Shaking off winter introversion

A tiny corner of Japan awakes, gets to work

Hand cleared, tilled, manured, and flooded. All by really old people.

Spring in Japan is distinct. Culinarily, it’s a time of funny bamboo and bean shoots, unknown mountain foliage, and not-yet-fattened-up fish finding their ways to our dinner plates.

It’s also an unmistakable time of reanimation for people in this small valley surrounding Frog’s Glen. Months of self-imposed hibernation, of barely seeing the neighbors, are over. And for the farmers here, plenty of physical work awaits.

Within a space of a week, seventy- and eighty-year-olds, stiff and stooped, emerge from deep inside their houses and suddenly are everywhere, reawakening the land we saw them put to bed this past autumn.

First, they pulverize dead brown scrabble as well as new, thick green weeds on their croplands using gasoline-powered, hand-held whirring disc saws. These aren’t weed whackers, they are Terminators and everyone owns at least one. All through the valley we can hear the roar of the machines as hectares of growth are reduced almost to slush. I’d say an average size crop space takes an old dude almost a day to pulverize.

When a paddy or cropland is done, it’s flat as a parking lot with only soil and toppled weeds and grass pulp lying felled on the surface.

Next come the tractors and soil cultivators. Shibata-san, the heavy machinery renter guy, is busy this time of year running his contraptions from farm to farm for day leases.

The old men and women gun the machines’ motors and force iron and steel blades through their caked, hard earth, breaking up and turning the soil. All the previously pulverized weeds get tilled right back into the ground from where they came. One farmer said to me, “Every leaf. Every stem. It’s all re-used—the land can’t afford to lose any natural carbon or nitrogen.”

Cow manure—mysteriously odorless, how so very Japanese—is spread liberally to give the soil that extra tszuj. The land parcels that will become rice paddies this year are flooded to stew the water, soil, and odorless poo for a few weeks. Depending on rainfall, the farmers will reflood if necessary to keep the pools of water about a foot deep.

Other crop lands, meant for pumpkins, onions, beans, melons, corn, and other conventionally grown crops, basically slow bake under the warming sun waiting for planting day.

The overall effect for our small valley is activity! And it’s welcome to see.

Mini trucks buzz back and forth through the narrow crop access roads, everywhere we can hear the gunning of machinery, and conversations among neighbors start back up from (presumably) where they left off last autumn before the cold set in.

Hiroe Kaji is a widow who lives about 300 meters from us a bit higher up in the hills. In the winter, when foliage is dropped, I can just make out a corner of her four-room broken down wooden house hiding in the tree line. I’d say she is at least 80, and amazingly she works her field and crops alone.

I say good morning and good night to Kaji-san each day as I see her pass by our place to work on her crops. She has a wide, gold-capped smile, and gives a small wave of her hand and a deep bow to return greetings. Her face is coarsely wrinkled and dark brown, I guess perma-tanned, from a generation of outdoor work.

Kaji-san starts her springs by growing melons and lima beans, and then progresses to pumpkins and a variety of potatoes and other starch roots for the rest of the season. I can’t imagine her plots of land are big enough for her to be selling her crops for income. Maybe she’s growing for herself and some friends and family members, while covering her daily living costs with national pension and welfare payouts.

I called out to Morioka-san who owns and works the field just below Kaji-san’s. “It seems farmers are planting their rice shoots earlier this year. Global warming or some such thing?” He said last year was a bit of a bust, planted too late, so the cooperative agreed that farmers should try for April dates this year. I think most people try to follow the “guidance” the local JA co-ops offer.

After a few more words, I continued on my dog walk with Tera. Morioka-san called out behind us, waving some sort of leaflet. “I don’t know if you’re interested, but this year I’ve been assigned by the valley to distribute the co-op’s monthly newsletter to everyone,” he said. “Do you want this sort of thing or should I just not bother you with this…I see you don’t farm.” I asked him to continue sharing with us—I like looking at the ads for things like bug-proof clothing, moth killers, and enhanced farmer pension payouts.

“These are my peeps,” I joke to Toru. “I need to understand them.” Toru rolls his eyes.

Ditto. No wonder so many are stooped.

Yesterday I had a long conversation with the Yamauchi family. Long-time Frog’s Glen readers will remember that over a year ago I told you about an old man who grows daikon across the lane from us and continued to offload gifts of his veggies. He had a massive stroke last June and we haven’t seen him since.

This Yamauchi family is actually Daikon Guy’s son, Naoya, who is 47 and the spitting image of his old man. Yesterday Naoya and his wife and their junior-high-school-age boy were teaming up to clear the old man’s fallow plot.

“I hope it won’t be a burden, but tomorrow morning we will be burning these piles here,” said mother Kayoko to me. The Yamauchis had cut and gathered three huge piles of basically what looks like grey hay onto the land and would need to destroy the old grass before restoring the space to farming.

“How’s grandfather,” I asked. “Is he still in intensive care?”

Naoya explained that his dad is now out of hospital but is in an assisted living home. He won’t be returning to our valley as his wife, the frail grandmother, isn’t capable of caring for him. Seems I won’t be seeing our kindly daikon farmer again.

Kayoko and the boy laid down their large weed rakes and came to the plot’s fence to speak with me. They left dad Naoya to rake alone. It looked exhausting.

I laughed and called out to him, “Woah. Better you than me. I literally cannot do work like this. I refuse.” He grimace-smiled with an expression of “Thanks for that, pal,” and kept raking alone.

The boy has just made his school’s rugby squad and was proudly wearing a shirt emblazoned with the team name. The kid is about 80 pounds, so I wonder if he is going to be okay. Out of the blue he asked to meet my dog, which I had never mentioned. “Could you please bring out your dog, Suzuki-san,” he asked. “Terashima-kun,” I corrected him.

“Ah, sorry. Terashima-kun.”

I called the whippet out of the house and the dog-loving boy was delighted. Tera is seriously shy of strangers and had no clue what the fuss was all about. He took a giant crap on our lane, shivering in fear of the cooing boy.

I asked Naoya and Kayoko how grass is burned here in this valley. “I see it all the time. Do you farmers just light it or do you use some sort of accelerant like maybe gasoline?” They answered immediately almost in unison, no, no, never an accelerant. You just light the grass and it all goes up fine, said Naoya.

They took the opportunity to poke a jab at Mrs. Hatoyama, the lady who owns the abutting crop. “She’s definitely using weed killers on her land—nothing clears growth that perfectly and for so long without it,” said Kayoko. “We really don’t approve and would never use such stuff. It makes us nervous she’s doing that right next to our land,” added Naoya quietly.

The Yamauchis will be planting melon and watermelon first according to dad. I don’t care what they plant; I’m just glad to see work being done—activity coming back—to the land across our lane.

I hadn’t noticed but Kayoko had momentarily disappeared to go back to grandma’s place for something. She suddenly reappeared with a shopping bag full of at least five pounds of freshly picked lima beans as a gift to us. Toru loves these things, which he roasts in skin as a before-meal appetizer or mid-day snack. The piping hot beans are peeled out from the pods, and one-by-one dabbed just slightly into a pile of salt. With a cold glass of sake, basically nothing beats this fresh snack.

While she’s the daughter in law, clearly Kayoko takes after the eldest Yamauchi, intuitively carting around bags of freshly grown produce while pleading, “It will all get thrown out otherwise. There’s too much. I won’t take no for an answer.”

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Several weeks ago when the spring buzz was just beginning, Toru and I had another memorable interaction. The police stopped in.

We were in the garden making a wooden compost bin. I was holding planks in place while Toru marked, drilled, and screwed the frame and sides in tight. I looked over and past his shoulder at one point and saw a single cop slowly driving our lane on a small white and blue police scooter. We never see police here, and the officer was in full uniform.

I smiled at the cop and whispered to Toru, “Oh, ummm. The cops are here.” Toru ignored me and continued to construct with his electric drill.

“I SAID hold the plank STRAIGHT.” He was berating me.

The police man nodded at me from just outside our fence and raised his eyebrows as if to say, “Okay if I stop by and have a word?” I smiled and bowed a non-verbal “Of course!”

The cop was quite good looking. Maybe late twenties, fit, with a friendly and cheerful face. (Yup, I started to flirt, but I try to reassure myself that it was entirely unconscious.)

“I’m Officer Yano,” he said. “You are the Tokyo people I presume?”

Yes, I chirped (embarrasingly). Toru kept working, largely ignoring the fact that the fuzz was standing right here with us in our garden. “I said STRAIGHT! YOU CALL THAT STRAIGHT?!”

The policeman gently chuckled and said he just needed us to fill out a basic questionnaire. “You know, if anything happens. Where we can contact you. Who lives here. Etcetera.”

It’s all quite common in Japan to get one of these visits. Several times when I’ve moved into a new place in Tokyo, even as a renter, a cop showed up to introduce himself, to let me know where the nearest police box is, and to gather basic contact details. I am always happy to help.

Toru, not so much. He dropped his electric drill and without really even greeting the policeman, grabbed the clipboard from me and said, “It would be faster if I fill this out.” He quickly scribbled our names, ages, and Tokyo addresses.

Turns out the cop already knew quite a bit about us, and it seems was just finding the right time to say hi rather than drop a questionnaire in our mailbox for us to send in later without a face to face.

American readers here might find all this quite 1950s and quaint. The local cop stops in, has a chit chat, and is happily on his way after letting a new resident know he can be called on any time. The police man is cheery and exceedingly polite.

Anyway, this is what public/police interaction is like in Japan. Hands on, and I couldn’t think of a better time of year for it to occur than the spring as we all shake off the introversion of the past many months.