asazuke

Life in Japan, food, music, whatever…

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

 

Well, it’s a start 26 September, 2009

Filed under: politics — johnraff @ 2:16 pm
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Since Hatoyama became prime minister just over a week ago, every day’s TV news has been dominated by the latest actions of the new DPJ government: Hatoyama off to the USA for a gruelling series of meetings – climate change at the UN, finance in Pittsburg, summit meetings with Obama and the leaders of China, Korea …, Okada the new foreign minister also zipping around, and back here controversial dam projects cancelled, and, significantly, a start to investigations into various murky dealings involving bureaucrats and the former LDP government. Who knows what might come out there? Of course there’s a long list of expensive promises on the election manifesto that have to be paid for somehow, but they appear to be determined to carry them out, at the expense of the pork-barrel pour-more-concrete projects that have got Japan where it is today…

But image-wise the new DPJ government are looking good for the moment. They appear serious, dedicated people who really mean to clean up Japan’s act. How much of this is just media hype we will have to wait to see. Good luck to them anyway!

 

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 31st August 2009 1 September, 2009

Filed under: countryside — johnraff @ 2:16 pm
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These habanero chillis are probably hot already. They're really too hot to use in the restaurant - I'm not sure why I grow them...

These habanero chillis are probably hot already. They're really too hot to use in the restaurant - I'm not sure why I grow them...

Last week’s chill was a bit of an abberation, and we were back to the sweltering hot weather, though nice and sunny and it cools right down in the late afternoon. In the evening we listened to the Autumn insects starting up, and the election results on the radio. (The minshuto got their expected landslide.) Those dragonflies of last week disappeared again however, and the Summer Cicadas made a comeback. The chillis are trying to catch up on the cloudy July, and some are turning red.

min 19°C max about 28 (forgot to check)

These medium-hot Malaysian chillis are just starting to turn red.

These medium-hot Malaysian chillis are just starting to turn red.

 

(a little) change is coming to Japan (maybe) 28 August, 2009

Filed under: politics — johnraff @ 2:27 pm
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Well, we’re just a couple of days away from the election that the LDP (Liberal Democratic Party, or jiminto) have been putting off and putting off in the desperate hope that their miserable opinion poll ratings might pick up. Aso, the current prime minister, was supposed to have been picked last October to lead the LDP into a quick election, as he was somewhat more popular than anyone else in the party at the time. He dithered a bit, came out with one inept remark after another, and his approval just went down and down. Like an animal caught in a car’s headlights the LDP just froze and now their rule finally seems to be coming to an end. They were slaughtered in the Tokyo local election last month and now seem to be in for more of the same on a national level. All the opinion polls are predicting a landslide victory for the opposition DPJ (Democratic Party of Japan, or minshuto). Of course, opinion polls have got things pretty seriously wrong in the past…

This is nothing like the Obama campaign in January, though. No tidal waves of enthusiasm – it’s more that people are just fed up. Of course they have many good reasons to be fed up:

  • one LDP politician’s funding scandal after another
  • the succession of unpopular prime ministers imposed on the country without the courtesy of an election since Koizumi’s resignation
  • the amakudari (“descent from heaven”) system where bureaucrats can retire from public service and be seconded to some token position in a company that just happens to be involved in public works… The potential for corruption, along with gross waste of tax money, is obvious.
  • millions of pension records that were lost when being transferred from paper to computer some years ago – more bureaucratic bungling
  • Even before the Liemann shock, the economy has been slipping down and down and income gaps between the haves and havenots getting wider and wider, largely blamed on ex-PM Koizumi’s reforms. (Raffles’ customers have not been exempt from seeing their incomes fall… 😦 )
  • record unemployment, especially for young people, a lot of whom are stuck in temporary work with outsourcing companies
  • The LDP seem to have just run out of ideas.

I’m not really that impressed with the minshuto to be honest; they seem to be a bit better than the LDP, have younger members, slightly more enlightened policies and fewer unhealthy links with construction companies… But even so, daft ideas like reducing petrol tax and making motorways free won’t exactly help Japan live up to the commitments to reducing CO2 emissions that must be coming up soon. Still, just changing governments per se must be a healthy development in a democracy, and help to loosen the bureaucrats’ grip on power. Bureaucrat-bashing has become a major theme of late; I rather pity anyone in public service right now, but some head-cutting at the top would probably be a great idea. (They will resist fiercely no doubt.)

Some oddities:

  • Bicycles are in: this was started by our own dear Nagoya mayor Takashi Kawamura who regularly used one on the campaign trail.
  • This mysterious “happiness party” has suddenly appeared, running candidates in nearly every constituency. It seems to be some religious thing and is being carefully ignored by the media in opinion polls etc.
  • The “revolution club” whose representative on TV the other day complained that for the state to aid old people was socialism, and causing the breakdown of family values!

Whatever, we’ll see on Sunday how big the minshuto’s majority is, and after that if anything has really changed…

 

Farmlog 24th August 2009 26 August, 2009

Filed under: countryside — johnraff @ 2:20 pm
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Finally we get a break from all that mugginess with some proper clear Summer weather. A perfect weekend in fact, with a delicious cool breeze along with the sun, and in the evening you could enjoy the novelty of feeling cold, even with a long-sleeved shirt!

  • Dragonflies are a traditional sign of Autumn, and there were lots around, though I didn’t see any red ones. “Aka tombo” will be out soon I expect, flying in hordes over the golden rice fields.
  • min 14°C max 28°C
 

Farmlog 17th August 2009 23 August, 2009

Filed under: countryside — johnraff @ 2:24 am
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A three-day weekend this time; our summer holiday for which we finally got some real summer weather.

  • Sun! More important, our encounters with blood-sucking creatures limited to insects like mosquitos and buyo: no more leeches! Quite a relief I must say – let’s hope the end of the long drawn out rainy season has seen them off.
  • Most of our stay was taken up with using the sun to dry out some of our mouldy tatami matting, and spraying it with mould-killer. Hardly anybody does it these days, but it used to be a regular task to lift up the tatami mats and dry them in the sun once in a while. Ours are now so old there’s a danger they’ll fall apart before being returned to place, but we just managed it. I think some day we’ll replace them with plain wood flooring.
  • The chilli plants are coming on, though held back because of lack of sunshine in July. The first red chillies appeared but most are still green and not yet hot.
  • Got up at the (for me) incredibly early hour of 7am and was rewarded with one of those perfect mornings. A totally clear blue sky, lush greenery and a morning chorus of birds and insects. (Later it got sweltering hot, though.)
  • minimum temp 19.5°C, maximum 31.5°C
 

Farmlog 10th August 2009 14 August, 2009

Filed under: countryside — johnraff @ 3:05 pm
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  • Well, here in Nagoya a couple of days later we’ve finally got a bit of Summer, but last weekend was yet more rainy, muggy, wet, slimy, mouldy, sweaty, sticky… (you get the idea)
  • Hey, enough leeches too, OK? A real plague of them this year; up to now I’d hardly ever seen one. I had no idea they could be this common in Japan. I read it could be something to do with the tendancy for wild animals like deer and wild boar to show up more around human settlements. The leeches ride into town on their backs. Anyway, both of us got bitten this week. This time I tried sprinkling salt to make them fall off, which seemed to work at the time, but by bite, although small, got itchy the next day. According to the Wikipedia you’re supposed to ease them off with your fingernail, which sounds tricky, but I’ll try it next time. I’d just as soon there wasn’t a next time to be honest.
  • Some more gaps in the net round the chillies, which the deer might have been getting in, hastily patched up. If they ever start eating the chilli leaves it’s a disaster for the plants, which are already a bit unhappy from lack of sunlight.
  • Min temp ?°C (the magnet stuck, but about 19~20) Max 25°C