- Last week it snowed in Tokyo, but Sunday was hot and sunny here, only to get quite chilly as the sun went behind the mountains at 4:00.
- The white police bikes were out. They like to do their speed-trapping in nice weather – you never see them when it’s raining. I suppose they have a monthly quota of fines to get in.
- Swallows have showed up in the village just down the road, but for some reason they never make it the extra few metres of altitude up to our house. We’ve certainly got enough insects for them to eat, but perhaps they’re not the right kind?
- Bamboo shoots coming up – ¥500 in the supermarkets, but in the ¥100 stand you could buy a big one for, yes, a hundred yen. Freshly dug bamboo shoots are a treat, with a special flavour that is soon lost. The trick is to boil them as soon as possible; I suppose it stops the natural conversion of sugars to starch or something.
- Is this kamemushi year? The smelly insects are turning up everywhere.
- Saw my first snake of the year – sunning itself on a grassy bank. Ten minutes later it was back in the same place, so it must have been a special spot.
- Did a bit of tree pruning and weed slashing. Nothing compared with the work coming up in a month or two.
- Min temp 2°C, max 21°C
Farmlog 26th April 2010 1 June, 2010
Farmlog 19th April 2010
(A major effort here to catch up on a month’s missed posts, while I can still find the envelopes with notes on the back…)
This time of year can be like a corner of paradise outside the city, and Sunday was a perfect sunny day with flowers coming out everywhere. People are getting worried about invasions of alien plant species, but the variety of plant life out in Gifu always surprises me. I’m not a botanist, so I don’t know the names of them all, but keep finding something I haven’t noticed before.
It’s “sansai” time – wild edible shoots and leaves coming up everywhere, and people coming out from the cities to pick them. There doesn’t seem to be much concept of private property among these peole and they quite casually walk into your garden and pick what they can find – sometimes even if you’re sitting outside the house watching! T. can get a bit ratty at this time of year…
On our way back to Nagoya on Monday the frogs’ evening chorus was already starting up in newly-flooded rice paddies by the side of the road.
Min temp 1°C, max 19°C
Daihachi Ryodan – really 30 years? 14 May, 2010
第8旅団 Daihachi Ryodan. When I first met these guys it was a band playing on a street corner in Nagoya in 1980: wild-looking people playing some kind of one-chord dirge with atonal guitar, sort of rock beat and incomprehensible off-key lyrics. I knew immediately that this was the band I wanted to play in…
Thirty years on, (although there was a 10 year break in the middle) we now use three or four chords – sometimes more – and like to think we’ve improved in various other ways, but basically it’s still the same band. Stardom is still just round the corner, but meanwhile we’re plugging away playing mostly original stuff with somewhat odd arrangements. I like to call it “latin-jazz-rock-reggae-psychedelic-enka-punk” but who cares?
If you’re in Nagoya on Sunday 16th May, come and check us out at Tokuzo!
Takemi Zakura 30 April, 2010
The "Takemi Zakura"
The mountains of Japan are full of wild cherry trees, at least where they haven’t been replanted for timber. Most of the year they’re hidden away, but in April suddenly there’s blossom everywhere – some beautiful trees you had no idea of.
One such is just above the entrance to a tunnel on the way back to Nagoya from our country house – a big old cherry that has its moment of glory for a week or two every year. We thought it was our private discovery but a couple of years ago some local friends cleared the trees from the area around it, built some stairs, seats, railings etc and made it into a little park, with an annual hanami party, which we went to a couple of weeks ago.
the teahouse is gone...
Apparently this isn’t a wild cherry after all – it has some history. Before that tunnel was built the road used to wind through a pass over some hills above it, right past that tree. There used to be a tea house at the pass, and the cherry was planted outside. It’s now some 300 years old, and the tea house is long gone, but, with a little treatment from a tree doctor, now looks set for a good few years more. From that spot, if it’s a clear day, you can get a beautiful view of Mount Ontake, the holy mountain, so a local politician gave the tree the name Takemi Zakura “mount-viewing cherry” – fair enough, though most people had been calling it the cherry on the pass or something like that…
Check the prices.
It’s still a fairly quiet local type of event, but elsewhere in Gifu there are some famous sakura that attract hundreds of visitors, so maybe ours will be one of those some day. Meanwhile they sell beer and yakitori at more or less cost price just so people will come. Weather was less than perfect this year, but on a sunny day it’s a very nice way to spend an afternoon or evening.
Farmlog 12th April 2010 28 April, 2010
On our way out of town on Sunday, listening to the radio – this time a discussion of Japanese food. No, not some exquisitely refined product of Kyoto culture, nor the raw contents of a trawler net off Madagascar… but the kind of thing most Japanese eat most of the time: teishoku, yakitori, okonomiyaki… Which sauce is best with pork cutlet, whether you get free raw cabbage with it or not… there are big regional variations here, and a general East/West split, with the dividing line coming right through us, in Nagoya. It’s a bit as if the fish and chips in Blackpool and Brighton were made differently. (Maybe they are.) Japanese Low Cuisine is not bad at all in fact. Another thing that came up was the different attitudes of men and women to eating out. Apparently women want something quite different from the everyday – an Exotic Experience with unexpected flavours, decor and bgm, while men are more looking for an extension of their normal mealtime – just a bit more delicious than usual maybe. This would certainly account for why our South-east Asian restaurant has more female customers. It’s OK, but sometimes they seem to want a place to talk more than anything else; men order more food and drink in a shorter time, which makes better business sense, so maybe we need to be a bit less exotic…
On the way back to Nagoya we stopped off at a Brazilian shop in Kani to buy some beef. Early in the 20th century there was a lot of Japanese emmigration to South America, especially to Brazil and Peru, and when Japan’s economy took off in the 80’s the only “guest workers” allowed in in any numbers were those who could show some Japanese ancestry, so a lot of second and third generation Japanese-Brazilians arrived to work mostly in factories – the usual gastarbeiter sort of deal. Kani city has one of the biggest Brazilian populations in the country, and though the way things are now a lot have decided they’d be better off back in Brazil there are still a lot of shops run mostly by and for Brazilian immigrants. We drop in sometimes because for some reason the beef is cheaper and better than in the Japanese supermarkets – maybe they’ve found a crack in space-time that links back to Brazil somewhere. They seem amused that I don’t speak Portuguese despite my European appearance and we have to use Japanese as our lingua franca. Fair enough – this is Japan after all.
And what about the farm?
OK min. temp. 1°C, max 19°C
Beef Wars 9 April, 2010
In the paper and on the radio yesterday, now on TV today: the “beef bowl” chain Yoshinoya have cut their main standard bowl from ¥380 to ¥270 for a limited period, and the two other big chains, Matsuya and Sukiya, are taking it down to ¥250. ( All these “something-ya”… “ya” means “shop”, also in Nagoya. ) Cooked beef on rice is qite tasty really, much better than a Mac in my humble opinion, and was already quite cheap anyway.
Yoshinoya has been around for years – I would drop in sometimes after drinking beer till 3:00 back in the days… (They’re open all night.) The other two are newer, but I wonder if there’ll be a limit on how low prices can go around here?
We’ve got deflation, folks.
Farmlog 4th April 2010 7 April, 2010
- This time the sakura were out in force. Every year it’s a surprise to see just how many cherry trees there are hiding around the country – both in gardens and growing wild in the mountains – waiting for their few days of glory. Everywhere you look it’s sakura, sakura, most of them in full bloom!
- We stopped off in our usual supermarket and picked up a bottle of their house wine – a white made from the Chardonnay grape (imported juice I think) so might not be too bad, though you can get a fair Chilean white for the same price of ¥498. It turned out to be awful. Just not nice to drink at all. Even at this low price you can do much better with a something from Chile, Spain or Italy. I’m amazed they expect people to buy that stuff.
- Spent an hour or so taking down the barbed wire round the chilli field. It wasn’t doing any good at all – just getting in my way, and tangling up in the net that turned out to be the only thing that would keep the deer out.
- On the way back to Nagoya we took a different route, and saw even more sakura…
- Coming into Nagoya at dusk, a lone bat flying around a crossroads. In the summer there’ll be lots of them – small creatures about the size of sparrows, picking up the insects drawn to the traffic lights.
Min temp -2°C. max 15°C
Riverbanks seem to be a popular place to plant cherries.
Farmlog 28th March 2010 6 April, 2010
- The cherry blossom got off to an early start, but the last couple of weeks of chill slowed it right down and only now are trees starting to show themselves here and there.
- A youngish couple we passed on our way out of Nagoya were obviously Walking. Not just enjoying a stroll, but striding along purposefully, elbows out, their whole bodies radiating “I am Walking”… Apparently you can take “walking” lessons in order to get the full health benefits or something. Later on we passed a whole crowd of mostly middle-aged people doing the same thing. It must have been a special Walking Day.
- Spring means gardening and the shopping centre where we usually stop off on the way was piled with bags of potting compost, fertiliser, chicken manure, lime… Actually it’s time I sowed the chilli seeds to get some seedlings ready to plant in May or June.
- The weather forecasts are quite often right these days! Sunday started warm, but as we were doing our shopping it clouded over, a cold wind got up and shortly after it started to rain – just as predicted.
- We left buying “negi” (leeks) to the “¥100 stand” down the road, but there weren’t any… Luckily the lady who runs it had some in her field, so we went with her to dig a few up. The local deer had been in before us that morning and got a lot of the green part, but we still got a bundle of stalks, which turned out to be very good. I don’t think the deer had been such a problem there until recently (they’ve been plagueing us for years) so I think she’d better fix that high net that should have been keeping them out.
- On Monday it snowed.
Min temp -2.5°C, max 16.5°C
Queuing for Doughnuts 4 April, 2010
If you live in the US you presumably know all about Krispy Kreme doughnuts, but here in Japan they’re an exotic import, like sushi over there perhaps. I’ve never tried one but apparently it’s the crispy sugar glaze over the soft doughnut inside that does it. When KK opened a shop in Tokyo they had some 500 people queued up for 5 hours on the opening day to be among the first to sample this delicacy, so when the first Nagoya branch opened the other week they were well prepared for something almost as big here (Nagoya is about a fifth the size of Tokyo).
As it turned out, they had some 900 people waiting for eight hours for their first taste of a Krispy Kreme Doughnut.
Nagoyans like to queue apparently.
Spring
This is a weeping cherry on the big crossroads near us, about two weeks ago, already in full bloom. It was a beautiful day, but freezing cold actually with a fierce wind blowing round the buildings. The much-heralded early blooming of the “proper” cherries – the “somei yoshino” – was stopped in its tracks by a cold wave that at last seems to be coming to an end and finally the cherries in the park down the road are completely out. I expect it was full of revellers enjoying hana-mi, but we had to work. Maybe we’ll take a look on Monday if it’s not raining…
Hanami is a sort of Rite of Spring I suppose, and can be a Bacchanale at times. There are people who claim flower-viewing should be accompanied with writing haiku and sipping green tea or something but I have no problem with people getting paralytic under cherry blossom…
asazuke 