I was at the grocery store the other day and spotted some delicious-looking ears of corn. With the current exchange rate, they were about 80 cents each. A real bargain!
But I quickly said, “Nah! We have fresh, organic corn coming up and soon ready to pick in our vegetable garden.” At least six at last count.
As you can see from the above photo, we’ve taken some drastic measures in our ongoing battle to protect our veggies from the local raccoon dog. Since everything is growing so well, there’s a lot at stake. Thus everything is surrounded by netting, stretched tight and securely staked to the ground. We — at least I — felt confident we had defeated the furry freeloader regardless of his determination and cunning. To be entirely candid, I though the little fellow was dead. Just last week, a raccoon dog had been hit by a car on a busy street not far from our house. As far as I was concerned, he was long gone from this life here in quiet, rural Tambasasayama.
Well, I was wrong on all counts. Because the day after I took a pass on the supermarket corn, our Yakuza [ヤクザ] raccoon dog was back. He dug under the netting, went full infantry on our corn, feasted on it, then devoured some tomatoes, before moving on to holding up a bank or kidnapping some school child. Okay, maybe I’m going overboard. Anyway, this is what no respect for private property and bad table manners looks like . . .
Actually, we have no right to complain. I mean, if you want to look at this objectively, this is his natural habitat. If we humans didn’t have better lawyers, he’d be having us arrested for trespassing. And even more to the point, there’s plenty to go around. Truth is, we can hardly keep up. We’ve gone through the lettuce and now have pepperoncini, tomatoes, scallions, cucumbers, eggplant, zucchini, butternut squash, potatoes, and I don’t know what else coming out of our ears — lacking ears of corn, of course. Even so, fair play dictates that the coon dog raider could have left, say, two of the ears of corn, so we’d have some idea what they taste like. Obviously, this particular raccoon dog has issues.
In terms of the near future, we’re looking forward to a bumper crop of one of the items that has made Tambasasayama famous. You can read more about it in my other attempts at signaling my agricultural sophistication, or is that horticultural enlightenment? Yes, I’m talking about black beans, aka soybeans. Here we are planting forty-eight seedlings, a tad bit late but not such as to compromise our ultimate success. And by the way, we grew the seedlings ourself, starting with — I know this came as a huge surprise to me — SEEDS!
Bear in mind, I grew up in Detroit area, where the only things that grew in abundance were plumes of automobile exhaust and racial tensions. All of this is new to me, and to be entirely honest, exciting in some completely non-exciting way. The excitement is internal as I see all of this unfold, maybe the way a person who was raised in the tundra by wolves would be awed the first time they saw an iPhone.
The real payoff in real time is that we’ve gotten some truly awesome, homegrown, organic, cultivated-by-our-own hands, nurtured-by-our-own-spectacular-personal-vibes vegetables to show for it.
Capping my little report here on the unfolding drama of life in rural Japan with a hugely vast understatement: I sure don’t miss the exhaust fumes and race riots of my youth, nor do I long for the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds, horizon-to-horizon cement, and frenetic frenzy of contemporary big city life at all these days — not at all.
