Hiroshima Holiday – First Day Farming
On our first day farming we planned to be up for 7.30am, ready for an 8am breakfast. But the room we were in had more nasty surprises for us than just the two, single-glazed glass outside walls in close to freezing temperatures! At 6am, the city wide morning alarm went off. It sounded like the speaker was facing into the room and about 2 foot from the window-walls it was so loud! That wasn’t fun, and what’s more, just as I’d fallen back asleep, at 6.30am an announcement went off! Suffice to say that was not the best start to the day. I phoned Mitch at about 7.55am which was nice though. Then Shimohara came and asked us to help with the rice. So Bekah, Yzzy and I went to dish out rice and take trays to everyone. This became something us three had to do every meal for the duration so we got used to it by the end.
Sadly I already have another thing to moan about! The meals he served were very traditional. I had stated on the website we applied through that I will not eat fish and I told the man I hate fish but every single meal was fish. And he somehow also managed to hit on the other thing I hate; raw veg. So I skipped the raw cabbage, raw broccoli, fish heads and other random things he often put on there and just ate the plain rice and whatever warm soup there was. Occasionally when there was cooked but cold broccoli I put it in the soup to warm it up. I did that with the cold omelette too. Twice I even gave the fish a go, so I did try! To be honest I was usually quite full on the soup and rice so it wasn’t a huge problem. It just became a bit much by the end of it to come in nackered and have your dinner cold and looking back at you!
But enough about food! Now I have told you I’ll not dwell on it in further blogs. The first thing we did that day was collect the burnt rice husks that Shimohara sells as fertiliser. It was strange to see; he burns them in tanks overnight and then pours them on the ground in the morning and stuffs them into plastic bags to sell. So we had a go and filled quite a few bags. We discovered that Shimohara is a man of few words, even though 4 of the 6 of us spoke Japanese; he wouldn’t give us proper instructions and often just made hand gestures. But the others who had been there a while knew what to do.
The blue bags are the rice shells ready to burn and the silver tanks are what he burns them in. Then the black floor is where they get poured to cool and then we scoop them up.
Once we had done this, we went over the other side of the road (in the background where the bus is in the above photo!) and started work there. It was good fun, we basically were cleaning this big patch of ground that had been nothing more than a junk yard for some years it seemed. Yzzy and Bekah were asked to shovel some manure to a patch that had already been sorted and the others and I got told to move a huge pile of bamboo and burn it all. He didn’t really give any of us detailed instructions though so we had to go back the next day and continue on! It was a fun job though so I didn’t mind. There was a very cool old rusty bus too so I had fun taking some photos of that.
We had a 2 hour lunch break which started with Japanese curry. I was pretty excited to be eating something other than fish until I realised it had fish in it. And it was cold. Oh well! I got to go out and play with the dogs and the goats for a little while which was great! They’re very funny. I felt very sorry for them though, they were all chained or in small pens and weren’t allowed to roam. Which seemed odd for a farm with so much space.
After lunch it was weeding time. It was nice to do something relaxing for a bit, until we’d been doing it for hours! Ask my dad, I have never been much of a weeder 😛 Bekah and Yzzy really enjoyed the calm meditate-y work and the rest was good. We made a frog friend half way though and finished about 6pm.
We had dinner around 7pm, showered (which was lovely!) and stretched out before bed. I slept like a log until the next announcement!
Maisy In Japan 