This Compost by Walt Whitman

Christmas, birthday and New year rolled into one for our neighbour: The joy of muck

Nothing gladdens the heart of the vegetable grower anywhere more than a great steaming heap of muck. And in some ways there appears to be a yet smaller gap than usual between people and nature here. At the level of feeling at least, the relationship between the two is understood to be symbiotic rather than simply exploitative - though plenty of that goes on at the behavioural level, especially by organisations.  Shinto and its pantheon of animistic nature spirits with which people are linked by comfortable habit and tradition, rather than belief in the western sense, frame the world differently from monotheist religions that place the world entirely at the disposal of the chosen ones - people.

So it is hard to imagine that Walt Whitman would have written the poem "This compost" if he had grown up here, up to his elbows in earth and matching his activity to the seasons and the weather. 

This Compost

1 

Something startles me where I thought I was safest,
I withdraw from the still woods I loved,
I will not go now on the pastures to walk,
I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,
I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.

O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper'd corpses within you?
Is not every continent work'd over and over with sour dead?

Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv'd,
I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through
the sod and turn it up underneath,
I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.

2
Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form'd part of a sick person--yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,
The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,
The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,
The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,
The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on
their nests,
The young of poultry break through the hatch'd eggs,
The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the
colt from the mare,
Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato's dark green leaves,
Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in
the dooryards,
The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata
of sour dead.

What chemistry!
That the winds are really not infectious,
That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which
is so amorous after me,
That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues,
That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited
themselves in it,
That all is clean forever and forever,
That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,
That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,
That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that
melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me,
That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,
Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once
catching disease.

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless
successions of diseas'd corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings
from them at last. 

Walt Whitman 1819-1892


That knocked my socks off when I read it as a teenager, and re-reading it living here throws a new light on it. His poem, as well as separating man and nature also is profoundly uneasy with death and illness, humans offering nature only the "sour dead" and their "foul meat" in return for its "prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops." Apart from the fact that he was probably a bit hazy on soil biology (aren't we all?), is this based in the Christian split between what, at its worst, can be seen as the sublime soul and the disgusting body, overlaid with his experience of seeing field hospitals in the American Civil War?  Strange, given his celebration of the living body elsewhere in his work - or perhaps natural as a reaction to the betrayal of the body in death which ends all that sensual pleasure.


I'm guessing Whalt Whitman didn't grow his own food

In pick 'n mix Japan, weddings are Shinto, but funerals are Buddhist. In Buddhism ancestor veneration means that your beloved deceased are still literally part of the family, receiving gifts, photos and partaking in family meals via offerings on the Butsudan, a shrine in cupboard form. Bodies are cremated, and in a hard core form of closure which must help the grieving process if it doesn't traumatise you altogether, relatives together place the charred bones in a box with chops sticks. "Mum, could you just give me a lift with Dad's skull?" This explains both the look of shock on a Japanese person's face if you clash chopsticks with them while eating, and their more integrated attitude to death, so hidden in modern western society until it crashes down on your head.

John Barleycorn - or whatever those little oil seeds are - must die. What of it?

Lacking mains sewers means that in our village we also have a closer  relationship with bodily corruption than is completely comfortable. In summer the smell gets cheerfully brazen at times, beating you around the head like a blast of sound as you pass a particularly ripe septic tank. Everyone ignores it.

Those who know me will have known this figuratively for some time, but as I write I am also literally full of shit. Water is leaking into our toilet, and the tank is overflowing. In an estate agent's nightmare, the air in our house does not, sadly, smell of coffee and fresh-baked bread, but I deal with it by re-imagining it as garlic. My wife, whose nose is preternaturally sensitive, is not happy.

I grew up seeing the corpses of sheep melting into Pennine hillsides, and always felt that it a natural thing that I would be doing in due course. Whitman seeing us as part of this compost is a wonderful insight, it's just a shame he wasn't as at peace with it as my neighbour - but now his pieces are.

But what do you think?

Saved by noodles

Unidentified wild mushrooms, rarely seen in the shops and gathered on the mountains by old hands whose knowledge I trust (almost) completely, glistened under red grains of schimi on a hot bed of udon noodles. No ordinary bowl of noodles this, it sat on the trestle table on the playground of a disused school which had lasted from the 1870's to the 1970's. All around were stalls and the ear-splitting distortion of an antiquated public address system not designed to take loud music. I ate with one finger in my bad ear. We were all here to help get the village back on the map and back on it's feet, and what better in a food-obsessed nation than a noodle festival to draw in the salivating punters?

A landslide in the spring downpours smashed down on a snow shed and made the main valley road south of Tamonashi unsafe to use. Rather more important than the inconvenience this caused to cyclist like myself, it severed the whole village from much of the tourist traffic that brings income to those who run accommodation, shops, and restaurants. Commuters had an extra hour of mountain roads to negotiate twice a day. Seven months of risky engineering work later, the road is open again, and the noodle festival was in full swing, run by volunteers from all over the area, and with lots of familiar faces behind the stalls.

Other dishes of a less culinary nature included the team of dancers having a lot of fun in their Kung Fu - looking costumes, leaping about on the gravel to blaring backing tracks, which must have echoed up the mountainsides to confused squirrels and bears disturbed in their mid-day snoozes up trees.

Upstairs in the old school, three rooms are a haunting home-made museum, each thing with its own hand written luggage label tied on with string. Many are still in use today, Aizu being itself a kind of living museum, but others a mystery. The walls carried fading photographs of the people for whom these objects were simply useful. The dusty clothes, patched and worn, sometimes, like the ankle length jacket, made from old futons and kimonos, were rawly personal, imprinted with the wearer's shape.

Uncomfortable information. A hand made aid for teaching anatomy

In the late afternoon musicians began to play to a scattering of people in the school gym.  I wondered where the young people were, as this gig was clearly aimed at them. Were they at home playing with their DS's, or in the shopping centres in Wakamatsu? When they dream of life in the cities isn't it just this kind of thing that they dream of going to? And yet when they have it here, they don't come.

Armed to a man or woman with acoustic guitars and the occasional harmonica, the performers were skilled singer-song writers in the efficient but somewhat off-the-peg mould that often afflicts many genres of Japanese popular music. If they were less skilled might it be better? Then they would have to invent their own ham-fisted and strange way of doing things and whatever is in them could come straight out.

The first two boys were winsome, poppy and sweet, the second a little more there, but the last performer was really good of her kind, though in all cases it was probably best not to understand the lyrics, like opera.

She played beautifully constructed slow acoustic songs with well judged and varied dynamics, her voice haunting and moving, creating that stillness and focus in the room that tells you the audience are no longer in it, but have floated out somewhere to meet the music. She deserved the young people to be here.

On the rack

Sun dried rice on the rack, with its rain hat on

Late September and Early October sees Aizu heavy with green-gold rice heaved onto tall racks, every doorstep full of aka kabucha (red pumpkins), walnuts, mushrooms from the mountains and all the riches of the harvest. Compliment someone on their sweet potatoes and you will get an armful, and bags of chestnuts and fungi like nipples arrive unbidden. It beats shopping, a warm glow of cash free exchange, no strings attached.

Drying rice in the sun is said to increase the flavour and increase nutrition, and fetches a premium over the more common machine-dried version. Here most is grown for personal consumption and to send to children long gone to the city. What will they do when the old ones are gone too, and their fields rank with weeds? Rice is much more than a food. The kanji character for a man resembles a paddy, and means "One who derives his power from rice."

Daikon thinnings and beans, chilled and washed in an old bath

Our neighbour opposite gets an extraordinary amount of produce from a small patch of ground, an endless round of seasonal food being trimmed, grated, pickled or dried for that day's food or for through the winter. This week it included walnuts. Nothing is wasted. An old tiled bath is used to both wash vegetables and keep them cool until meal time. Thinned out plants are eaten, leaves and all.

Despite our towny incompetence and reprehensible laziness some food miraculously leaped out of our own garden this year, and sometimes we had the satisfaction of meals entirely home grown, with only minutes from ground to plate, which must have come as a shock to the aubergines. This week I astounded the waiting world with my first attempt at green tomato and apple chutney and managed not to burn the house down. Unfortunately a nice bit of strong Cheddar to go with it is 5,000 miles away.

Our benign neglect produced enough for a daily meal for months.

The plants seem to be as resilient as the people. For example, in attempting to be organic we don't spray, but allowed some black caterpillars to get the upper hand, and five rows of autumn plantings were reduced to rags. We assumed that was the end of both them and our veg cred with the neighbours, but returned from three days away to see them resurgent and thriving. Amazing. They must be adapted to tolerating the insects' life cycle, or we were just lucky....or, come to think of it, the neighbours may have taken pity on us and sprayed them while we were away. Hmmm. Much more likely, come to think of it.
Don't come the innocent with me, madam

Scare bears

One of the bi-products of there being many hairdressers in the area stares out like a young Marc Almond, with album cover weirdness, through the netting surrounding a pumpkin patch. Hairdressers are as numerous in Aizu villages as pubs in English ones, and one folically well-connected smallholder has enterprisingly blagged some mannequins in a spirit of surreal husbandry to scare away the many bears that are now causing anxiety by coming into the local villages in unprecedented numbers.

In the next-door village a particularly persistent black bear was unfortunately shot dead last week. It had taken to sleeping in a rice field rather than the usual tree platforms in the woods, and it was probably only a matter of time before it attacked someone - and there are several children in the village. Like a children's tale, 30km away a woman stepped out of her house in the early morning to tend her garden and was mauled by three bears, though happily she survived. This was probably by a mother with two cubs, which stay together for their first two years.

We have always taken them seriously (and taken suitable precautions), but bears are no longer a fairytale or theoretical construct for me now. Having waited eighteen months to see one, I recently saw two in the space of ten days, fortunately from the safety of the car. The first poked it's head out between someone's car and their house at 9.40pm in the biggest village - emphasising that you really can see them anywhere. The second dramatically ran across a mountain road at 8.45pm. Luckily I was able to stop in time, but the image of it filling the windscreen in the headlights as it lolloped along, big and muscular with thick fur rippling with the rhythm of it's gait will stay with us. It was a full moon, and the wildlife was waiting to throw itself in front of us that night - shortly after a Tanuki appeared, followed by a Japanese Marten, which ran on the road in front of us for 500m instead of heading for safety.

Laughing in the face of forensics: a bear takes the subtle approach to corn-related crime.

There are more bears appearing in the villages than in living memory. Is this because the winters are milder and more survive, because there has been a change in the food supply in the woods, or, as the locals postulate, because there are fewer mountain allotments to raid than there used to be? They are mad for corn, pumpkins, and water melons, and who can blame them - Aizu vegetables are wonderful and provide more nutrition than anything to be found in the woods.

No cold, no heat, no tiredness

Now that the leaf canopy has arrived to soften the snow-mauled mountains, cloaking their winter wounds in green flames, it can seem even more as if they are empty. Looking at these precipitous wooded slopes you could be forgiven for thinking that yours are the only human eyes at work.

Aekichi-san in May on his daily rounds looking for sansai (wild vegetables). He is in his seventies

Yet every day, in every area, beneath the secretive trees scores of eyes are bent to the ground from the early morning. Gradient, undergrowth, bears and snakes are no obstacle. When you have been doing the same thing for fifty or sixty years, why worry? It is as natural as breathing for the inhabitants of Aizu to collect wild vegetables. It is almost an automatic response to the colour green to try and match it to one of the many shapes and forms that spell 'food.' They are not hunters, but they are certainly gatherers. And they do it with a passion and focus that equals any animal hunt.

This isn't an occasional pass-time - it is a serious part of everyone's diet, and the picking, preparation, preservation and eating of sansai is an important part of local culture, on a par with farming and vegetable growing itself. Special patches are closely guarded secrets, and it is a matter of great concern if outsiders, especially organised gangs, come and steal the locals' wild food. Each season provides it's own changing harvest, each with it's own taste and texture, but each with a sense of the mountain in it. Local people feel that there is a special kind of health to be had from sansai, as if the power of the mountain is somehow in it - and looking at them, who is to doubt it? It is certainly in your body if you are the one who goes and gets it every day...

Preparing zenmai, a complicated process. It is poisonous if you don't get it right.

Now that the growing season is here, aunty Siako-san is helping us in the allotment, as we know what is most accurately described as 'bugger all' about growing things. Hell, I can't even grow hair. She fits us in between her own rice fields and vegetable plots, always on the go now that winter no longer keeps her a prisoner in the house. Her and her husband won't stop until the rice is in now, always with a ready laugh and apparently tireless. "If you are a farmer," she said over a cuppa in our kitchen, "You cannot feel the cold, you cannot feel the heat, and you cannot feel tired." Then she laughed, and went out to do some more work.

Coming back from picking Kogomi (an edible fern shoot) with Aekichi-san in May, we crossed some small rice fields in the hills that looked as if they were still being worked, although there was no road to them. Further on, we met a wizzened little man in his eighties at the end of the nearest track, contemplating the snow that was preventing him riding further in on his moped. On the floor were some tools and heavy looking sacks that he obviously wanted to get through to the rice paddies. Hayasaki-san and he knew eachother and chatted a while, while I weighed up whether to offer to help or not - always a difficult decision with this elderly but extremely proud populace. Well, he was looking balefully at that snow, and he did look to be well on in his eighties. What the hell. "Can I help you with those?" As if prodded with a sharp stick he immediately picked up the bags and began walking across the snow.  No cold, no heat, no tiredness.

The meaning of food

Tetsutaro and Tomoko Tamaki, orgainic rice growers from Chiba

Tetsutaro and Tomoko Tamaki are examples of how the way food is produced and sold in Japan  is being re-evaluated. Part of an environmentally and socially aware generation across the world, they are asking  questions about large scale agribusiness and  its impact on smaller food producers, and on the quality of food we eat. They are also interested in the relationship between food consumers and producers. For most of us, that means no relationship at all, but they would like to see that change.

They grow organic rice in Chiba prefecture, and sell only to people that know them personally and trust the quality of their food. Known as 'face to face' trading, consumers are able to know definitely how food is produced and who their money is going to. Food sold in this way is likely to cost more than supermarket food, but it is local, and the buyer knows that all their money is going to the producer with earth under their nails, rather than them receiving a laughably small percentage of a supermarket price.

"Why is food so cheap?" Tomoko asks. "It is too cheap for small farmers to make any money from. Small farmers in Japan really struggle to make a living, as the price of rice is too cheap. Imported rice, and rice that has been grown using lots of chemicals on big farms means that the people who traditionally farmed Japan are having a very hard time." While Japan still has many relatively small farms compared to other developed countries (for example England, where land ownership is concentrated into fewer hands), her view is that most of these smallholdings are just subsisting, growing vegetables and rice for their own use, as selling it is not a viable option for many.

This makes it all the harder for Japanese farmers to think about moving towards organic production, though Tetsutaro and Tomoko are hoping to gradually get this message across. "Small farmers are quite traditional, so you have to give them time to come around slowly."

"We need to think about paying more for our food. Of course it is nice to have cheap things, but there are hidden costs to other people." They did not grow up as farmers, but became interested in food and decided to be part of the move back to the land that some  people are attempting to make in Japan. "It can take time to be accepted, but to be honest we get on well with everyone - better sometimes than the older families do themselves! There are feuds going back generations, maybe hundreds of years, so long that the families have no idea what started it - just that their family is not supposed to talk to the other family! They all talk to us though."

They provide an alternative image for what it can mean to be a farmer. Growing high quality food for sale through their own distribution network, and mixing that with their lives as musicians and a dose of social awareness, they show that farming can be carried out in many different ways and can co-exist within a rich cultural framework. After we finished talking they packed up the hollow tree trunk and big wooden hammer used for beating omochi rice. Every year they bring some of their rice to Tokyo, so that people who have experienced homelessness can join in the fun of making and eating new year omochi, which is essential to any Japanese new year.

The laughing, shouting, grinning circle of  people had chanted in time with the swing of the mallet, loud in the confined space between two buildings. Far from where the rice was grown, but linked by the companionship of this ritual, we had all shared in part of the real meaning of food.

Visit Tomoko and Testutaro's website

****************************

Festivals in autumn

Masks exhibited in Kawaguchi, Aizu, Fukishima-ken for National Culture Day

Festivals in Japan come thick and fast. The calendars that are hung everywhere (I counted eight in one front room) are peppered with seasonal days and celebrations, including the pitifully few national holidays that the embattled and hammered down workforce are entitled to. People throw themselves into these with a will, whether helping voluntarily or for a few extra Yen staffing one of the many food stalls that seem almost to be the main point of any gathering.

Nursing stew into life

Operating on an improvised breeze-block cooker

It's good to see everyone, children often included, setting to with a will, enjoying the banter and catching up on gossip over a big steaming pot of something. Remarkably each small village still makes it's own festivals rather than joining together into something bigger. This would perhaps be more rational, attracting more visitors to any one activity of performance, but somehow less their own, and besides, it's always been this way. Therefore for National Culture Day on 3rd November, there were three exhibitions, three sets of performances, and three lots of food to try - if you managed to scurry round them all.
The ageing curve in Aizu

The white heat of attention was on the vegetable stall

Gender roles are alive and well in Kaneyama

As with most things, It's even better if you join in and contribute something yourself rather than simply spectating. For us the main point of the cultural day was our Taiko performance - or rather three of them, one for each village. The boy, the wife and me joined the group whose purpose is to help children learn Taiko, though I had decided to stop after this, as the deafening noise is not the best for my bad ear. 

Our first go was at the splendiferous venue up the road, big and with great acoustics. The gravitas of our performance was somewhat lessened by my slipping on my arse between pieces as I rushed into place, foolishly forgetting to take my socks off for the shiny stage boards. The audience thoroughly enjoyed it though - no respect, some people. The second was outdoors by the council offices, and it stopped raining just in time. Otherwise I could have caused further merriment by whacking hell out of the rain canopies every time I raised my arms. 
Taiko with the Jomon period hilltop fort behind (photo Ichikawa-san)

By the last performance that night we had got into our stride, and I managed not to fall over or knock anyone else's stick out of their hand. The boy was beating thunderously on the huge drum centre stage with two other seven-year-olds. We worked ourselves up faster and faster, movements meshed with sound, louder and louder, beating back the mountains above us, until animals in the snow-dusted woods around must have paused in wonder, nosing off into the dark in search of food. Maybe I won't stop after all.

************************

Late autumn in Aizu

The usually soft purity of the Aizu air is besmirched with smoke in late autumn. From many points it rises, curling and rising to join a band floating across the valley at a hundred feet, each one the result of some activity mysterious to the uninitiated. Burning off, tidying up, making ash, smoking or distilling, pungent and drifting, these funeral pyres for the end of the season are part of rituals whose attendants have often vanished.

Smoke house, Showa, Aizu. Probably making charcoal, widely used for cleansing

Dinosaur still, Showa, Aizu

Wild mushrooms  are to be found in the woods now, if you know where to look - and the local people have always known. The kaki trees are heavy with fruit, and the bears are tempted into the villages for this treat, bright orange with big seeds. Tiny wild kiwi fruits are secreted in the woods too, sweet of flesh, or deliciously tart if you eat their soft skins. We were lucky enough to be given some. If we had an oven the boy and me would make a crumble in memory of the blackberries we picked and cooked every year in England, just as my parents showed me.

Our next door neighbour's wild mushrooms drying in the sun

Wild miniature Kiwi - perfect replicas the size of grapes

••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Preparing for snow

This tells you two things: these are well-loved shrubs; and the snow is going to be deep.

The rice is in, the weather is patchy, and snow is coming in a month or two. It is time to prepare with an attention to detail commensurate with the scale of the coming problem, and that is considerable. A metre can fall in one day, and Aizu has one of the heaviest snow-falls in Japan. But people have time. The eighty eight actions it takes to produce rice have been accomplished, and it has been a good year - wetter than usual, but dry for the important two weeks needed to ripen the grain after it had formed. There is a relaxed relief in the air, people smile and laugh even more now that the rice, that most central foundation of life, is secure and in store.

Piles of rice husks are everywhere, to be used in their turn for many things

The cycle of seasonal crops continues to the death of the year, growing and drying, preparing and hoarding, squirrelling away for the hungry months to come. Old habits, ancient habits, die hard, and who doesn't feel better with groaning cupboards when the storm howls outside? So we all have cars, the roads are ploughed, the Co-op delivers and the internet brings all to our door. Is that any reason to get lazy? We remember real hunger, and that is not a game. And who can make food like our food? Everyone knows that ours are the best rice, the best beans, the best vegetables - the supermarkets are full of stuff from China. Who knows what they put in it over there? When everything on your table comes from your own hand, you know where you are.

Husband and wife digging the good stuff from the ground: sweet potatoes

Marching stooks and tripods of grass on stubble or bare earth push back the green to outposts of winter cabbages and leeks. Each village has it's own pattern, it's own way of doing this, some in fat bundles, others stacked around trees, still more in ingenious arrangements all tied up with themselves like POW s on role call.

People love their gardens too, and protect their shrubs and trees before their houses. Yet another use for the indispensable long pine poles is to create wooden spires above each one. They pin the snow in place and keep it from slumping onto the beloved with crushing indifference, a careless wrestler flopping his vast white belly down to sleep. Later we can make sure the house is OK.

They say that the Kusai-mushi ('stink bugs'), that clamour for re-admittance to the same houses they left in the spring, know when it is going to be heavier winter snow than usual. The more there are, the heavier will be the fall. They only want the same as us, to be buried under a pile of futons and blankets, pooling our heat, huddled together under a safe roof to wait it out. The same beetles that flicked and scuttled at speed in the spring sun, evading the stabbing chop-sticks of their human hunters, to live a life green in the woods, now stagger slowly, befuddled and old, heading for any nook or cranny that will  have them, and are easy prey. We don't want to share our winter quarters with them, picking them out of our socks and underwear, hopefully before putting them on....Though I suppose to them we don't smell too good either.


Late October, and it is the turn of soya beans to be dried

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Vegetable givers

Part of today's haul - not easy to manage on bike handlebars

The unstoppable generosity of Aizu people, like smallholders the world over, is amazing to behold and receive. Any thought of trying to refuse, guiltily aware that you cannot respond in kind, is bulldozed by the realisation that it is more likely to offend and confuse the giver rather than relieve them of an obligation. What If giving and sharing are indeed founded in the dry and cold machinations of the selfish gene, a way of bonding social obligations in times of surplus and a mutual protection in hard times? It is also a way of expressing pride in your abilities to grow and to find food, and a way of touching stranger and neighbour alike that needs neither language nor explanation. If only the scale and suspicions of city life did not frustrate this most basic social act.

At first I thought people gave us so much because we were new and my wife's family are from the village, and that it would stop once people realised that we were not able to give as much back. But no, it appears they expect nothing in return, being happy that we have brought a child to this, one of the fastest ageing communities in Japan. "I love to hear the sound of children playing, and your son being here brings the other children to this part of the village to play," said the mayor's wife as she dropped off yet another offering. And yet it is enough to be simply passing through.

Yesterday I took my lens for a short ride in the last hours of slanted sunlight, meaning to reach the top of a pass before returning. I stopped to look at one of the Gaudi-like iron fire towers that each village has, with bells and a small precarious platform perched above rusting ladders. Distracted by the light glinting off a rail-crossing mirror, I moved into the allotments, to be greeted by the man working there behind his house.

Yokota-san and his wife Uriko-san - they'd give you veg as soon as look at you

We shot the breeze in stuttering chunks, manfully and politely ignoring the mangled mess of my barely existent Japanese. Where was I from? Where was I going? Where is my house? We managed to get as far as establishing my village and house, and he was delighted that not only was I actually living here, but that I had a child at school - that really cheered him up. He wanted to know which of the many families in the area with the same name my wife's mother belonged to - we struggled with that one. Then came the magic words that opened the vegetable floodgates. Looking across his well-stocked allotment full of healthy and big plants, I said "Sugoi yasai des - kileh, neh?" (Great vegetables - beautiful aren't they?). Works every time. "Ah! Choto mateh!" (Wait a minute!) he said, and bustled around, clipping here, cutting there, uprooting in another corner. i knew better than to try and stop him.

His wife came around the corner and joined in on the act, cutting some beautiful greens with small yellow flowers.

Eaten within the hour

She was getting carried away, in her element, looking around for what could be next, bringing out a big cardboard box. "No, no, he's on a bike!" Yokota-san cried. "What, no basket on the front?" she gestured. How strange. I teetered home on my shortened but enriched way, a large plastic bag with a big cabbage, carrots, daikon radish, broccoli, and greens endangering my steering. "Come again!" he called, enjoying the break in routine and the chance to be appreciated by someone other than his neighbours, who all have the same prodigious growing skills, and therefore probably take it for granted.

I arrived at the house joyously, like a hunter home from the hill. "Look what I've got!" "Oh, yes, said the big M. "Aunty dropped off some sweet potatoes, and M-chan's mum sent some cakes round too." That's my thunder stolen, by Thor. Wouldn't you know it. Upstaged by the neighbours, vegetable givers every last one. Last time I went next door to borrow some pliers (charmingly called 'Pinchi') I came back with a bag of wild mushrooms for goodness sake. Ah well, you can't fight it - might as well eat it... And we gave the cabbage we had previously bought to a mum picking up her child: serves 'em right.

Flippin' sweet potatoes

••••••••••••••••••••••••

Early autumn, Aizu

Come the autumn, come the seeds, the first blush of red and brown on the mountainsides, the high grass and the rice harvest drying on the tall racks.

Bandai-san above the last unharvested rice on the plain

The temperature is sweetly comfortable, the light softening and golden towards evening which draws down with a new coolness. Time to check the heaters and sort out some extra bedding.


Pumpkins are on every step: these are ours

The garden still provides most of our vegetables - here's supper

Chestnuts are everywhere, drying on doorsteps or lying ungathered in the road, though the best ones will have fallen to the industry of the busy locals, who are out there every day. They keep the grass short under their own chestnut trees to make them easy to find when they fall, so don't take these. They - chestnuts, not the locals - are eaten roasted, steamed, or cooked with rice to make Kuri-gohan (chestnut rice). Their shining brown goodness hidden in fleshy green-spiked balls is one of the highlights of the year.

Chestnuts as they are found in the woods

Drying on a doorstep

Autumn is nearly here: above the Tadami river

Sunflower seedheads ready for harvest

Two metre high grass stooks nod like waiting courtiers....

In the court of the crimson king

••••••••••••••••••••