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.