Mucky Mother's Day

I've had a long standing feud with Mother's Day, ever since we moved into this new house, in this new neighborhood. That is, every year for twelve years Mother's Day coincides with our town's River Sludge Cleaning Day.

Happy Mother's Day! Now wake up early,  pull on those thigh-high rubber boots, and get out there and dredge some slime.

Okay, by river I mean this...

A River.

And this...

And Another River.

And this...

Another.

More like little streams running between houses and around the rice fields.  It's spring and almost time to plow, flood, and plant the fields, so every year at this time (EXACTLY on Mother's Day) we all wake up at seven and get to work. 

The whole thing looks a lot like this. 

Scraping up River Sludge.

The gunk is then put into these woven bags and stacked in piles all over the place. In about a week the city will send trucks around to pick it up. I hear they use it for fertilizer in some mysterious place.  

Bags of Yuck.

Basically the crud is a mixture of river grasses and mud (cans and garbage are plucked out and thrown away separately).  

So, a few years ago I pleaded my case. Why must the mom's do this treacherous work on Mother's Day? Not only that, but why can't we just leave the smelly, slimy stuff. The ducks and turtles and fish certainly seem to enjoy it. 

But I was chastised. 

Gunk.

If we leave it, I hear this will happen. 

Muck Monster.

And eventually, invariably...this. 

I eat you. 

And so, I no longer put up (much of) a fight. And my husband volunteers to go into the river with the boots and the funky shoveling device. I, along with all the other women in the neighborhood, just sit around picking weeds for an hour or so and rest assured we won't be killed in our sleep by a River Sludge Beastie. 

ETA: It's NOT Mother's Day. This is the first year in 12 that they've done it BEFORE MD. My husband I judge MD by Sludge Cleaning Day not by the calendar. That is scary. 

Zeus

While spacing out in line at the supermarket the other day, I ran across this little gem in the impulse item section.

Zeus!

How freaking cool is that?

There isn't a clue as to what it is. The only words on the entire package are Zeus, Lotte (the company's name), and if you turn it on its side...

Thunder Spark!

So I bought it, took it home, and opened it. It was GUM! Zeus gum. And it tasted like a cross between...

mint...

and pepper spray...

But not all together horrible. Actually, quite refreshing, stimulating, painful, almost like I was shooting thunder bolts from my mouth.

Overall I think Zeus would be proud.

Best Fire Extinguisher Ever!

Sometimes translation is hard. English to Japanese. Japanese to English.

A lot of the time phrases just turn nonsensical, sometimes they turn hilarious, and sometimes they turn fabulous.

Every Friday I park at this parking garage and it makes me happy. Why? Because there's a fire extinguisher on each level, clearly marked.

Yeah, baby, yeah!

Rwarrr!

Something Strange from my Garden

Last year I planted a butt-load of daikon radishes. I planted tomatoes, eggplants, and green peppers too. And then I spent my days working up menus with all the fresh veggies I was going to harvest. Boy, I couldn't wait to eat them. And as it turned out the bugs couldn't either. My entire crop was devoured before I even had time to Google how to non-toxic-ly beat the pests.

*sigh*

This year I didn't even try. So Imagine my surprise when about a month ago I saw the top of a daikon coming up in my flower bed. Dude survived!

I kept my eye on it. Watered it. Talked to it. Plucked off bugs and tossed them into the river. I also dreamed about how I'd serve it up when the day came to pick it.

But then something happened.

Something changed. I couldn't put my finger on it, but something was amiss.

This, my friends, is a daikon. It's not my daikon, but it's what a typical daikon (the type I planted) looks like.






And this is a photo of the puppy I harvested today. Not terribly off, you say.





Until you see what it looks like to scale.

WTH is up with those stemmy, leaves going everywhere?




Closer examination shows that those stemmy leaves are covered in little pods.





Are you thinking what I'm thinking?




Sure, we're 300 kilometers from Fukushima. But there is fallout around here. France just turned away a bunch of green tea they said was way over the safe limit for drinking. That tea came from my prefecture.

So maybe it's possible: Mutant Daikon!

Or, if you don't like that one, I have another theory...

Let's return to the pods.


THE PODS!



Yep.


Whether I'm worrying about radiation or body snatchers, doesn't look like I'll be getting much sleep for awhile.

I'm just wondering if I should eat the thing though...

Plant, Grow, Cut

Okay, it's not Eat, Pray, Love. But hey.

We have all these rice fields in our neighborhood. They make walking so much more enjoyable, not just for being pretty, but also for the loads of critters that reside (or visit) therein: frogs, egrets, wild ducks, snakes, jumbo snails, loaches, and a whole host of dragonflies. Even bats live in the strange covered earth ditches used for irrigation. I really like the bats. And the egrets. And the frogs and dragonflies (okay, you see where this is going).

Sadly, though, as the elderly folk get older and their children decide not to become farmers, more are being sold and built on. Almost every year we lose another three or four or five fields.

Here are some photos I took of the rice season as it is in our neighborhood. Plant. Grow. Cut.

Here's a field in spring (May?) flooded and newly planted.

With some purple.

And some more purple.


Then I didn't take any photos for months. The rice grew, turned a very lovely green and then tasseled in mid to late August. We had a small typhoon come through. Here's a bit of damage from that.



By the end of summer the fields turn from green to gold.


Here's some pics from this morning's walk.


Someone has starting cutting this field already.



After they cut all the rice they tie it and hang it like so.

It dries for a day or two and then comes the men with their threshing machine.



And finally we have a naked field. This is actually the same field as the first photo, just a different angle.



During the winter the fields remain bare and the kids are allowed to go in and play. We don't have any parks nearby so they become nice places to kick a soccer ball or throw a baseball. There. Useful all year long, the rice field. I hope they stop filling them in. Where will all the egrets go?

Sending Great-Great Granny Back Home

My absolute favorite part of summer is something called okuribi (Sending Fires). What happens is that in the middle of August family altars are decorated, family graves are visited, and little ceremonies are performed to call all the deceased ancestors back from Beyond for a visit. It's all fun and games until it's time to send those same relatives back home.

Some people float paper lanterns down the river. Not my town. We know it won't be that easy getting Great Grandpa Kintaro back to the nether world. The big guns are called out.

First, these giant bamboo-like brooms are built. Here's a little instruction on how that is done:

They are stuffed with straw and (what else?) fireworks--mostly bottle rockets. Next, they are stuck into beach in a nice long line. (Mount Fuji is back there but you can't quite see it.)

This year's excitement was ratcheted up a notch because certain kids were chosen to actually do the honors and light those puppies on fire.

Lighting an okuribi consists of holding a ball of fire on a rope... (That's J in the light blue shirt; yep, he got to participate while I stood behind a rope.)

...and then swinging it around and around at full speed...

..until you gather enough momentum to wing it up and hopefully into the center of that monstrous up-turned broom (and not onto the head of the guy standing directly on the other side of the okuribi.)


It takes a few tries and it's all very exciting with the crowd cheering and great balls of fire exploding as they hit the ground or the side of the broom and bounce off in a shower of sparks and flame.

Here's one that has been successfully lit.

Now as if that isn't breathtaking enough, after these massive, exploding, easily-toppling okuribis have been ignited what do the men in charge do?

Whey, they sit the children down right underneath them to relish in their handiwork, they do.

Actually, no one was hurt or even singed, and there were firemen nearby, just in case. Occasionally when one does fall an errant bottle rocket zips into the crowd of bystanders but mostly it's met with a bunch of screams and nervous laughter afterwards.

This year was also different because while all this was going on there were about two dozen monks behind us chanting sutras in that deep-voiced drone that is so intoxicating and oddly sexy. All the ancestors could very happily ride the sparks and smoke back to paradise.

Here's one just about ready to collapse.

Here's some more spinning/throwing fun.

And here's a beagle who thinks he's a cat and sleeping on the top of a couch all stretched out which has nothing to do with okuribi but was funny at the time.

Nakizumo, Crying Sumo

In Japan there are all sorts of versions of this:




The example above is called nakizumo, crying sumo. Here the referee is encouraging (frightening the living shit out of?) the babies, but sometimes they have versions (also called konaki zumo) where two sumo wrestlers each hold a child and turn them to suddenly face each other, thus making them yowl. The one with the loudest cry wins.

Babies are supposed to cry, evidently. I remember when J was just born my mother-in-law would say the longer a baby cried the stronger his lungs would become. I imagined her kids had some monster lung capacity to go with their diaper rash, hunger pangs and lonliness. I smiled and changed my kid's nappies reminding myself my mother-in-law said a lot of things. Believe me, I could write a book.

However, having a baby belt out a good one is an auspicious event. Well, kinda. I think I can speak for everyone when I say a toddler throwing a tantrum in the check out isle is far from auspicious. But when you consider that these festivals are hundreds upon hundreds of years old--back when a big cry was a simple way to determine a healthy, strong baby that would eventually grow into a healthy, strong adult, then it totally makes sense.

Every summer they have a big three-day festival in my town. Children aged one, two and three are allowed to participate in all sorts of fancy ways--prayers, parades, dances. Man, you should see their adorable little outfits (note to self: must scan old pictures).

The first event of the the festival (and only done once when the child is one) is called kami korogashi, or god rolling. The priests line up across from one another, two to a tatami mat, and are handed a child. They then chant prayers as they roll the child around and around until it starts to howl. Everyone laughs and claps and celebrates the wee one's fine pair of lungs as well as his continuing health and good fortune. It's a great photo-op, I tell ya.

I just remembered there is a Japanese saying, naku ko wa sodatsu, a child who cries grows/thrives. There is also one that goes, neru ko wa sodatsu, a child who sleeps a lot grows/thrives.

I've since gotten used to the tradition, but I must admit I was at first worried about the poor child's mental state.

Then I saw this!




Cracks me up.

I Knew It!

Remember this?

I was waiting for the invariable next phase. And here it is:




I am just happy they didn't give these little boys enormous crotches.

On a side note, mom and dad are still in Japan, more on that excitement later though. Today we go to the beach where the naked angel hung out. I wrote about her on Richard Crawford's fancy journal Daikaijuzine right here. And the cherry blossoms are fixing to bloom so I foresee drinks and merriment (and much more shopping) for the rest of the week.