Seven-Colored Sky.

Or Nanaironosora, which is where we've been the past three weeks (without a reliable internet connection, which is why this post is coming now).

First though, our last week in Obuse was full of spoils, one of which was being treated to a night at the Masuichi Kyakuden, which is a gorgeous inn built by the same family
that has the brewery. Extremely luxurious. We were able to stick around for Obusession, a monthly salon/party wherein a particularly influential person in the
arenas of agriculture, architecture, urban planning, etc. gives a talk and then everyone goes to Honten (one of the three restaurants within the Obuse-do company) to drink lots of sake & eat endless platters of amazing food.
That night reinforced to me that Obuse is a unique place - there is a really interesting confluence of people and history and reinvention and food and celebration happening there. Despite my concerns/criticisms about some of the agricultural practices in that area, I really enjoyed being there and would make it a point to visit again, maybe to run in the half-marathon - yet another wildly successful event started by Sarah.

Since leaving Obuse, we've been in the village of Iiwate (Fukushima Prefecture) with the Murakami family. They are a true farming family, growing all of their vegetables and rice (brown, black and mochi), establishing orchards, and harvesting bamboo and other mountain vegetables from the woods around their property. Next door to their house they have a macrobiotic cafe, which also functions as the family kitchen and gathering space.
Shimpei-san is a brilliant farmer who spent many years doing organic farming development work in Bangladesh, India, and Thailand. His wife, Katsue-san, runs the cafe (by reservation only, which works really well for them in that they know exactly how much food/energy they need to expend on the cafe in a given week) and the girls, Mi-chan (5) and Sora-chan (2), basically spend their time being ridiculously cute and entertaining.

We were there at one of the busiest times due to the fact that they can get a frost as late as May 20th followed by the rains in mid-June, so some pretty intensive field work needs to happen in a relatively short window. Calder and I were particularly happy to be working in the rice fields, which are partly managed by Aigamo ducks. A few weeks after transplanting, when the seedlings were established enough, we fenced the paddies and released 5 ducks into each field. They stay there the whole growing season, eating weeds and bugs, fertilizing, and paddling away (which muddies the water, further preventing weed seeds from being germinated).
It's a brilliant system - the ducks get to be ducks, the year's rice grows, and the humans are freed up to do other work, which in our case was the preparing of beds (no machine tilling) and planting of corn, tomatoes, eggplants, summer and winter squashes, and greens; prep work in the cafe; harvesting and processing bamboo; and making miso paste.

Today we made it back down to Kansai and will get a flight to Vienna tomorrow night. We are due at a farm in the Czech Republic this Saturday. The past three months here have been a beautiful blink - I already feel a bit anxious to return.

A is for A-Bomb

We're commuters.
Land-rovering commuters. Through-the-sprawl- of Nagano- to- get- to- the- farm- commuters.
I dread it.

Sarah has taken on so many projects in this area that much of the work is spread thin. She and her husband Joe (A total character - the sort who asks a question and then in one long breath offers multiple choice answers; the sort who finds a use for everything, including rancid pretzels which did you know could be crushed up and hidden in muffins they turned out a little salty but on a hot day like this you need some extra salt i learned that on my first paid job when i was a youngster baling hay and the grandma would give us her homemade pickles - and he won't be offended when you decline the rancid pretzel muffins, but he will proceed to offer them to you; the sort who breaks out into song - English, Japanese, French, German - when he's run out of things to say, in a shockingly lovely tenor. The dude is from Fargo.) are sort of scrambling to keep up it seems - with a baby on the way no less. So much of the way they function is contrary to the way Calder and I function - it's been a bit challenging.

The orchards here are full-on chemical. I've been trying to understand the larger history of agriculture in Japan (which if nothing else, softens what tends to be a knee-jerk reaction on my part) and, as with most things here, it can be described as post-war and paradoxical.

It probably goes without saying that land and farming reforms were embraced in earnest after the war. Japan was decimated and starving, their agricultural production cut by more than half by the time America set about ushering them into western-style capitalism as well as what was becoming western-style agriculture.

What that meant for the villages around here was a switch from mulberry orchards (silkworms) managed traditionally to apple orchards managed with surplus military chemicals. Another depressing change was the clearing of large swaths of native forest to plant cedar trees - the destruction from the war called for a fast-growing source of timber. Those cedars suck up more water than the native forest, so rice fields in the valley suffered, as did relations between neighbors over water usage.

The plan here is to eventually farm without chemical pesticides, but I'm fairly sure that it will take a stable younger generation of farmers to do so. It's not easy to convince 80-year old villagers to change the way they've been farming for 60+ years. For now, the work of saving the old chestnut and apple orchards from becoming apartment complexes - which is what Sarah has been doing - seems to be the priority. It has to start somewhere.