Harvest and rice straw

This is a harvesting season in Japan. Rice paddies in this area are now almost dried and harvested except for some varieties like mochi rice and okute rice. Yesterday, I went to visit a friend in a village in the mountains with my wife, and saw a farmer cutting rice straw in a dried paddy. The smell of dried straw was refreshing.
Traditionally, rice straw was stored and used for various use. Rope, sheets, baskets, sandals, boots and many other things were made of rice straw. To build a traditional house, rice straw was used for thatching and plastering. It was used as fodder and bed for draft cattle and caws. Rice straw is used for mulching and composting. In some area where timbers are scarce, they used it as fuel. Rices straw was essential to make a living in rural area in Japan.
Time has been changed and now there are much less demand for rice straw. Rope made of rice straw is still used, and you can find sandals and ornaments made of it in the souvenir shop. Shrine needs it for their ceremony and there are still demands for traditional Japanese house construction. But cows and cattle are long gone from ordinary farm and every house has its electricity and supply of gas. No one needs as much rice straw as they produce every year, and excess straw are cut down into small and scattered in the paddies to be decomposed in the winter.
Still, you need rice straw to maintain a vegetable garden. It can help seedling taking root in the spring, and help vines to clime for peas and beans. You don't get good vegetables if you don't get enough rice straw. If you want to grow vegetable in Japanese rural area, you need to grow rice in paddy along with vegetables. In this sense, a farmer in Japan is essentially a rice grower.
I have a small vegetable garden, but I don't have a rice paddy. In this sense, I am a pseudo farmer.

Homecoming in Obon

I always realize it is a season of Obon when all the grass in the edge of the paddies and gardens, roadside and paths are cut in the heat of the mid-summer. Old people in the villages like to keep their house, gardens and paddies tidy. And especially before the Obon season, they want them cozier than ever. It is because this is the season when their ancestors visit them from the world after. Obon is more or less like Halloween in the western culture. On the first day of Obon, people will go to graveyard to welcome the spirits of their ancestors, and they will send them back after several days staying together in their home. Naturally, they want their home tidy to welcome the spirits.
But there is another reason. In Obon season, many office are closed, and their sons and daughters now living in the city will come home with their children. The old people in the villages want to welcome their descendant more than their ancestors, even if they deny. Older people always love to see their grandchildren anywhere in the world.
Bon dancing will be held in the middle of the village. In many case, the population of the villages are too small to make a dancing circle, and there are no dancing in those villages. In other cases, the festivities of the Bon-Odori are just as the same in the old days, with children coming from the cities.

I know how those children feels, because I was one of them many years ago. They don't have a good time because they don't feel at home in their grandparents' village. They might be interested in some strange things in a strange place. There are old wares they will never see in the city. They might be thrilled pushing a one-wheeled cart around or cut weeds with their sticks. But soon they will be lost, frightened. They will seek their parents who drink beer and talk something they don't understand. Even the language they use sounds strange. They want their daily life back, don't want the festivity of the Bon-Odori.

Still, the slim chance of survival of the mountain villages in Japan lies in these homecoming in Obon season. If the sons and daughters in the city will never bring their children back in the place where their parents live, eventually, there will be no one in the city who knows there still exist such a place as a mountain village. They surely will think it vanished long ago, with nursing stories they heard when they were babies.
There is still a hope that someday those children will return to their ancestors' place to save the mountain villages. I think it is not likely to happen, but there are people hoping it will be.
At least, the old people in the villages will always welcome their grandchildren back.

Sons and Daughters of the Dying People

The villages in the rural part of Japan are now dying with decreasing population. It may sound as if these people are like endangered species in the mountains, or minority ethnic group on the verge of an ethnocide. But it is not true. Those villages are dying because the people living in there are dying for the aging. There are only small number of young families to support them. The function and tradition passed on from generation to generation had to be stopped, and some village had been closed down. But they haven't lost their sons and daughters. Only, they are now living in the cities, and living their lives in totally different ways.
You may wonder that it should be an ethnocide to force people move away from their homeland and abandon their traditional lifestyle. In a way, yes. When you visit a deserted village in the mountain, stand in the middle of the street, you feel sadness and anger for the things lost. The people once lived there were all long gone. You only see ruined houses, some are two or three hundred years old, and summer weeds to cover. The economical structure that once supported some hundred of people is now completely destructed. No future, no hope, and no one is there.
Yet, looking back history, you cannot call it an ethnoside. It sure was sad and miserable for the people to leave the old life they were living, but it was them who decided to move, abandon their tradition for good. Many of them were deceived to leave, but they were the partner in the crime. They consciously became victims of the economical growth, which they believed, and still believes is the only way to the bright future. In a way, they were right, in another, wrong.

Fifty years ago, young families in those villages intentionally sent their sons and daughters to the city for their education. They believed that it will make their children rich, and eventually bring them a fortune. They had sensed that the structure of the economy and society had dramatically changed, and there would be no scope for the villages to prosper. They thought that next generation would only be able to survive in the city, not in the village. They wanted to pass their tradition to their sons and daughters, and to pass it, their children must survive. So, they chose city life for their next generation.
In this way, they were right. Their children had built an invincible economic empire, and became rich enough to send them money. Their own life gets harder and harder in the countryside, but they could support themselves well with the money from the city. And their children kept on coming back for the ceremonies for their ancestors and in need of the parents. They still could handle spade and hoe, and move agricultural machines. The tradition was passed safely.

But it was not as it had been. The tradition became superficial because it lacked the lifestyle and economical structure to support it. The sons and daughters only came back for the sake of their parents, or nostalgia for their childhood. When their life in the city got busy, or when their parents die, they no longer came back to the village. And they couldn't pass the tradition to their own sons and daughters because they have nothing to do with the life in the mountain village.
So, now the people in the city simply ignore the existence of the people left in the mountain villages, and let them die. It is tragic, because they are dying for their decision half a century ago. Worse, they still believe it, and feel joy when they hear the news of their children or grandchildren made success in the city. They don't want to see the fact that the very success keeps people away from the village, and eventually put an end to the tradition and life they have been holding on.

Still they are the sons and daughters. An old woman once told me in her cracked shack in a abandoned village where she was staying for the summer, that she is glad that her son is now a successful doctor and the world became a better place with prosperous Japan. I couldn't say a word. How could I?

Dying People

I once lived in an old Japanese house for two years in a small village, not far from here. During these two years, I attended five funerals in the village. The village consists of less than hundred people, so the death rate is much higher than the average Japanese rate: about 0.8 death for hundred per year.
The dead are all elder people, except one at his fifties. First funeral was for an old woman living in my neighbor. She had been ill and I only met her once while she was alive. Second was an old man lived in front of her house. He had been ill too, and I'd never met him, although after his death, I had a chance to talk with his son. Then an old woman lived upper side of my house, then the younger man lived next door. These two, I met frequently, and sometimes talked about weather or the crop in the vegetable garden. The last funeral I attend was for an old woman, and it was just a month before I left the village.
The death rate of the village was high, because there lived many older people. There were young families, but when you walk in the village in the day light, you would find people older than late sixties only, except for the foreman in his iron work, the soon to be dead man roaming out from his bed, and me. Later in the afternoon, eleven or twelve children at various age would come home from school, and their parents would come home in the dark of the night. More than half of the population were older than sixty five, retire age of most companies in Japan. They were dying one by one.

This village is not as bad as other villages in the hillside. There are many villages in this area which consists of only older people, or only with one or two younger families. The people over seventy are stronger generation in Japan. They had endured the hard times during and after the World War, and they had eaten no junk foods when they were young. They can live longer, stay healthier until they finally die, compared to the generation of their sons. But they must die sooner or later. There will be no filling up of the vacancy they left. The population will get smaller and smaller until the village will not work as a habitable community. People are dying, and the village in the hillside and mountains in Japan are dying, too.

I have some friends who dared to choose to live in such dying villages, but they are all struggling. One young family cannot stop the community dying. There are many works a village has been doing, and they all had to be stopped when the village gets older. For instance, there should be somebody who cut weeds in the summer to keep the village from buried in the jungle. When nobody can handle sickle or grass cutter, the fight against weeds must end, defeated.
There are those who make a prophet that those mountain villages will vanish in ten years to come. There are those who hope there will be much more younger generations will return to the place of their ancestors from cities. I wonder which of them is right.

Early morning work

Farmers are early raisers everywhere in the world. Especially in the summer, it is too hot to work in the daytime out in the field. Traditionally, Japanese farmers would wake up before the sunrise, set out in the paddies and gardens in the dim light of the dawn, work two or three hours before the breakfast. They would work outside after that, maybe work inside the barn, and after the lunch, take his long nap. Then they would start his evening work at three or four, until the sundown. Very hard workers. Almost twelve hours or more of hard labor was the standard.
Now, the time has been changed. People work nine to five, or six, in the office even in the rural area in Japan. The descendant of the old time farmers are now workers in offices and factories.
But in the rural area, many of them still hold their paddies and gardens of ancestors. They harvest rice and vegetables to sell. Some stopped to sell, but they still plow for their own consumption. Those farmers are called 'kengyo-noka,' a part-time farmers, in Japan. Actually, almost 90 % of Japanese farmers are part-time, as in the statistics.
They don't regard their farming as their occupation. If you ask them "What is your job?" they will answer their daytime jobs, like office worker, teacher, driver, and manager. They never tell you they are part-time farmers unless necessary. They think farming as their household job, like repairing pipes, cleaning rooms, cooking, or annual ceremony for their ancestors. Farming is more of ritual than earning for them.
And they keep their tradition as an early raiser. They wake up early morning to cut grass in the field, or water their paddy. Only an hour, for they now cannot take their nap, but they still are the hard workers. Light jobs before going to work, they will call it "Asameshi-mae," an easy task.
"Asameshi" is a breakfast and "mae" is "before" in Japanese. So, literally, this word means "before the breakfast." They will farm before breakfast easily to keep Japanese agriculture intact.