Totoro-baths under the milkyway

For my two previous trips I took to Japan I spent a good portion of my trip as a volunteer working at organic farms and eco-tourism places. This was via the WWOOF-network whose aim is to provide opportunities for cultural exchange at all kinds of eco-friendly places such as farms and guesthouses.

You basically volunteer to work at lets 6 hours a day for example at a farm and you get free food and a place to sleep. And the farmer gets an extra pair of hands for what ever needs to be done at that time: harvesting apples, weeding, more weeding, washing the dishes, digging holes with a huge excavator! And you both get a chance to learn about each other's culture and language. The exchange program is open to everyone. The network helps you to make the arrangement with the farmer-host you would like to visit.

Daikon radish

For me this was the perfect way to get beyond the role of 'The Tourist' - which I didn't like. I wanted to see the real Japan - the real / mundane / exotic everyday life - as well as any secretive things hidden from view.

As a volunteer you get to enter a Japanese home and live as part of a Japanese family - an experience a tourist could never get even if honored with an invite for tee at someones place. As a guest you are always treated a certain way - and don't see beyond the surface. But after a few weeks working at a family you start to get to know people as their true personas.

On my first trip I took it easy and just picked one place in Hokkaido - a biodynamic garden and dairy farm. And then went to join my friend all the way down south near Kumamoto, Kyushu to work at at Buddhist temple's garden.

Working at a Japanese farm for me was easy. I was physically fit and eager and already knew and accepted a lot of the cultural differences and quirks you need to know for not getting into to trouble. The work itself is easy and simple. For example stripping weeds or thinning apple buds are mundane boring tasks that even a child could do. But you need a certain kind of attitude and a state of mind to keep doing it for several hours at a time.

It helps if you glance up and see the snow capped Japanese Alps and see eagles circling overhead - and think about the delicious home cooked Japanese meal you are about to have for lunch, dinner, breakfast xP And the fact that you are there, in person, somewhere in real Japan living the Japanese life - even for a few days or weeks. I was so 'Zen' meditating all this I could have endured any hardship.

You rarely work alone. Farms are always big and there are other volunteers from all over the world, as well as family members, even neighbors helping to get a field or a garden patch done. I particularly recall when I was 'lent-out' to a local neighbor who was about to start building a new house - and I was there just as a pair of extra hands to move large logs and other building material around. There's a shortage of healthy strong men in the countryside so my help was very much appreciated and even though we were working together for only half-a-day we become good friends.

At this point I must mention that I don't know Japanese language. My level of Japanese is very basic: a few words and phrases that tourists need. I can kind of recognize a few words here and there when someone speaks to me. So lifting logs 'up' 'down' 'left' 'right' was confusing at first when I didn't even remember those words. It was good practice. And that is how you learn for real.

My strategy with my poor Japanese has always been to try to say something, ANYTHING in the language xP - and then just try to listen to any words that sound familiar. Then even if you don't have any idea what the other person said you just repeat what they said and they usually get that you are confused and repeat it more clearly or using simpler words. I've been pretty lucky I guess - I've never had any 'language problems' as such with everyday communications. However it would be nice to be able to have an actual conversation in Japanese. I would so love that :3

Hokkaido was my first wwoofing-place and also the strangest. It was a farm run by a US army veteran and his Japanese wife - so not exactly the genuine Japanese experience. But I picked it because I was interested to see the Biodynamic and CSI-model (Community Supported Agriculture) in action. I guess it was my 'culture-shock' moment but nothing too dramatic. After a few days there I just got sick with fever from getting wet at night sleeping in a tent because they had no other accommodation to offer at the time and I just felt miserable not being able to do any actual work. However before that I managed to fix a tractor, chop a whole load of logs and milk a cow which was a first!

So I was happy with it. A visitor from Sapporo gave me a lift back to civilization and I immediately felt better. Went to ask for a map of the city from Sapporo Station Tourist Information and noticed that one of the advisers had a Finnish-flag pin on her shirt. Asked her if she knew any Finnish and she replied - in Finnish! Apparently she had never visited Finland but spoke the language amazingly well having studied at evening courses arranged by Hokkaido Finland Society! So long story short I got their contact details, called them and asked if I could visit their classes in the evening and got permission. It was much more organized and bigger then the small language school at Osaka I was used to visiting - with over a dozen students per class (the teacher was called Aki if someone know's him from Oulu University where he had studied Finnish). Went boozing that night with the teacher. He knew how the Finnish drunk so I had a bit of a headache next morning.

After all this I went on a well earned 'vacation' in the south of Hokkaido where there were some active volcanoes. Got a traditional Japanese room with a tatami at a lakeside bath house with its own onsen. The lake had an all most a tropical island in the middle. I was surprised how hot it was but then I remembered that this was the hottest month in Hokkaido and therefore very similar to the hot but brief summer in Finland. The tourist only followed the tourist path and went away on the boat and left me alone with a whole island for myself. Ended up walking some 3km along the beach around the island - just wild nature everywhere - dipping myself in the warm shallow volcanic lake from time to time. Fortunately by this time I had learned to carry a couple of liters of water/tea with me - otherwise I would've been in trouble. The actual volcano I visited next day was all too crowded and touristy for my taste.

I finally took a plane south all the way to Kyushu which is the southern most of the main islands. Beyond that is the island chain of Okinawa. Kumamoto being the regional capital was easy to reach by train. I didn't take the Shinkansen because this time I was island-hopping with internal flights and didn't have the Japan Rail Pass.

I had thought Hokkaido had been hot for this time of the year but here was tropical heat I had only experienced in Singapore - scorching hot and humid. At midday people stopped working because it was uncomfortable and even dangerous to toil outside. By this time I had fortunately learned that I don't tan in the sun - just burn. So the first thing in town I went to a local superstore I got myself some long loose working clothing that had long sleeves and collar - and a large brimmed hat. It was strange to be this far south of Tokyo - everywhere we went had a real exotic relaxed countryside-feel to it. Very different feel to mainstream central Japan.

Furo = bathtub 'Totoro-style' - there's a wood fire underneath <:3

We woke up early every morning around 6:00 did some cleaning and washing and had breakfast at 7:00 and worked till 11:00 when lunch was ready. After lunch you slept through the hottest hours of the day and woke up to work again at two in the afternoon and then worked till six in the afternoon when we had dinner. And yes, that was way more then 6 hours of work per day but this was not the usual WWOOF-host but a special one that followed the Buddhist-temple life-cycle. They only took guests there who were committed to stay through the whole harvest - at least several months but preferably half a year or more. My friend had been there all spring and was about to be there with his Japanese wife all through that year. So as their friend and guest I was given special exception from this rule. But I was still required to do everything they did and the workdays there were quite intensive. After a days work I would have a shower or a bath in our traditional 'totoro' furo and just doze off to sleep. But I felt very at peace there :3

Typical lunch with lots of different things to eat like vegetable tempura xP

We tended a garden of various vegetables: Japanese cucumbers, egg plants, peas, salads etc. Well, I guess they were all 'Japanese' varieties because some of them were just unrecognizable to a westerner. Especially the cucumbers were really weird looking. But they all tasted great! The meals were 'vegetarian' due to the Buddhist nature of the host but for some reason sometimes seafood such as shrimp and dried fish flakes were part of the dishes so I'm not sure what their exact criteria was. The meals were always plentiful and you had lots of different things to try and eat. A steamed sweet potato was my favorite - it was like eating soft candy xP The Japanese rice-cooker is an excellent invention as it keeps rice fresh, moist and warm for a whole day - sometimes until the next day >:3 And when you have more than a few people in the house a large cooker is constantly on with timer set for making a fresh batch of new rice during the night :3

In the evening you had a moment to relax before exhaustion took over. The summer nights were magical (as sunset was around eight even during midsummer) and in the countryside you have no light pollution so you can see all the starts and the milkyway. Our Japanese friend would set his poi aflame and we've sit at the veranda just drinking and taking in the amazing air full of insect and bird sounds.

In part two: Bikers, Kittens and Smoking Volcanoes ^^'/

~ Tinka :3

...

Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWOOF
http://www.wwoofjapan.com/main/index.php?lang=en

For those interested the wwoofjapan website has so clear and throughout instructions on every aspect that I won't repeat them here. I just urge you to read them and then re-read them all. That way you won't get confused and end up making mistakes.

It is important to carefully read all instructions you are given. The Japanese assume that all instructions are read carefully and followed to the point. I guess they learn already this at school. In comparison western culture is much more relaxed and understanding about such things - we don't read manuals. But for the Japanese this kind of behavior just seems sloppy or lazy ;3

Polka-dotted rice paddies

Rice paddy art using different colored rice :3

It is an exquisite feeling when you first step into the mud of a Japanese rice paddy field. Rubber boots or wellingtons are useless here since you'd only get stuck with them in the mud and they can also damage the roots of the rice plants. So you go with bare feet, lifting up your pant legs high enough not to get yourself wet (although sometimes the water level is high enough that there's no way to keep your pants dry) ;3

On a hot midsummer's day in central Japan the mud is at the same time cool and warm. It is cooler than the roasting bare ground but warmer than the water, having stored some of the heat from the sunlight piercing under the crystal clear surface. 

My friend's paddy in Kumamoto, Kyushu

Depending on the state of the field, somewhere down below there is hard ground under all this mud. Otherwise the water would all just seep away into the ground. This is also fortunate for you and reassuring to know - you won't sink in all the way. Typically the mud on top is very soft and loose and after a while you get used to walking in it if you are careful. It only gets sticky if you try to move too fast.

You should wear a large brimmed hat to shade you from the blazing sun (I for example don't get a tan - I just burn!) and a wet towel around your neck helps to evade the eventual heat exhaustion for a while longer. And tea, drink lots of tea :3

Occasionally you glance at the sky when you hear the cry of the hawks or endangered mountain eagles circling the thermals overhead. The green sea of rice stalks, clear blue sky and the snow topped mountains encircling you create a dreamscape you won't want to wake up from.

Organic 'black' rice almost ripe for harvest

The agricultural area and village of Azumino is located in a long valley in Nagano Prefecture in central Japan - also known as the Alps of Japan. Surrounded by snow covered peaks (Mount Hokata 3190 m / 10,466 ft) it is a lush agricultural area famous for its Wasabi-root plantations, fruit tree orchards and wine production. Some three hours by train from Tokyo, the largest town nearby is Matsumoto with a quarter of a million inhabitants, a quiet easy going town with lots of touristy shops and quirky art studios, the home town of the polka-dotted Yayoi Kusama. I even found a Monty Python themed whisky-bar there but that's another story...

Back at the paddy I'm starting to get tired. You see, one could try to use chemicals to keep the weeds down or use some sort of mechanical weeding machine, a tractor, to periodically mow between the rows. This however is very bad for the rice plants as it damages the roots and anyway no machine is that precise - it would leave weeds growing right next to and within the rice plant - and would require you to leave wide spaces between the rows for the tractor wheels. A human foot is only two inches wide and does not tear into the roots of the plants.

Our field was full of dragonflies buzzing around, frogs croaking happily away. But in a nearby field where they have put some sort of pesticide in the water it is all quiet and the water looks stale: and if you look closer you see dead tadpoles. Fortunately it is our field which runs into their field and not the other way around. It is the natural organic fields which must maintain higher ground to avoid being polluted by neighboring fields.

Work and toil maybe characteristic of the countryside everywhere but farmers have always tried to avoid useless work when possible. At the start of the season you grow rise seedlings in pots at the side of the paddy, trying to get them as strong and tall as possible so they have a head start over the weeds.

Stock photo: Japanese Rice planting machine

The paddy itself is well prepared with impermeable hard bottom and embankments. Flowing water usually from a natural source like a stream or a river brings with it nutrients which settle in it to form the fertile mud. Preferable you want to plant the young seedlings as fast as possible so as to avoid uneven growth in the field. It used to be that people of the village would help each other and gather to plant one field at a time. This still happens where there is community for it. But its hard work and nowadays there are machines that do it a lot faster. A rice planting machine can go and plant several fields in one day and not everyone needs to own one. You can even rent one for a day.

Ones the rice is planted you maintain a level of water just so rice stays above water to feed on the sun shine but weeds will have a hard time making roots and reaching the surface. For the first weeks you can use a traditional mechanical weeding-sled made of a long float pulled by ropes from opposite embankments which slides gently across the water and over the sturdy rice plants, dragging along with it a row of chains (I guess these might've been rocks or sticks in the old days). The chains disturb the mud and mix any weed saplings into it but slide gently past the rice plants without damaging them. It takes two men less than an hour to weed a whole field using this method. But you can do it for only so long. Ones the rice gets too high and inflexible the float would begin to damage it.

Aigamo ducks at our paddy in Azumino

Then come the ducks :3 Ducks have always been part of paddies, eating insects and slugs and some of the weeds. The Aigamo duck was formed for this special task. Bred to be flightless and fenced in, it will quite happily spend its entire life within the rice stalks gobbling any insects, slugs and some of the weeds - all for free - and then providing delicious meat when the harvest time arrives. They are super cute and follow you around the paddy, chirping loudly, hoping you will grab a handful of delicious dandelions or clovers to vary their boring diet. Paddies with ducks in them are extremely clean because they act like robot vacuum cleaners pecking and hoovering up anything that floats in the water.

Doing the weeding later gets tough.

Unfortunately the local wildlife also knows this delicacy. Reflective bands of string or whole nets are sometimes needed to keep predatory birds, hawks and eagles from snatching them from the field. And it seems there is no fence that can keep out the most cunning of predators: the fox. It was sad that on the last day of my stay at this place I missed the opportunity to say goodbye to the ducks which had happily chirped along my feet on many a day. A fox had broken in during the night and eaten a few and then just ripped to shreds each and every duck in our paddy. The farmer was more angry then me, vowing revenge. But I had nothing but sympathy for it. That is what I would have done as a fox.

Ones the rice is tall and begins to shadow the water, most of the weeds begin to stay back. However there are a few weeds, tall grass types, that can still take root and can grow rapidly to shadow the rice. And for these there are no chemicals, no machines, no ducks. One has to step into the paddy and rip them out with bare hands. And this is what I had been doing for sometime.

Stock photo: rice harvester

It is both a very boring and very exhausting task. You reach down into the muddy water and use your fingers to find anything that is beginning to grow out of the bottom around the rice plants. Usually you can only find a single blade of grass. You grab it but don't pull but follow it down into the mud with your fingertips and find its root. And then gently but firmly pull the whole plant, root and all, out and into a bucket you carry with you. And then you repeat this a couple thousand times an hour.

Even my host farmer thought this was the hardest work he had to offer. No other western volunteer had endured this job without constantly complaining. Fortunately I was at my peak physical fitness at that time, and had already acclimatized myself to the cycle of farm work at the previous place, a fruit orchard. So for me it was a challenge I though I could manage. Fortunately we usually only weeded for half a day at a time - then rested - and then did something more interesting and less heavy. And the satisfaction from completing a whole field - such weeding wouldn't be necessary until harvest time.

Bath house on a hill under mountain clouds

Once the fields were all weeded and vegetable patches taken care of, there was not much else for me to do than to hang some laundry and enjoy the mountain views, eat blue berries and look forward to onsen-bath in the evening. The local bath house was on a hill overlooking the valley and the best time to visit was after dark. The local farmers would all come and soak in the hot water after a long day of work. They would not treat us as strangers for they knew we were also working on the same orchards. 

From the pool outside you could gaze into the valley under a starry sky and just melt your aches into the steaming hot water.

 ~ Tinka ^^'

Night lights of Matsomoto ^^'

On the shapes of leaves

" When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it " ― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

On one of my walks as usual I begun to ponder the limitation of human perception in our culture and the frameworks we apply to sensory data. This came about when I found a very interesting looking tree at the side of the road. It wasn't unusual in sense of the word - it was just very old and stood out from others in a kind of majesty.

It had already begun to loose most of its branches to old age but was still retaining some really sturdy ones going up. The kind I liked to climb up when I was a younger and dared such feats. The view from the top of this one would be amazing as it was already some elevation from the rest of its surroundings at the side of a hill.

Lost in thought and admiration of its thick bark I began to wonder the process by which that bark is formed, and ultimately shed by the elements - and that it was this process which defined the shape of its bark and why it was different from the nearby trees whose bark was relatively young.

Life of an organism like a tree is mainly concentrated in two key locations of active growth - the tips of the branches which form annual buds and are responsible for flowers for reproduction, leaves for photosynthesis and the ultimate upward growth towards sunlight - and a thin layer of spongy tissue left behind on all surfaces just under the outermost bark which keeps thickening the inside truck with water and nutrient carrying channels and also forms the outer bark which protects this whole operation from the elements, pests and disease.

The scales of bark covering this old gentleman were tough as shields. Each one having endured countless cycles of harsh weather and extremes of annual climate. Only paper thin slices of dried bark would occasionally come loose and float gently to the ground - or ripped off by heavy rain and wind. Yet this old tree had seen its formative years, now slowly but surely shrinking, loosing a branch here and there, taking a beating after another. With every shedding the shields would get thinner, polished by the elements.

It was in their shape I saw all this. Yet when you think about it I didn't really see any of that. It was all a story I made up to explain away what I saw. If given a similar piece of plastic painted pink, I probably wouldn't have recognize it as a shape of a tree bark and wouldn't have made any of the conclusions about its formation - and wouldn't use words like 'shield like' to describe the shape.

In the Middle age European theologians, especially popular ones, formed many such stories to explain away things - their shapes, their meanings, purpose, existence. A cow was there to provide milk for humans and its udders were shaped specifically to fit between the fingers of the man woman milking it. Even predators were there to teach us about courage (lions), cunning (fox) or the importance of washing (parasites). This was at the time made sense to some extent because most people had not the time to really observe and examine nature.

Naturalists who came long after begun to distance themselves from such anthropocentric explanations and begun to see multiple reasons for why things appeared a certain way and even some of the processes by which they came about. Modern evolutionary biology with its basis of chemistry and ultimately physics unified and made our understanding rigorous. No longer could we judge anything by their appearances - almost any process of nature had an inner life which we could only discover ones we delved deep into its hidden processes and interactions with its surroundings.

Thus the random ramblings and walks of the naturalists became quite boring and almost irrelevant. Apart from the occasional discovery of a new species or phenomenon which the biologist and chemist would then rush to examine, verify and dissect there was nothing much the old master could with his limited senses but be nostalgic for the old days when there was still some mysteries and secrets one could discover on your own.

So turning from my rigid framework of limited perception towards the next tree I was stunned to see it covered from branch to roots with velvety silk gown. A species of months had invaded several local trees that summer and was in the process of engulfing them. Every leaf was gone leaving a bare wintery looking tree - with a web like continuous translucent white cloth neatly woven by perhaps thousands or even millions? of Bird-cherry Ermine moth caterpillars (Yponomeuta evonymella). In fact the ground under the trees was quite full of dead moths and loose wings, bright white like petals from a cherry tree.

My thoughts were: OK, here is another process. But how would I see this phenomenon if I lacked the framework of explanations for each part. Surely I would have no idea about the role of the netting in the reproductive cycle of the months - or would probably make up some sort of quite imaginative explanation for it.

Then I thought my point of view was also quite biased in that I was looking at individual months and projecting myself 'in their shoes'. Many insects are 'hive-beings' as in they only survive in groups and it is their collective effort which defines their existence. Examining a single moth, let alone trying to find its process, its motives and purpose, without the whole of its swarm would be impossible or inaccurate.

In fact the border between the 'individual' and the 'collective' is very fuzzy in reality. From the anthill down to the smallest of bacteria and viruses, we too are composed of primordial collective agreements between interacting cells - even the our cells themselves are a union of two 'organisms' - molecular cluster called mitochondria and the outer cell with its nucleus distantly related to a single bacteria. The evolutionary development of early forms of life indicates that even these components were once 'individual' lifeforms that at some point merged to form a complete symbiosis - to the extent that we no longer hardly see them as entities on their own. 

To what extent can we then examine the behavior of a species, or any phenomenon in general, when we have this bias of differentiating entities into 'actors', individuals, and then assigning them with motives or purposes - when in fact we could just as easily see them as parts of a process with many interacting levels. In fact when you think about it the 'collectivity' or the 'individuality' of the moths to the cells in the tree bark are just degrees or levels of categorization. We cannot assign them 100% into either category.

This makes observation of nature particularly challenging - and disturbing when noticing that this applies to ourselves too.  We want to assign ourselves some level of free-will, yet always at a closer examination any such 'freedom' appears uncertain and elusive.

To think that we are no more free to choose the aspects of our behavior in every day life then a tree has in forming the shape of its leaf. Both are ultimately limited by the biochemistry (signals in brains and cell division in leaves) and environmental factors (sensory and other signals to the brains and the environmental signals like direction of sunlight to the leaf). On top of all these we have our conceptual and cultural biases - I guess the leaf would have some pretty restrictive biases too about what form to try to grow under the circumstances.

Approaching storm clouds cause my brain chemistry to switch to 'seek-shelter' -mode and my brain creates an illusion to myself that I have made a decision to return to home supposedly because of a rational choice about not getting wet. This all seems very satisfying to me and I congratulate myself on my decisiveness :3

Refs:
The Biography of a Tree - James Jackson,
Free Will - Sam Harris