Living In Japan: Lotus Flowers, a Castle, and a Moat

We have a 400-year-old castle in the center of town.  Well, to be fair it's really the ruins of a castle.  Even so, it's an impressive sight and many of our festivals and fairs are held in an area adjacent to the castle compound.  It's completely surrounded by cherry trees, so it's a popular spot during the Cherry Blossom festival, and whenever the weather is good, for families and friends to picnic, for people to stroll.  The castle and surrounds are also frequented by local artists.



The inside of the castle grounds has a large wooden structure which functions as a visitors center and museum, telling of the history and function of the original castle, which burned to the ground some time ago.  It was, as were all such structures in Japan from this period, made entirely of wood. 

Sasayama was not an important military outpost.  The castle served as a way-station for the visiting samurai.  But like all castles of its time, protection from hostile takeover was a basic requirement.  Its first level of fortification consisted of moats, an outer moat and an inner moat.  These obviously wouldn't be very effective against cruise missiles or Predator drones but they served the purpose at the time, erecting a formidable obstacle at the time for any aggressors, who were usually on foot.



Now the moats perform an entirely different function.  Both inner and outer moats are the home of ducks and turtles.  The turtles were a bit elusive this year.  I couldn't get any shots of them sunbathing, meditating, doing what turtles have been doing long before the castle was built -- say going back at least four million years.  Turtles are behaviorally a quite stable species, to put it mildly.
The moats definitely offer the many visitors who visit this historic site, something more interesting to experience and enjoy than the stone wall fortification -- the second line of defense -- which forms the base the entire perimeter of the castle grounds.

One of the outer moats also has a very special function.  In spring and summer, the city rents row boats.  No jet skis, no submarines, no hover craft.  Only row boats.  That pretty much fits the pace here.



This year the experience of the picnickers, revelers, stroller, artists, and ducks and turtles, was dramatically heightened.  A local high school connecting their students with nature and community service had them plant lotus flowers.  The effect was breathtaking.

[ This originally appeared at the author's personal website . . . https://jdrachel.com ]



Living In Japan: Lotus Flowers, a Castle, and a Moat

Life In Japan: Planting Rice

                                          Photo taken from the front door of my house.

Preparing the soil to plant rice is a wet, muddy, mucky mess.  l know because I've watched them prepare the fields directly in front of my house several years on and off.



They flood the area, let is soak for several days, then drive a tractor through the mud -- I'm amazed they don't get stuck -- giving it a hardy blend and a stir, because apparently having the amiable consistency of quicksand makes it more of an inviting and nurturing environs for the soon-to-be-planted rice seedlings.

The seedlings are grown in green houses by the millions, sold to the farmers, then the real fun begins.



Now there may have been a time -- at least a hundred years ago -- when Japanese farmers planted them by hand.  This tedious method is still practiced in parts of China and nations of Southeast Asia.  I've seen it myself in my travels.

But leave it to the Japanese to come up with a machine that does in minutes what used to take a week.  No need for artificial intelligence or quantum computing here.  Just good basic mechanical design does the job.

It's astonishing how quickly the rice grows.  Soon our entire valley is an intense, vibrant green, going from almost incandescent lime to the rich, deep emerald of a mature plant.  Maybe I have too much time on my hands and too little excitement, but when I ride my bike through the fields of viridescent rice, I'm struck by the incredible beauty of it all.



And to think.  This entire process starts with men -- who as I noted in another article -- never outgrew the desire to play in the mud.



[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . https://jdrachel.com ]





Life In Japan: Planting Rice

Life In Japan: Vegetable Gardens

Gardens are the thing here in Japan, especially vegetable gardens.

Growing food for personal consumption is such a part of Japanese culture, even in Tokyo, by population the largest city in the world, there are plot-share farms, rooftop gardens, and at least one major company that devotes a significant amount of its office floor space to growing an impressive variety of fruits and vegetables.

It's commonly known that land use by the Japanese is extremely efficient, meticulous, ingenious.  Everything I've experienced here over 12 years, substantiates that.  Even out here in the sticks where I live, hardly under the pressures associated with the population density of cities, every patch of terra firma is treated as a valuable asset.

It's entirely obvious why this is the case.  Compare Japan with the United States.
While both are highly-industrialized, complex and extremely modern societies, with very mobile populations, large cities, vast swaths of land allocated to industrial-service sectors and for housing millions of people, Japan comes up short from the get go.  The total area of the U.S. is 3,531,905 square miles (9,147,592 square km).  Japan is only 145,925 square miles (377,944  square km). Meaning it's just over 4% of the size of the U.S. -- Japan is about the size of Montana, just one of the 50 U.S. states. 

Yes, Japan has fewer people.  The U.S. now has just over 330 million people, Japan just under 127 million.  It's still vastly disproportionate: Japan's 38% of the U.S. population must use land that is at best about 4% the size of America, a continental landmass which stretches sea to shining sea, embracing vast undeveloped, underdeveloped and natural tracts in between.  Visit states like Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Montana, Arizona, New Mexico, North and South Dakota, Texas, and you'll see what I mean.

Moreover, a considerable amount of land in Japan consists of mountainous terrain.  Japan was formed in ancient times by volcanoes.  While this offers beautiful landscapes and good trekking, the short of it is that there's much less usable land in Japan.  Much less!  Only 12% of the land in Japan is arable, compared to 20% for the U.S.

So Japanese put every square meter they do have to good use, and make it work for them. 
Add to that the nutritional benefits of eating food that's not produced by factory farming, but grown in small amounts without machinery and a minimum -- sometimes none at all -- of chemicals.  The result is in Japan, vegetable gardens are ubiquitous.  Here in my own community of Sasayama, it seems like everyone has a vegetable garden.

Even yours truly gets in on the action from time to time.  As a city-boy born and raised in the industrial heartland of Detroit, Michigan I have to confess to a bit of awe when a seed or two actually sprouts, grows, and I end up with the fruits and vegetables of my personal labor on the dinner table.  Here is the naked American getting things ready to plant some seedlings.



That was last season, working our vegetable row, a single strip my wife and I rent from a neighbor.  We ended up with tomatoes, bell peppers, zucchini, eggplant, onions, garlic, a couple melons which got stolen by some local monkeys, then late in the season soybeans.

Credit where it's due:  Masumi actually knows what she's doing.  I pretty much defer to her on anything agricultural.  On the other hand, she doesn't know how to rebuild a Ford V-8 engine.  We each have our specialties.






[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . https://jdrachel.com ]




Life In Japan: Vegetable Gardens

Life In Japan: Washlets

The first time I ever saw a washlet, to be entirely honest about it, I was genuinely afraid to sit down.  To my unschooled Western eyes, it looked like an ejection seat in a fighter jet.  Seeing it plugged into the wall most definitely made me pause.  I'm not exactly excited about having 100 volts of electricity anywhere near the 2nd most important cluster of organs on my body -- the ones responsible for both a great deal of pleasure, as well as relief from the build up of sludge and stinky fluids.



The washlet is the technological evolution of the "bum gun", a simple, standard approach to hygiene for the private parts, still commonly seen in Southeast Asia -- Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar.

When I first saw a bum gun, I thought "how primitive!"  The real truth?  My disdain itself was an embarrassingly primitive, insular, knee-jerk reaction.  What do I mean by that?

Is this the best we can do? Seriously?

I imagine an advanced race of extraterrestrials returning from our beloved planet Earth, reporting to the Council of Wise Elders on their own beloved space rock: "Well, they're an interesting but strange bunch there on Earth.  In some ways, they're quite advanced.  But in others quite puzzling to say the least.  They actually cut down trees to wipe their asses."

Yes, we cut down trees, process them, turn them into pulp, then toilet paper.  You know what happens next.

The bum gun does the job much more admirably and is much more eco-friendly, at least in terms of maintaining forest cover on our ravaged planet.

Just spray and wash.  Pat with a towel.  Get on with your life.  Frankly a thorough wash is much more sanitary than . . . you know how it goes.



Back to the washlet, a Japanese innovation I put on a par with the invention of the steam engine or artificial intelligence.

Washlets come in varying degrees of sophistication, accessorized to accommodate a wide range of tastes.  But they all perform the same purpose.  They wash you.  Men in back. Women back and front.
You can adjust the temperature of the stream, the intensity of the stream.  It can be just a direct stream or in "massage mode" a wiggling stream.



Some washlets greet you!  Some play music.  Some put the toilet seat up and down for you.
This borders on somewhat excessive for my particularly pedestrian world view and spartan expectations.  But there's one feature pretty standard on washlets that is truly admirable.  THE TOILET SEATS ARE HEATED!  And you can adjust the temperature on them too.

Why haven't these caught on in Western countries?  Has someone tried to market them to the wiping/smearing/stinky-butted round-eyed barbarians of Europe, the U.S., Australia, Canada, and the rest of the non-Japanese world . . . and gone bankrupt?  I don't get it.

Yes, I admire much about Japan.  And every country has its pluses and minuses.  You can examine and study, compare and argue, go back and forth, weighing the pros and cons. 

Then some one thing comes along which is so phenomenal, so HUGE and AMAZING, so entirely off the charts, so beyond anything else on the table, it's no longer a contest.

The simple unavoidable truth is . . .

Washlets put this country in a class by itself! 



[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . https://jdrachel.com ]



Life In Japan: Washlets

Wild and Crazy in Chiang Mai, Thailand!

What were you doing New Years Eve?  The usual.  Or the unusual.

As is standard operating procedure for us, Masumi and I were well off the beaten path . . . we certainly weren't in Times Square.  We weren't wearing a beer guzzler cap.  We didn't do vodka jello shooters, smoke DMT or put magic mushrooms on our eleven-cheese pizza.  We never even got around to singing Auld Lang Syne.

Here's the very short, edited version of our New Years Eve celebration.

This was the climactic end to seven days in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

To put it mildly, it was a unique and highly entertaining visit to a country I've been to before, but always finding intriguing.  My wife Masumi, however, has never been to Thailand, so this short adventure was especially exciting for her.

Doi Inthanon National Park is about an hour drive from Chiang Mai, and is home to the highest peak in Thailand.  On our way there for two days in nature, we went through a Hmong village, where they happened to be having a New Years festival.

The park and surrounds were outstanding.  Unfortunately, since Doi Inthanon Mountain itself shrouded in a cloud, while we were there the visibility at the top was limited.  But as the day progressed, the air cleared and we got to do some hiking and experienced stunning views of the countryside.  We stopped at a few villages sprinkled around and sampled "real life" in this rustic, relatively underdeveloped part of the world.

For easy access to the park, we did a homestay at Nongtao, a Karen tribe village actually within the great expanse of Doi Inthanon National Park.  People were shy but amicable.  Our host was truly superb, helping us decide what to do and how to get places.

Not far from our homestay was an elephant park.  These were no ordinary elephants.  They had all been in the parade celebrating the recent coronation of the new King of Thailand.  You can sense from their regal bearing and sophisticated manners their royal blood lines.

What would a visit to Thailand be, however, without spending time at a few of the literally tens of thousands of temples and shrines?  We capped off sacred site hopping by visiting the world-famous White Temple, a short distance outside of Chiang Rai.

We were so comfortable and fit in so perfectly, I'm sure no one suspected for a moment that we were tourists.

[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . https://jdrachel.com ]





Wild and Crazy in Chiang Mai, Thailand!