Harvest Breed

Early Saturday morning I woke up, got dressed, and was on the road to my first ever rice harvest in some no name village outside of town. One of my teachers in our Japanese Language class owns a rice farm and thought it would be a an excellent idea both for the sake of enriching ourselves with some hands on experience with Japanese culture, and to build some character through the activity of compulsory, unpaid manual labor.






When we reached the fields, I stood amidst a sea of yellow, the color which the rice plants assume when they are ready to be harvested. I now know what Sting was talking about in that song about barley fields.. Equipped only with my bare hands and a miniature scythe with serrated edges, I was well on my way to becoming a full-fledged Japanese farmer. I must admit that after a while, my agrarian activities made me feel as though I were a Medeival peasant, or some feudal serf sacrificing his time and livelihood to a ruling class of nobility, all in exchange for shelter and protection from other hostile fiefdoms.






After a some time went by, I soon realized that clearing this field by hand would take ages. Bending over in the scorching sun, working with no immediate cessation in sight, a strange urge suddenly came over me to start humming a song to the rhythm of my bodily swinging, an old Gospel hymn I remembered from the church-going days of my childhood in the deep South. I immediately stood upright and said to myself, "What the hell?? Why does this all feel so wrong..." It later occurred to me just how funny and also inappropriate that moment was.


After about 30 minutes of work....






After that brief realization, a much needed respite was in order. It took us about 30 minutes of hacking away at the corners in order to make enough room for a small tractor to squeeze through, and clear the rest of field at twice the pace that 50 able-bodied men would have been capable of. Thank God for that. I was beginning to think that this "cultural experience" my Japanese teacher conjured up was a fabrication, a means to get his field cleared and his rice crop out on the market sooner.

Deus ex machina...




Whatever amount of resentment I may have had was immediately put to rest once I saw the reward for our farming efforts. We were treated to a Japanase BBQ of Brobdignagian proportions. Chicken, Beef, Pork, Squid, and a medley of veggies, all slow-cooked and marinated in a sweet, tangy sauce, the taste of which I'll not easily forget. Beef cutlets are a little expensive in the supermarkets, so I mainly devoured what was red and bloody. After the feasting, our teacher wowed us with his fishing expertise, as he adeptly snagged a small fish using a pole without any bait or tackle from an irrigation dike that ran along the perimeter of the rice field. It too was doomed to a fate of a slow-roasted delectability.



The First Course...




At the conlusion of the meal, it turned out to be a bad decision to eat as much as I did, because I had a training session with Renofa, a semi-pro football club based in my prefecture, and add to that my overall lack of fitness, I was not in a position to seriously impress the players or the coaches. In the end, I did reasonably well, but you can be sure that next time I'll use a little more forethought. I'm writing this entry on a bus taking me back to Hagi from the stadium where the training session was, and I have a nice long 3-day weekend to start enjoying.



What the machine did after 20 minutes....


















Now we have enough rice to feed the entire village...