asazuke

Life in Japan, food, music, whatever…

New Year at the farm 19 January, 2010

Filed under: countryside,customs — johnraff @ 2:23 pm
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The weather forecast said a cold front was on its way and sure enough just after midday on the outskirts of town the snow started sprinkling down. We were on our way out to Gifu so that didn’t bode too well for conditions further on, but we had decided to spend a couple of days out at “the farm” for the new year so pressed on… Of course by the time we’d got halfway the road was getting slippy and there was nothing for it but to put those cursed chains on the front tyres. Put on the brakes to pull into a parking area and the car just kept going… that’s how close to the edge things had been. These new-fangled plastic tyre chains are supposed to be easy to put on, but after half an hour of scrabbling about in the freezing slush I still hadn’t got the hook thing at the back properly attached – my fingers had no feeling and it was getting dark and things were looking somewhat hopeless… Finally a friendly passerby gave us a hand and the left chain was on. Back in the car with the heater on full for a few minutes of agony as the blood returned to my fingers, but then the other chain went on much more easily, as I’d sort of got the hang of it.

It’s now dark and an almost full moon is gazing balefully down through a gap in the clouds as we tiptoe gingerly down the road through 10cm or so of snow. Finally make it to the house, turn on the heater, sit in the kotatsu with a cup of tea and it’s all in the past…

New Years Day and it’s still snowing. The postman braves the elements to bring us our small bundle of nengajo – there’ll be more back in Nagoya. Unlike Christmas cards, which should arrive before Christmas, New Year cards are supposed to be read at New Year and the Post Office keep the ones posted in December and go to some trouble to deliver them on the first of January if at all possible.

New Year is really just like Christmas back home in many ways: everything’s closed, all day spent watching the box, eating, drinking… We’ve only got a radio on the farm, but still don’t miss NHK’s big song spectacular which they’ve been plugging for weeks. Something like the Royal Command Performance (do they still have that? ), it’s been slipping in the ratings in recent years. The newspaper is full of adverts for January sales – these used to be after a week or so but now many places start right in on the first, along with “lucky bags”, which can be OK and can be rubbish. Even the shrines are advertising – the best place to have your car blessed to protect it from accidents, the best place to pray for success in exams… They say some 80% of a shrine’s takings are in the first few days of new year, so this is peak time for them. The terrible economy is good for holy business, but the snow and cold probably hasn’t helped.

Throughout our stay we are visited by a huge flock of small birds, flying around in a swarm like migrating swallows. About the size of sparrows, with a crest on their heads – I’m not an ornithologist, but I suppose they’re winter visitors from somewhere further north.

A new beginning… and everything is “hatsu”whatever, ie hatsumode – first visit to a shrine and presumably hatsu-sake, hatsu-tabako…

Happy New Year!

 

Hana Matsuri 30 December, 2009

Filed under: customs — johnraff @ 1:56 pm
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Yesterday we got a postcard from a village in Toei Cho in the mountains of Aichi prefecture – the same prefecture as Nagoya but a completely different world. That region is known for the Hana matsuri (“flower festival”) held around this time of year and which seems to be a sort of fertility rite to encourage the return of the warm weather (not to be confused with Buddha’s birthday, in April). That postcard was to remind us of our visit in 2004, in case we wanted to go back I suppose. It’s tempting… anyway, here’s a bit from a letter I sent home that year:

This January we went to the Hana Matsuri in a place called ToEiCho a
couple of hours drive from here. It’s still in Aichi Prefecture, but in the
Northeast corner and quite isolated in the mountains. The Hana Matsuri takes
place in a number of villages in the area from late November to sometime in
March, depending on the village. In the 28 years I’ve been here I’ve been to
this festival 3 or 4 times, and it really is quite special. Because the
place is so isolated the ceremonies have been preserved much more completely
than in most other places, it runs continually for about 36 hours, there are
some impressive devil masks worn by the dancers, and the beliefs behind it
are really interesting if you’re an ethnologist. Of course it’s now a
“National Treasure” and well supplied with photographers, not to mention TV
cameras, but it still has a special atmosphere, especially if you pick one
of the smaller villages as we did. At 4 in the morning, freezing cold,
watching two huge devils dancing by the light of a couple of pinewood
torches, Japan feels like a pretty exotic place after all…

 

Spring Cleaning

Filed under: customs — johnraff @ 1:24 pm
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This weekend (27th & 28th) we stayed in Nagoya again to do some cleaning up before the New Year holiday. I had given myself the task of getting the grease off the extractor fan hood, and T re-waxed the floor so the restaurant looks quite nice now. This is the traditional time for a big cleanup here, so everything can be fresh for the New Year. Actually new year is associated with Spring anyway – the traditional lunar calendar, still followed in Okinawa and China, would put it somewhere in February, and even at the end of December you’re already past the solstice so the days are getting longer – so we’re not that far from our Spring Cleaning really.

 

Farmlog 21st December 2009

Filed under: countryside — johnraff @ 1:12 pm
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One day in Amsterdam some 35 years ago, with a heavy grey sky overhead and the wind blowing the sleet into my ears, I swore I’d never again put up with a North European winter… and so it has proved to be, barring a couple of Christmas visits. The wind, the wet, the short dark days: sorry, it might appeal to the poetic side of some people but I set out for Asia that Spring. Greece, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India: each country was warmer, and cheaper, than the last and eventually in the South of India I was living in paradise, on about $30 a month.

Of course that can’t go on indefinitely and I wound up in Japan in search of some gainful employment. Now here there is a winter I have to admit, but it’s much more tolerable, at least in Nagoya. For a start, it’s dry with plenty of sunny days when it can be quite warm outside in the daytime. With the latitude of Crete, the sun here is a good bit higher in the sky than in the UK. It can be windy sometimes, but it’s really not so bad, and quite short- from December to February, roughly. On the Sea of Japan side it’s a different story though: there the wind comes in across the sea picking up lots of moisture which it drops when it hits the mountains, and that region gets some of the highest snowfalls in the world! Just in the last two days they got over a metre in the north of Gifu prefecture, not all that far from our country place; that same cold wave gave us a foot or so at the farm and even Nagoya got a sprinkling.

So when we drove up on Sunday it was still overcast, and as we got into Gifu there was more and more snow on the fields around. Luckily the snowploughs had been through and we didn’t need tyre chains – putting those on in freezing winter weather is one job I hate – but the entry to our side road needed clearing with a spade so we could park the car. Once you get inside and the oil heater cranked up it’s quite warm enough though.

On Monday we were back to the norm – a beautiful day in fact without a cloud in the sky and the snow was dazzling. It was worth driving out after all!

Min temp -3.5°C max 2.5°C

 

Farmlog 19th October 2009 31 October, 2009

Filed under: countryside — johnraff @ 2:52 pm
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On Sunday we drove up through ricefields bright yellow in the autumn sunshine, to be welcomed by the last movement of the insect symphony, along with some shrieking deer in the background. The deers’ mating call you hear at this time of year is not pretty at all – an unearthly banshee scream! That evening was clear and still; the stars wet and shimmering, draped across the sky like dewdrops on a spider’s web. A couple of little ones fell off in the ten minutes or so I was watching…

The next day was hot under the sun, but chilly as soon as it went behind a cloud. The kamemushi (“stink bug” maybe?) are all making a beeline for our house to find a winter home behind the curtains. OK till you find one and try to throw it out. They do stink. Oddly, the smell is not unlike coriander leaves, but if you dwell on that you could get put off Thai food. A dying wasp in front of the house. A few years ago, one got into my wellington boot and with its last gasp managed to sting me on my toe, somewhat to my discomfort… The show is slowly closing down for the Winter.

On the radio I heard that the Orion meteor shower was starting.

Min temp 7°C, max 18°C

 

Farmlog 12th October 2009 17 October, 2009

Filed under: countryside,food & drink — johnraff @ 2:54 pm
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This week it was finally too cold to eat outside, so it’s dinner in the “kotatsu” and dozing off till we can summon the energy to go to bed. Dinner under the stars will be something to look forward to next April maybe.

  • Good crop of Hbaneros this year!

    Good crop of Hbaneros this year!

    The Habaneros have excelled themselves, even though once they get damaged at all – a split, or a bite by an insect – they go bad very quickly. Even after throwing all the dubious one away I’m still left with far more than I can sanely use, as they’re so hot. I don’t know why I grow them really, except that the aroma when you cut into one is fantastic – strawberries and apricots and a vague hint of something wild and dangerous which you find out all about if you’re silly enough to taste one. I was explaining to Yamamoto-san, who’d dropped in on his way home from a bit of forestry work, that if you wanted to test the hotness of a chilli you touch the cut surface with the tip of your finger, then lick your finger. This works pretty well, but while I was talking I absent-mindedly rubbed the cut chilli so my finger picked up an extra load of juice – enough to put a stop to conversation for 20 minutes while I rushed to the kitchen to find something to ease the burning in my mouth. Milk did no good, but a sip of very sour salty “ume vinegar” helped a bit. Eventually the pain subsided. That’s how hot Habaneros are, though you can tame them a little bit if you use the tip of a knife to remove the seeds and the white pith they’re attached to. Try not to touch the inside of the chilli, and wash your hands, the knife and the cutting board thoroughly afterwards. Even so, your fingers will be hot for a while so don’t touch your eyes or anywhere else with thin skin…

  • These little "Ishigaki" chillis are also very hot, but aromatic too.

    These little "Ishigaki" chillis are also very hot, but aromatic too.

    The other chillis I try to grow are a standard Malaysian “red chilli”: biggish, medium heat and a nice red colour, and what I call “Ishigaki” chillis. Some years ago we got some chillis in the market that were marked as being from Ishigaki island in Okinawa. These were the typical “shima” chillis – somewhat cone-shaped, very hot but with little aroma, possibly related to the Thai chilli. I saved the seeds and planted them next year, but what came up was different. This is not so surprising; commercial plants are often hybrids which don’t breed true. The new chillis were straighter in shape, still very hot but with a special fresh, floral aroma, quite different from habaneros. What was surprising was that they have bred consistently since then; each year seeds saved from the previous crop produce the same kind of chillis. This year they’ve done especially well.

  • min. temp. 7°C max. 19°C
 

Farmlog 5th October 2009 15 October, 2009

Filed under: countryside,food & drink — johnraff @ 1:09 am
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It’s probably one of those “you know you’ve been in Japan too long when…” things, but there’s a rabbit in the moon. You can see its long floppy ears hanging over the mortar as it pounds mochi. Mochi is glutinous rice cooked then pounded into an even more glutinous lump. It’s supposed to be a New Year treat, but I can’t say I find it too appealing. Maybe that’s the next hurdle? (They have something similar in Ghana called foofoo, made from plantain, yam or, yes, rice.) Anyway, Sunday night was indeed a full moon, and cloudless so there was the rabbit pounding away. This particular Autumn full moon is special: “chu shu no meigetsu” – a harvest moon I suppose – and you’re supposed to eat “imo” or yams, while sipping sake maybe and waxing poetical, and that’s what we did, in a “nabe” (a sort of stew) plus a bottle of white wine. The winter cold is definitely coming on and there was plenty of wood on the fire to hold it at bay for a few hours.

Japan and rice seem so close; both Japanese and foreigners agree on this, and this attachment to rice is common all over the Far East. The word for rice is usually synonymous with a meal and in many countries the rice plant is venerated as a god. However, the “imo” goes back even further, apparently, to before the introduction of wet rice cultivation, and is still held in affection somewhere deep in the Japanese psyche. In the north of the country around this time of year there’s a tradition of “imo ni kai” or “potato party” which is better than it sounds as the imo stewpot usually has other good things in it, and there’ll be some booze too… Actually “imo” covers a variety of potato-like vegetables: “jagaimo” are our familiar potatoes (“Jakarta potatoes”), “satsuma imo” are sweet potatoes, presumably arrived via Kyushu, “yama imo” (“mountain potatoes”) grow wild, are incredibly slimy and disgusting, especially when grated and put on raw fish and therefore much loved by the Japanese (yes, another hurdle coming up), and “sato imo” (“village potato”) are the kind we had in our stew, and used in the imo-ni-kai. These seem to be definitely a kind of yam, smaller than the ones I saw in Africa but with the same broad waxy leaves. They grow well here – you can see those leaves in everybody’s garden once you get a bit out of the city – maybe yams were the staple diet all over this part of the world once, as they still seem to be in some Pacific islands.

The chillies are doing quite well this year as the deer have been kind enough not to break through the 3m net I put round them and eat all the leaves off, and the wet July was followed by lots of sunshine in August and September. Chillies need sun, especially Habaneros, and our small but hot “ishigaki” variety.

Min. temp. 11°C max. 18°C

 

Farmlog 21st September 2009 23 September, 2009

Filed under: countryside — johnraff @ 2:49 pm
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Yes it’s Autumn for real, all the rice in nearby paddy fields is golden and some has already been harvested, and all kinds of wild nuts and berries are ripening up so the wild population can get through the coming (probably mild) winter. Not quite as cold as last week and dinner under the stars with the Milky Way visible, a bottle of wine and some Spanish guitar music softly accompanying the insect chorus was quite pleasant… (I recommend “Recuerdos de la Alhambra” by Narciso Yepes.)

  • We used to have 5 chestnut trees behind the house, but insects and a typhoon got most of them; we planted another though, and the nuts are ripening now. Last year the monkeys came and ate them, but we got some on Monday – you can cook them with milk and sugar, then mash for a nice dessert, and chestnut rice is good too.
  • higanbana coming up everywhere. A beautiful red flower that blooms exactly at the Buddhist higan period. There’s nothing to be seen through the summer – the leaves only appear briefly in the spring, I don’t know how it manages.
  • On our way back home through the village we passed a folorn tai yaki van. As it was a public holiday he must have thought children visiting from the city might get their grandparents to buy some, but didn’t seem to be doing much business.
  • Min 13°C, max: I don’t know because we left early to get back to Nagoya where Daihachi Ryodan were due to play at a festival, but at 12:00 it was 25°C.
 

Farmlog 14th September 2009 15 September, 2009

Filed under: countryside — johnraff @ 2:57 pm
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Autumn’s coming on so fast Winter seems to be breathing down our necks, though we don’t usually get the first frost till November. Last night however was cold. Dinner outside under the stars is still the more attractive option, but even with a jacket over a trainer over a T-shirt we were huddled up near the fire, sipping shochu with hot water and inhaling the wood smoke. I had a sore throat the next morning.

  • Now the sansho is ripening, our annual visitor pigeons are busy eating them. We don’t see those pigeons any other time of year- they must be quite tasty after eating all that sansho…
  • Last week I noticed a papaya plant had sprouted from last year’s compost heap – get it through the winter in a pot and it should grow quite big in the garden next year. But I forgot to dig it up, and this week the deer had got in first and chewed all the leaves and top shoot off. Drat.
  • I’ve been bringing the organic refuse from Raffles to make compost. It’s not as easy as it sounds: if you just leave it around the animals will come and mess with it, while an enclosed plastic container makes drainage difficult and it gets all wet and slimy. I’ve found mixing in some dry leaf mould helps, but a neighbour suggested another use- give it to the fish. He had put some carp in our pond for us a while ago and they seem to be surviving on whatever they can find there, but I tried throwing in some of the food scraps. It all disappeared in a few minutes, but the next offering was ignored so they don’t seem to want too much of it…
  • T. was busy taking advantage of the hot sun and dry breeze to dry her umeboshi pickles. About half done now. The home-made ones are definitely good, and cheap if you don’t count the labour.
Umeboshi pickles drying in the autumn sun.

Umeboshi pickles drying in the autumn sun.

 

Farmlog 7th September 2009 10 September, 2009

Filed under: countryside — johnraff @ 2:58 pm
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Those of you who live up in the Northern latitudes know all about this, but the shadows are slowly getting longer, and the days a bit shorter. It’s nothing as extreme as in the UK, for example, though- even in the Winter we get a fair amount of sunshine. Still, the sun that blazed almost straight down a month ago has levelled off a bit, and there’s a hint of gold in it, a cool wind is blowing from the North: Autumn. It can be one of the best times of the year, as long as a typhoon isn’t messing things up, and this year looks set to be a nice one, if the long-range weather forecasts can be trusted at all. (hmm…) Well, down on the farm:

  • One dragonfly showed up; there should be more to come, and the Autumn evening insect chorus is building up nicely. Every week it’s a bit different.
  • Another voice from the evening darkness was the unholy screech of a deer in the mating season. Not a cute sound at all, and too early really. They just couldn’t wait.
  • T. found three more leeches, just when we thought the dry weather had got rid of them. One bit her, and it’s still itching.
  • Along with worrying about deer eating my chilli plants (nothing yet, touch wood) a major feature of life up here is trying to keep the weeds under control. Put in a couple of hours more slashing with a sickle, somewhat enjoying the mixed aromas that some of the more fragrant plants come out with as they’re cut down – sansho, dokudami and something that smells a bit like “curry leaves” (if you know them).
  • min 17°C max 28°C