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.