can be at once nostalgic and unsettling, an interesting combo), some of those youth of Japan who are mute in the sociospiritual sense and depend upon incoherent loudness for public expression - hundreds of them in this instance - came motorcycling past on the road down by the Lake, flicking their accelerators to flatulate the fact of their presence.

This usually occurs at night in the city, to the delight of those heavily put-upon urbanites trying to sleep on the other side of thin walls a few feet away, but on nice sunny Sundays like this the mutes sometimes roar collectively out into the country, where they can eructate in the light of day.

As they did so en masse, moving on by in their superficial soundcloud, a startled frog in a nearby kinmokusei tree suddenly began chirping rapidly with irritation. I couldn't make out all that he was saying amidst that torrent of noise, but before he was drowned out he said something like: What the hell is that? Who are those amateurs? How come they're saying nothing so loudly?

Amazingly, he was voicing the very same thoughts that were even then burbling up from what must be the amphibian levels of my bathoconscious!

How unlike an exhaust pipe!

FOREST MONKEYS, STREET MONKEYS

As a sapient being and anciently practiced discerner of patterns amidst chaos, I can't help but perceive the similarities between the lowdown thieving conscienceless behavior of my local simians at one end of the Intelligence Spectrum, and the lowdown thieving conscienceless behavior of Wall Street simians at the other end. The forest monkeys in their basal integrity come and take a few onions, bite a radish or two, then are gone till they're again hungry in this neighborhood and there is nothing better around than my onions. They never get bonuses or flaunt the success of their scam, they never make off with more than they can carry.

The Street monkeys, in contrast, find that integrity gets in the way of their desires; they want more than just the onions of it all, they want the yachts and the golf courses, the 25 million dollar houses, they want the respect of folks like themselves, who can only envy. So they package a dozen actual onions and millions of promises of onions and trillions of onion IOUs into tranches that they get rated AAA 100% ONION by some bribed rating agency, then sell the Fully Onionized Derivatives at declared value to widows and pensioners, mayors and governments all over the world, who then believe they are rich in onions and will be even richer when they cash in their fat onion portfolios in 20 years.

Both parties of perpetrators know, somewhere in their "Heart," that they are committing dishonest acts, the main difference being that it's easier to perceive in the forest monkeys. You can see they feel guilty when stealing - which they know must be clandestine - and they look guilty when caught red-faced. The Street monkeys, in contrast, feel no guilt; in fact they reward themselves all the more handsomely the greater their dishonesty. What's more, they even flaunt their actions, lately praising themselves for so many brilliantly (and honestly impossible) profitable quarters in a row, achieved by further milking the biggest scam in the history of sapience.

Forest monkeys, with their ingrained integrity, would never stoop so low.

A SMALL JIG

The monkeys of course know when I am at home, and they know that when I am at home I am ever on the watch, gardenwise, that when I see a monkey in the vicinity I am a man of fast and accurate rocks, loud scary fireworks and other advanced forms of dastardly insistence upon vegetable possession.

Of course the monkeys know these things. But they also know that I work in the city on Tuesdays, and that Echo is away on errands all Tuesday afternoon. So they are patient. They don't often come on those other days, unless they're strangers, who are easily chased off. The native monkeys wait, hold the kids back, restrain themselves. They come on Tuesday afternoon, after the red car has been spotted and confirmed as coming down the mountain. "Red car descent confirmed, let's move out..." the monkey Godfather says into his virtual wrist mike.

So it wasn't really a big surprise when on Wednesday morning, one of my at home days, I awoke and looked out the window upon my garden, where I perceived even with sleepy, eyeglassless eyes that that the few onions that had remained did so no longer. Some form of lowly, crass and uncaring beast had paid a visit to my onions, as depicted in those impressionist flecks of white scattered there among the long, blurry brushtrokes of toppled green.

The reason I wasn't jumping up and down possessed with Gardener's Rage, however, was that I had been quietly and inyerfacedly harvesting and consuming my very own onions for some time now, as per reasons posted of previously; hence there weren't that many onions left, and those of lowest value. I had also scored 99.99 percent of the shiitake in my daily log scans, so when the drooling beasts came upon the empty logs after the paucity of onions there was likely much gnashing of simian teeth in that quarter, which pleases me immensely.

I don't really mind the monkeys taking their vig in exchange for my use of their ancestral turf, especially a radically diminished vig, such as I've been contriving of late. It's not like we have a contract or anything. Also they left the garlic alone and don't like spinach, chard, radishes, shungiku or peppers, among other things. And there aren't yet any cukes, tomatoes or squashes, which I will hawkeye like I do the shiitake, so all in all most of my garden remained mine, a matter of not-too-small a jig on my part, even before I found my glasses.

EXPAT BOOKWORM JUBILATION

As a long-time traveler who has experienced many of the world's markets (in fact, sold in a few) and the infinity of trickery therein, I of course did not believe it when I visited an online bookstore with an Amazonlike selection range and Amazonlike prices, but that offered FREE SHIPPING WORLDWIDE (Amazon offers "free" shipping in the continental US for only $79 a year!), I thought who are you kidding, from Seattle to here it's usually book price plus ca. 50% for shipping costs, and this new place was in the UK, but then after checking a bit deeper decided to try it and see, ordered two paperback books (one of which Amazon had only in hardback (to be pre-ordered!). Received the two books in perfect shape by air, the first in about 2 weeks, the other at a bit over 3 weeks (delayed by to the Icelandic volcano, as discovered via order tracking). I don't know how they do it but I hope it lasts. I suspect that Expat English bookworms worldwide are now rejoicing.

PROFESSIONAL

This morning I was restacking the old firewood into a new and improved arrangement for next year, and was just lifting the last 10cm diameter cherry log from the northernmost cord open to the wind so I could stack some newly split wood there, when all of a sudden on the support cedar log below was a professional baby mamushi, going "Huh?" "Wha?" "I was asleep, man, what the..." looking around and talking kinda slow like the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland saying Wwwhhhooo aaarrreee yyyooouuu??? Actually he was a bit older than a baby mamushi, which would be more like the snake I found under my front door one morning.

He'd be about a foot long were one to stretch him out, which I was not about to do, you can if you want, and even though he was curled up small I could tell he was a mamushi because of the casual and fearless way he addressed me, a giant looming over him with giant claws and clothes and stuff. He didn't dash off at lightspeed, the way venomless snakes always do. Plus there was the professional pinstriping and other decorations along his body, even though not in the black-and-brown of mamushi adulthood, or the black-and-gray of infancy-- more like, I guess, an adolescent red-and-green-- but even if you've never seen it before, way in your inherited archives you always know exactly what it means-- that "zero at the bone" that Emily spoke of. He slowly tilted his head up to better see what the hell, and though tiny, his head was triangular like that of a pit viper, all the more beautiful for its perfect, gemlike tininess.

It was morning and still cool, so he'd been racked out since dawn after a night on the new job, and had not expected an interruption to his snaky dreams. However, I already had his former roof in my hand and was not going to put it back because I'm restacking this firewood so get over it, was the thoughtwave. After a loaded pause (Hey, I got venom you know...) he did the reptilian version of Good Grief..., slithered slowly to the ground and huffed off into the downmountain underbrush to find a new place to crash and not be interrupted by one of these crazy, legged creatures.

Not long after, as I was stacking the new wood I could have sworn I heard some tiny snake snores, but that was probably just the bamboo leaves rubbing in the breeze.

The problem with capitalism is that eventually other people run out of your money.

WE AND THE RAIN FOREST

At the convenience store on the way to the office this morning I bought for my afternoon coffee break which I'm having right now a double-espresso in one of those plastic cups with the plastic membrane and plastic dome lid that have the plastic straw glued to the side with some plastic glue, and I notice it has on its side - not far from the straw - a green and bulbous-toed, but otherwise nondescript rainforest frog standing alert in a tiny white space just above the symbols for Do Not Microwave and "PURA" (in katakana), the Japanese disposal code for plastic items as required by some international convention on preserving the whatever of the earth yeah sure, and the bar code for sheer biz purposes, and of course the corporate URL, then above the alert frog (who is, I note, trademarked), in a rectangle of definitely not gold, float a couple good-lookin' coffee beans, and beside the frog are some simple instructions on how to remove the straw from its plastic concealment on the side of the container without spilling the coffee all over yourself, and we're in charge of the frogs? They're depending on us for their survival? Oh yeah, the frog's tiny space is surrounded by a jagged green circle that says above the frog's head in accordance with said International Convention, in a kind of glory banner: RAINFOREST ALLIANCE, here among city canyons, and underneath the frog a ribbon across that says CERTIFIED. Aren't we the strangest of species.

WILDFLOWER

One of the reasons I love gardening is the challenges it poses, especially up here, trying to grow vegetables where no vegetables have ever grown, in the face of monkeys deer, wild pigs and so forth; there are so many facets that it's always new, like being a seed myself. Another thing I like is the flowers. Finding flowers that will survive here, even thrive here. I'm still trying. And losing, mostly.

Last year I scattered a few different packets of wild flower mixes of unspecified particularities over our small landscapy gardens out in front of the house, where some narcissus and wild iris (the latter getting rare, I hear) survive, but not much else (the monkeys dug up and ate the lily bulbs), and everything competes with the bamboo. A couple of tiny wild flower plants are there this year in one area, but over in the other area something really caught on, and found a niche. Bushy low foliage it had, with a tiny red spot at the feathery leaf tips, maybe 40 cm high, spreading to maybe a meter in width so far, then last month it began putting out long thin stalks that developed pointy new tips on them, like little pale-green witches' hats.

Then the little hats began to change to tan, then gold shone through, then one of them began to split at the bottom and halfway up, and I could see there was a vivid orange-gold something in there; it stayed that way for days, until at last I could stand it no longer and gave a tug on the pointy tip of the "hat," which slid off in a silken way to reveal a tucked-up, thin-petaled, gold-orange flower, which the next morning opened fully into brightness, then closed when evening came. I had no idea what it was. Something from the cosmos family?

It seemed familiar though, so I image-googled "flowers that close at night" and there it was, right up top! It was a California poppy! A flower I had first beheld at sunset nearly 40 years ago on the upper meadows of Big Sur, a place I visited many times while living in Berkeley...

And here was my colorful old friend come to thrive in my garden on the other side of the world, shouting out dozens of that same orange hello.

KAKISHIBU

Sogyu came by late Friday afternoon with the kakishibu we ordered-- enough intensified persimmon peel juice to treat the whole deck, two coats. Yesterday, therefore, after two cloudy but rainless days and one sunny morning had dried out the deck real well, I started kakishibuing. (Feel free to use this newly coined verb, which I hereby donate to the public domain.)

Kakishibu has an interesting fragrance-- an organic smell, sort of astringent; not like you'd want to drink it, but not that sensibly toxic volatile smell of the standard wood treatment stuff. Brushing on kakishibu is like painting with thin red wine. It's reddish and watery on the brush, but not deadly at all; no need to wear gloves to protect your skin, safety goggles to protect your eyes, mask to preserve your general existence, no hazmat suit for optimal protection from unspecified mutational possibilities.

It's safe for kids to later run around on barefoot and basically will not kill you, now or unto seven generations. There is no need for skull and crossbones on the container, or instructions on what to do if you should get it on your person, in your eyes or ingest it, god forbid, no big red letters saying BE SURE TO KEEP IT OFF YOUR SKIN KEEP IT AWAY FROM YOU AND ANY OTHER LIVING THING, DO NOT BREATHE THE FUMES OMIGOD WHAT IS THAT... Kakishibu doesn't beget horror movie thoughts or smell like a chemical weapons factory when you're finished treating the house you have to live in afterwards. Whatever sour-winish smell there is is gone quickly.

The first coat makes the wood a bit darker, the second that much darker and so on till you reach the desired shade, but it even looks organic somehow, and on lighter wood quite interesting, colorwise. It doesn't do anything unnatural and you could eat off of it if you were so minded-- had no plates, real simple living, whatever. It came in three two-liter recycled PET bottles Sogyu kindly sold us from out of his major stash of the stuff he gets from an old Kyoto kakishibu store he frequents.

I recommend kakishibu for treating any wood you need treated. It may be about double the cost of deadly poison, but it has considerable advantages, many beyond price, such as extended longevity of home, self and family. Nice to stay around, see your kids grow up normally and so on.

Kakishibu serves way beyond the small print.

WINGS OF BEAUTY

Scattered over the mountains - the green parts and the stony parts, with a little cap of snow at the top - here and there glow puffs of pinkish-white where a cherry tree has somehow managed to be. How did each of them come to brighten there, like slow fireworks with those shimmery petals, amidst the solid shades of cedar, hinoki, oak, beech-- all the other stolidly green, right-at-home trees?

Single cherry seeds must have been dropped in each of those places way up there, in those most difficult of locations, by animals or birds, or by rainstreams flowing down from a parent tree above, now long gone. Perhaps that's why there are never two cherry trees together; they are scattered singly across these mountainsides, those little bursts of pink confetti, at least for this moment-- roundish wisps of brightness up there, flickering now in the wind, amid the overall somberness of the forest.

In the midst of one mountainside there is something white, not pink - as alone as any cherry tree, but not roundish like a cherry - it is tall and pointed... My handy binoculars tell me it is a tulip tree up there in full bloom, limbs raised high as though all the world should see its beauty-- perhaps indeed secretly stirring beauty everywhere, as the beat of a butterfly's wing begins a breeze.

The road below us is lined with cherry trees, as is the main road up through the village, that at this time of day are lit from behind us by the setting sun as the lake below turns dark sapphire in the background, white sails in the darkling air above the blossoming trees. All that beauty, like all the finest beauty - like the cherry blossoms themselves - lasts but a moment; then the sun fades behind the mountains, and that much splendor is nowhere but in ourselves.

HIGH NOON

Well maybe not exactly high noon, but pretty near - near enough for the purpose of this tale I'm about to relate. Gimme a whiskey. Sogyu was due at noon. Sogyu was Gary Cooper-- cool and taciturn, Japanese gardening and landscaping expert. It was high noon, or pretty near, when he came from Kyoto town, out the dusty road to the mountain ranch. It was time. I went out to meet him.

In the holster at my side I was wearing my trusty Gracemaker. And what a tool it was, signed by the maker Wakajishi, the clippers that won the East, or at least my part of it. Popular in fast-draw gardening circles hereabouts, and bonsai too. A name to reckon with in these parts. Not for the mountain country those imitations of quality you see all over the place, sometimes with aluminum blades even, dadblast it; no, this was quality iron, forged in the ancient Japanese way swords were forged, from select steel, with care. Sure it cost more - a lot more - but it's worth every yen when your lifestyle is on the line. And man is it a beauty to use-- cuts like a bonsai master's dream, sharpens like it was up front in the Seven Samurai.

I was wearing my old Gracemaker as I say in the holster on my gardening belt when I stepped outside to meet Sogyu, who had stopped by to talk about some work, when something caught his eye and he suddenly went silent like Gary Cooper; he was looking at the holster on my hip. "Ahh, I see you have the fine clippers..." Yes I said, showing my quick draw. He examined the well-maintained artistry; there was a kind of Samurai/High Noon background music playing up in the sky somewhere.

We talked our talk, then Sogyu went on his way down the mountain road; I turned and set off into the garden. Getting a bit wild; it needed taming.

soaring hawk

in the sky below -

paddies flooded

ONIONS KNOW ALL ABOUT IT

What with all this global freezing going on, here we are in mid-April building a fire in the woodstove to keep from shivering even with a sweater on, I bet this is what happened to the dinosaurs or maybe it swung the other way and got hot; on the other hand there might have been a meteor or it could even have been some kind of major dinosaur flu; whatever happened, the dinosaurs didn't have a chance, except the ones who could fly...

Onions are survivors too; they know all about this stuff. Even though rooted, they adapt on the fly. Which is why all my onions are now prematurely (from my point of view) sending up flower stalks, because they have been paying attention to the weather patterns a la their how many eons of experience and they're no fools, so our diet will be heavy on premature onions for the next few weeks, apart from the monkeys' cut.

As for us neodinosaurs - enraptured with sapience as we are - the upper ones talk a lot about global warming, bird flu and terrorism to keep the lower ones distracted, but the true problem with our modern interregnum is lack of Reality. Not the Action! Cut! reality as portrayed by the upper ones on Faux News or "reality" tv, or by the gladiators of today, action-packed movies and cage fighting - which make the everyday boring in the same way fast food makes true nutrition boring - but capital-R Reality, of the kind that love is and children are, that trees are, that play is. Birth and Life, Joy and Sorrow, Self and Death, that kind of thing. The actual stuff.

It takes a kind of unlearning, an undesiring, to get back to where we were when we first got here, to where we can once more look around and see what is truly there and what life time is, regain the mental status that flies in the face of everything disney, vegas, mcdonalds, survivor et al. stand for, in their respective variations on the Glitzy Premise: that we must suspend common sense in order to find joy and be nourished, that we must step aside and stop looking, stop being like little children, stop noticing the rips in the fabric, the man behind the curtain, instead have a big glass of coke and some fries, buy a ticket, make our bet, settle back on the couch to watch Transformer 42 so that when it's over we'll need more of the same, so that never having won, we'll have nothing to lose by the time whatever's coming comes, so who cares...

Next autumn I'm planting seeds, not sets. If onions can learn that much, so can I.

ALL NATURAL

If you look at it like the back of a cereal box, the countryside is all natural, contains no trans fat, filler, artificial color, flavor or preservatives, is high in fiber and fully organic. A shocking difference compared to the urban cereal box.

In fact we don't really use those concepts out here; the words sound kind of funny in these surrounds, as we idle here in the shade of a thousand-year-old tree on the edge of a mountain glade listening to the stream's part of the conversation and thinking: high fiber? Bizarre. Trans fat-- what for? Triglycerides? Get out.

Even the house we live in is organic and high fiber, comprising mostly wood, and low in saturated fats. The only sugar we have is in the strawberries from the garden, the cherries, persimmons, apples, tangerines, wild grapes, raspberries and blueberries (all made with real fruit, btw, with no artificial colors or flavors; hard to believe in this day and age). It's a long list, all the stuff that grows out here (you just pick them off the plants), as compared to urbanity, which has no such list, but where cliffsides of cans, bottles, boxes and bags say the contents are made using, for example, "real fruit," which logically must mean something other than real fruit, since that would be called Fruit. Is there another kind? How did we get here? If this keeps up, we won't even be able to trust Wall Street.

Basically there's no need for those bizarre concepts out here, because out here we get the real deal. So no, there's no trans fat in the mountain stream, and yes the forest is high in fiber, the wild animals are unsalted, the fish are fully organic (unlike some city streams), there's no fast life here necessitating dietary and fiber info on the backs of boxes and sides of cans, no fast food (whatdidIjusteat?), none of the autoimposed nutritional dangers so common in the unfortunately less countrified regions where fiber is rare, concrete is big, asphalt is a fave and "totally organic" - whatever that might mean in those regions - if you can afford it, you have to buy it in a special supermarket, for a Price, whereas it's pretty much free out in the country and right at hand, since this is where it actually grows-- in fact those free sansai are just coming up now, the fukinoto, the taranome, the warabi, the koshiabura, all salt-free by the way, with zero trans fat, high in fiber, 100% organic and money free too...

Now if you'll excuse us while we take a slow walk around the mountainside among the sunbeams and harvest some of those natural goodies, then sit under the old tree by the stream and savor our wealth, join the big conversation...

WHERE LIGHT PLAYS

That bit of a haiku I posted yesterday was prompted when I stepped out the door onto the deck in the morning on my way to some work in the garden and was surprised at how bright it was out there, the light itself was different, until I looked around and saw that two of the paddies across the road had been flooded since yesterday.

Like the paddies downmountain, they were now as blue as the morning sky and as bright, and as I set to planting ginger I thought about how every year around this time the whole mountainside is a mirror that remains at max brightness for a good while after all the paddies are flooded and the whole mountainside is sky, even at night when it fills with starlight, until the rice is planted and the light of the mountainsky diminishes day by day, week by week as the rice stalks grow and replace light with life, the whole mountainside changing in shade toward imperial jade at the pace of a rice plant's growth, the ambient light changing as well all along the way of the process, light thus traveling at vegetable speed, which is quite a switch, stirring interesting yet calming perturbations in the spirit, itself a matter of light that takes much of its nourishment from beauty and transition.

The habituated mind as well is reminded as it steps out onto the deck blithely thinking that all is just as it was, and so perforce comes to do its job and realize reality, which is good, by and large, especially out in the countryside, where light plays... and grows...

One by one

the paddies fill with water -

sky all over the ground

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SIMPLE THINGS

One of the deeper powers of the Japanese people is their undying love of simple things. They come from a long and concentrated past, uncolonized, and have willingly adopted all the diversions and distractions that the modern world has to offer, from trains, cars and planes to movies, tv, fast food, computers - it's a long list - and they enjoy and use it all, even improve on much of it, but at the core they're still much the way they were before all that came along.

I saw a good example of this the other morning when Echo and I joined the crowds going up the cherry blossom-lined mountain road not far from our house, to the cherry-inundated ski ropeway area where locals throng during cherry season to picnic and view the Lake, visit the stalls at the local product hall, buy some local foods and wines, pickles, sake, senbei, shochu, sit around on the red cloth-covered platforms and enjoy the events, some singers, some taiko drummers and other performances out in the open air.

All are just getting into enjoying their picnic bento when the MC announces that the mochi-making will now begin and whhhooooosssshhh: instantly all the platforms are empty and there is a steadily growing crowd of folks of every age gathered around the mochi-making place to watch an event that everybody there has seen dozens, hundreds, thousands of times (Echo is up there too watching, but for me a few dozen viewings is pretty much enough): someone plops a hefty hunk of hot glutinous rice into a big wooden or stone mortar and someone else pounds it with a big wooden hammer as the first someone, after each hammerstrike, with wet hands turns the blob of increasingly sticky rice, the crowd yelling at each turning of the gooey glob before each descent of the hammer Yoisho -- Yoisho -- even the tiny kids join in, yelling at the top of their lungs; they never tire of this, even the teenagers take part, then when at last the mochi is done, at the MC's announcement that they will now hand out the finished product, each person to receive two small portions of mochi, they all right away get in a line that snakes down the mountain and wait for up to 20 minutes to get their mochi, no problem, this is all fun, all joy, this timeless tradition, this symbol of strength and unity from way before any of the lives here, it means much more than the little it appears to be, all somehow deeply and importantly spiritual, but above all, as simple as you can get.

The Japanese love this kind of thing and always will; the grandmas love it, the new mothers love it, the farmers love it, the city folks love it, the young punks love it, the little kids love it, the babies love it, even the cynics love it, it resonates in all their hearts, this simple kind of thing, like the bon-odori dancing and the omikoshi carrying, the many societal embraces that the members take deep comfort in, because in all simple things, beyond the deceptive mask there are profound reaches, umbilicals of time and existence.

To those who by custom can appreciate that much dimension, it's all so simple, really...