One Life Japan

Finally, a few minutes to rest. The past week has been consumed by a family (of six!) trip, followed by volunteer fire practice yesterday morning - which always ends up in a drinking party for the rest of the afternoon so my whole day was shot.

The photos are from the past week when the family visited us for a bike trip. They kept it a secret from us that their youngest daughter had just learned to ride a bike two days earlier, but by the time she left us she was a die-hard biker. I asked her what her favorite part of the trip was, and she said “riding the bike”. This is a pleasant surprise because this past week every thing seemed to work out perfectly - from the night in our favorite 250 y/o Nozawa inn, to their lunch at the local sushi shop where the chef dressed them up as chefs and taught them how master the art. We joined first and second graders at the local school for a mochi pounding party, and the boys had two pairs of wooden geta custom made by the last kiri geta craftsman in Nagano.

With all this culture going on, however, it was difficult to fit in as much riding as dad would have hoped for. On the third day we had planned a long and challenging ride through our village, but the children’s desire to play in the rice paddies and catch frogs won out. While the “official” activity was helping us weed the paddy, not much weeding actually got done. Luckily, the way we weed the paddy is to push all the weeds down under the mud and smother them - something that happens naturally as the kids chase the creatures around.

Another highlight (to my surprise) was the fireworks we brought along on a whim when we spotted a package in the 100 yen store the night before. We were staying in an amazing 150 y/o house on the edge of the mountain with nothing but rice paddies and fireflies all around it. After a late dinner of bear meat stew, wild boar in miso, and raw deer meat (all from the local hunter), everyone was passed out until the fireworks came out and miraculously everyone was genki again.

The last day was sad and crammed as everyone prepared to leave on the 2:30 bus. A lesson in painting picture postcards from the curator of the museum himself gave us a chance to write thank-you notes for everyone we had met along the way, and the museum folks were extremely excited to have so many foreigners in their museum. They insisted we take a tour, despite the children’s obvious desire to get riding, and we were an hour late to meet dad at the top of a mountain (where he had ridden his bike to while we painted postcards). After a quick junk-food lunch (sorry about that Sarah), everyone chose to take the challenging dirt road down, instead of the smooth paved road. Remember, the 8 y/o daughter had only learned to ride a bike one week earlier! I am often worried about making the routes too challenging - not because the kids can’t do it, but because the parents complain. This time the parents made the decision to take her on the dirt road, she herself wanted to challenge the dirt road, and she did AWESOME! I no longer accept complaints from parents.

A few photos from two weeks ago with our visitors from Hawaii. Activities included lots of walking and photo-ops at temples and shrines, gathering wild veggies for dinner, planting rice, gathering mulberry leaves for the babies. While we were visiting the preserved thatch-roof house in Akiyamago, we happened to meet the old woman who was born and raised there. She now lives in a more modern house in the village.

June first is also the day that Mt. Naeba is officially opened. We joined the ceremony and the lunch party afterward, as well as made an attempt to climb it. This was the first time in their lives to see so much snow, and walking was slippery even with the crampons, so we made the decision to turn back for safeties sake, but not before enjoying the breathtaking sunset views of Akiyamago.

As professional as we try to be with our One Life Japan bike tours, it always ends up being more like entertaining family. This last week was no different. A couple from Hawaii visited, and for the most part I felt as though it was the same as a visit from an aunt and uncle. The big problem with this is that I would never charge my aunt and uncle, yet we charged them.

This morning Buna, our baby cockatiel, experienced a few fleeting moments of freedom. While Tomoe and I were in the field behind our house, we heard a familiar scream and looked up to see a white streak across the sky. Buna - Awii and Klees’ baby hatched in November. We dropped everything and scrambled up the river bank in the direction we had seen her fly. After a few frantic moments, Tomoe spotted her petrified on the neighbor’s roof and we watched and waited, wondering where she would fly to next. Little did we know, we were not the only ones watching and waiting.

Buna seemed terrified, and did not move for several minutes, so I ran home to fetch Awii (her father) in a cage, hoping that Awii’s calls would lure Buna from the roof to a place where we could grab her. After about 30 minutes with no reaction, I took Awii home and put his age in the upstairs window hoping that being bit higher might make it easier to Buna to come to him. Still no movement.

Our options now were to hope that 1) Buna somehow decides to go to her father. 2) I can climb up on the roof without scaring her away, or 3) She dehydrates and passes out making it weasy to catch her. We didn’t feel like waiting for her to dehydrate, so I climbed up on the roof and got quite close when Buna took off. In the house she has never been a skillful flier, but out here she was brilliant.

The moment she took off I scrambled to the ladder while Tomoe watched to see where she flew to. Before I even made it off the roof, however, I heard Tomoe’s panicked screams about a crow. By the time I made it down, the only thing I saw was a large black bird speeding into the mountains with a small white puff of feathers in its beak. I chased it along the river, but when I saw it fly across the valley to the other mountain, I ran home to hop on the motor scooter, hoping that I could at least follow it wherever it flew, and *maybe* have chance at hitting the crow with a rock or something that would cause it to drop Buna.

By the time I arrived at the area where the crow was last spotted with Buna in its beak, I had pretty much given up hope.

Just a few days ago we threw away a brood of Klee’s newer eggs because we didn’t want more babies. Today we put a nekozukura in their cage. This is a traditional craft of the village, a rice-straw cat house (before child welfare laws, it is said to have been babies were kept while mothers worked in the field). Awii and Klee have been checking it out as a possible nest ever since we recovered it from an old house. Now we hope they will make use of it.

We plan to go to the mountain tomorrow to look for any traces of Buna.

I have very few photos of Buna. Although I took one of her on the roof today (just in case) the best ones are from the months after she hatched. She is also the white bird in the background of the first photo in this post.

In Tokyo, we went to work with people around our own age. If someone retires, we hold a party for them and say our goodbyes. We never witnessed what happened to these people outside of our office setting, people around us get old and move on. Usually, we don’t see them die unless we are old as well. Every once in a while ours, or a co-worker’s parent or grandparent dies, and we feel sympathy for their loss. Still, for someone in their 30s, really knowing someone who dies is a relatively rare and often tragic experience.

Monday night when I went to the volunteer fire-brigade trumpet practice, I heard that a previous trumpet brigade captain had died earlier that day. While the name was not mentioned, I deduced that it was the old inn-keeper in Akiyama which we frequent often. He was over 80 y/o. Aside from his own traditional hunting skills, passed on by his own father - a matagi hunter, he took with him an incredible depth of knowledge about the area and traditions - he shared his knowledge at the annual yakibatake (field burning) event which is an attempt to keep alive an important tradition of the area. He was also recognized and honored by the emperor of Japan for his own hunting skills and contributions to keeping Japanese culture alive. It is a big loss.

I was invited to take a hike up Naeba with him this spring, but felt I was “too busy”… so I cancel led. I lost a truly “One Life” opportunity.

What does this have to do with the difference between my previous live in Tokyo and the reality of where we live now? Well, most of the neighbors we see and talk to on a regular basis are in their 60s or older. Our next-door neighbor, whom we love chatting as much as she loves snooping into what we are up to, is 87. The only surviving geta (wooden sandal) maker we visit often is in his late 70s. The famous ex-mayor of Sakae, who just retired last month, is 79. The neighbor we learn all our farming from is in her late 60s. Most of the people I chat with in the bath are in their 80s. We often visit one of the oldest women in the village - the 96 year old Ise-san, whose family was killed in a large avalanche that buried their house in sixty years ago.

Life and death is so much more real here. Sometimes it means Tomoe being upset that her sprouts died because they were left too long in the sun, or the peanut plants killed by ants, and sometimes its an amazing organic farmer that died last fall before we even had a chance to meet and learn from him. Now we visit his widow every now and then, but she will most likely be gone within ten years as well.

Living in a community like this, I know many more people who die in the next ten years than I ever would have in Tokyo, where my activities were restricted to work and play with “young” folks. Here I will (and do) know three or four generations of the families around us. I spent an hour at my rice-field the other day catching frogs with the five-year-old granddaughter of the neighbor who was hospitalized two weeks ago after a motor-scooter accident. He is 80+ and lives across the the river, aside from seeing him and simply waving because of the roar of the rive that separates us, I often met him in the bath or on the street. He shared his home with me on New Year’s day and I promissed to go back soon, and this time bring Tomoe. I now regret that I have not been back.

What made me start to think about this is that when I heard about the hunter’s death, I felt sad, I felt loss (despite the fact that I have only talked to him a few times). I took on the “appropriate” expression and said something about how sad that is. The young (30s - 50s) people around me continued smoking, laughing, discussing it matter-of-factly. The mood did not change one beat as they decided who would go to a memorial event to blow their trumpets. (I can’t really make the trumpet sound like it is supposed to, or I would have joined). I realized that they are much more used to or in-tune with reality of life and death. They see it all the time. One might say that they are just “cold” or “numbed” to it, but I think that they felt just as much (much more for sure) loss than I did, but they also were not so sheltered so as to dwell on its sadness.

Am I really mentally and emotionally prepared for life in a place where the “young people’s party” consists of 50 year olds?