The Story Is In The Soil, Keep Your Ear To The Ground

Greetings internet denizens! Long time no see, eh? Well, after my trip to Tokyo and the requisite two weeks spent in shock at the discovery that summer still hasn’t come to Aomori, I’m about ready to return to the world of blogging. I’ve got a considerable backlog at this point, so you’ll have to bear with me while I play catch up.

While traces of humidity have been slowly creeping into the air as of late, any other signs that it is, in fact, June remain conspicuously absent. The sky continues to be obscured by a thick haze of clouds as it was throughout the winter, leaving me to ponder whether the sun ever really existed at all. Despite this fact, most farmers in the area seem to have somehow managed to successfully plant their crops for the season. Since Aomori is rice-farming country, all of the arable land in the prefecture now looks something like the picture above. Being surrounded as I am by such rice fields, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would feel like to wade through the knee-high mud as all those hunchbacked old ladies do. I intended to find out.

Inakadate, a small village just outside of Hirosaki, is a town that lives up to its name (which literally translates into something like “country place”). Like residents of many other small Japanese towns, the folks in Inakadate have come up with a few novel ideas for making the most of their surroundings. One of these is their yearly exhibition of “tambo art”; designs made using colored rice plants in two rice fields that face town hall. Every May, curious visitors are invited to join local rice planting enthusiasts in sowing the thousands of plants that will make up that year’s design. You can see this year’s proposed design, as well as a photo of last year’s spectacular tambo art on David Hammer’s blog.

The day before we arrived, David and a few other officials from Inakadate town hall painstakingly placed some thousands of tiny steaks into the mud indicating which color of rice was required in the various areas of the fields. Starting at 9:30 am, a few hundred folks waded into the cold mud and by noon, all of the rice had been planted.
Here’s some of the green rice plants that will make up the background of the design.
While the fields were mostly dominated by the sort of old Japanese men and women whose hunched backs render them instantly recognizable as career rice farmers (their presence would explain how two whole fields were planted in only two hours), there were also a number of children, families and the occasional foreigner.
The fields had been plowed beforehand with some sort of device that left raised trails in the mud. These trails were a guide for the planters, marking off the intervals at which the plants should be spaced. Planting a rice plant was as simple as making a hole in the mud with your hand, dropping the plant in and then closing up the opening. Here, David and Megan demonstrate good rice planting technique.
One out of two foreigners agree: planting rice is fun! The other 50% finds it to be thought provoking, apparently. According to one of my kindergarten teachers, Megan and I were even featured on the Aomori nightly news for our efforts although I wasn’t lucky enough to see it myself.
Afterwards, we decided to head into Hirosaki in an attempt to locate the various British miscreants who are known to haunt those parts. I had only ever seen Hirosaki castle in the dead of winter, so I figured that a second visit was well overdue.
During the warmer months, visitors can enter the 17th century structure, which now houses a museum of samurai artifacts from the defunct Tsugaru clan.
The museum occupies all three floors of the castle including the top floor, which would have once been a vantage point for archers defending the castle.

[historical reenactment]

The grounds surrounding the castle once housed a large complex of buildings in which the clan’s lords and their retainers would have lived. All that’s left nowadays is the castle and five gates, three moats, three keeps and a tower. Oh, and a lot of vending machines.