A Culture of Cultivation

I learnt a lot with the funny, direct woman from my speech. I knew I would like somebody like her. I immediately took her up on her offer to meet with me again and we met this weekend.

She showed me her house – I saw her allotment. I exclaimed how common I noticed that it was for many Japanese people to have a small allotment. How often I have been offered gifts of homegrown mandarins, or apples (or gone fruit picking myself - 3 times!).

So many families have these vegetable gardens. So often I see the orange trees in people`s gardens when I travel past houses in a car. A common sight also at this time of year, is the Kaki (persimmon) strips hanging from the houses, drying (so that they lose their sourness).

She explained to me, how the cultivating way is something deep in the Japanese consciousness – back from prehistoric times when the Japanese were all rice farmers. She talked of the difference between westerners being hunters and the Asians being a people with a greater emphasis on cultivation. How true this is I do not know. But, it does make sense to me.

The difference is clear between England and Japan certainly. Objectively there is a lot of locally produced food here in Ibaraki, and I`m sure, all over the kens of Japan.

I received gifts of apples from Yuko-sensei`s husbands family farm up in the north. My host family grow many vegetables, and Ottosan likes to go fishing for eating.
When we go on trips by road the “service stations” are farmers markets basically. There is so much local production that happens.

It doesn`t surprise me anymore to see the odd rice field in the middle of an urban settlement … but it still always makes me laugh.
Furu Koshi grows rice. Lots of older people grow rice when they have retired from their office jobs. It is not an unusual occurrence for a regular person with a office job to have a little allotment/ farm at home as well. Cultivation, on a smallscale, is done by the average person here.

In England, farmers are farmers – whether largescale operations or smaller organic operations these people live and work on their fields/ warehouses – and they are very separate from the rest of the population of the country who are not farmers, and who live in the villages/ suburbs/ towns/ cities. It is a huge difference that here in Japan, cultivating is just much more a part of the life of the general population who lives in a town (even a big town, - like Hitachi) (admittedly not the huge metropolises like Tokyo though). So many people here with ordinary town jobs also have a little farming lifestyle aswell.

I think that it is a much better way to be. It means the eating local produce is much more a natural thing here. There isn`t a big national cry to “eat local!” because it happens. People are much more connected to the growth of their food (well, vegetables and rice at least) because many people do it! It is an important part of the Japanese culture that wasn`t immediately obvious to me at first, but something that I have gradually realized, over time here.