My goals for the trip were simple: a rare rice-cutting excursion offered by the youth hostel I'd opted to stay at, a meal at Ume no Hana for excellent tofu delights, a visit to Dazaifu to see the flying plum tree (which followed Sugaware no Michizane all the way from Kyoto.. well, more detailed history later), and onto onsen in Takeo. Shopping and a movie in Fukuoka, time permitting.
I arrived at Fukuoka airport late Friday night and, after bumbling around dark alleys and eventually getting a hand-written fool-proof map from a rice/sake-shop owner... and then letting lost again... found my youth hostel, Khaosan Fukuoka. After checking in and dumping my stuff, I meandered upstairs to the common room and was nearly floored to see a room full ' o gaijin. ... well, it was an international youth hostel and listed in my English guidebook-- that's how I'd found it, after all-- but after 2 months of relative seclusion from other foreigners, it was shocking to walk into a room and be surrounded by native English speech. There were maybe 10 people from various countries crammed around a table in various stages on the path to drunkeness, and I sat down mostly to observe and soak in their (progressively slurring) words and accents. We played a rather complicated card game that I don't think I can ever duplicate, even though the guy who explained it swore that it was the easiest card game in the world. He even boasted that he taught and played it with a group of Japanese homeless people once, mostly using gestures. In retrospect I have to wonder.
The group soon broke up, though, most everyone going to hit the clubs and me to bed to get up early. At 7 AM the next morning, the van departed from the hostel for a rice and vegetable farm in Kurogi (黒木）. It was an interesting 2-hour drive, mostly urban sprawl for the first half and sub-rural hamlets in the last hour. I was particularly impressed by a stone lantern/statue shop which had Jizo statues intermingled with stone lanterns and surrounding a clump of giant pot-bellied frogs on their hind legs. Kind of surreal.
People had gathered from the area at a ramshackle building I later learned was the local elementary school... I know my schools are huge and mostly beautiful, possibly over-funded, but this one needed help. There were many small children underfoot, and I realized this was probably a yearly family outing event. We soon introduced ourselves-- I got a spontaneous round of applause at my ingenious use of Japanese-- and loaded into the back of mini-trucks to make the climb up to the fields. It was kind of like a roller coaster, and while my truck was comfortably roomy, the one ahead of us was bursting with small children who raised their arms up and shrieked the whole way.
It turned out that rice wasn't the first item on the list. First, we had to fertilize the daikon, then harvest sweet potatoes and sawa imo, a softer, almost gummy potato whose consistency has been compared to natto (fermented soybeans), but I can't agree. Nothing can get as nasty as natto without some serious fermentation. We also harvested some gobo, although the ones in the field were shorter and stocker than the slim, >1 meter-long ones I'd seen in the grocery stores. It was nice to be able to root around in the dirt again, and the view from the field was gorgeous (the patches of yellow-green are rice fields), so I didn't mind the additional non-advertised labor.
Soon we took a short break and then charged onwards to the rice field. It was actually my first time seeing rice close-up, and the plant was more grassy than I had imagined.
It was also planted in clumps, which was important to keep track of while working with hand tools. I was given a small sickle-like instrument and told to cut 6-8 clumps which would be bundled together. Scything away, we made progress, but there were so many clumps! ... I had a lot of fun, though, even if kids did occasionally machoistically throw themselves in front of my sickle.
In addition to the physical learning-- seeing hands-on how difficult it is to harvest a rice field and trying it myself for a few hours-- I learned a little about rice equivalents. One of the farmers had brought along a newspaper to demonstrate. Eight rice clumps in a 2x4 arrangement occupy an area about the size of one folded-out newspaper page, which is enough rice to feed 3 people breakfast. It completely blew my mind; no wonder Japan's flat spaces are covered in rice fields. Most people do have rice for breakfast, and then there's lunch and dinner to consider as well.After cutting and binding the rice, the bundles were strung upside-down on bamboo poles to dry. Looking at everyone working away-- kids still cutting, elders tying bundles, and everyone chipping in to hang the stuff up-- I thought of that cheesy phrase "it takes a village." ...I'm sure that one hard-working farming family could've managed the job, but it did take ~30 mostly inexperienced but enthusiastic adults and children nearly 2 hours to cut the entire field. The main farmer said that the volume of rice we cut was enough to feed one 3-member family for one year (assuming rice is eaten at every meal)... so about 365 days x 3 meals x 3 people, which results in an area of 3,285 folded-out newspaper pages.
After all of our labors getting the rice strung up, we cleaned up and had a lovely lunch prepared by a gaggle of obaachans who must have been working all morning to feed the ravenous hoard. Watching the wise rural crones crouching around the pot of soup, I couldn't help but think of Macbeth.
In addition to this Fukuoka-style white miso-based soup, which included matzo-ball like dumplings with bits of sweet potato hidden inside, we had that rare kind of super-strong homemade tsukemono (pickles). The daikon tsukemono almost burned from overpowering miso. Excellent.
... there are more pictures of the rice-cutting expedition on the hostel's website, for those of you who want more, at http://www.khaosan-fukuoka.com/2008/10/_photos.html .
1 comment:
Now you know where rice comes from--something that most people do not know.
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