Travel to the Home Farm

 

Family house behind the chicken house - and roaming chicken art enclosure.

This was the goal at the end of today's travels - Nobue's home high in the mountains around Tokamachi. This is an old and very rural area where Nobue's family has been as long as they can remember. 

You want green, we got green of all types. Edible, in-edible, on the way to being edible (the yellow-green field is rice that has another month to go before harvest).

No SANSAI picking!

Harder to see are the wild vegetables this region is famous for called SANSAI (literally Mountain Vegetable). This is also a cash crop for the locals who forage and sell them to the wholesalers. There have been times when a lot of non-locals, especially city folk who don't know the mountain, try there hand at foraging resulting in a smaller crop and/or ruing the crops with the tramping through the forests. This sign basically says NO MOUNTAIN VEGETABLE PICKING in an attempt to slow them down. Being Japan, it mostly worked... 

Getting there

This morning started by dragging ourselves and our luggage into the bowels of Ueno Station to catch the Joetsu Shinkansen which runs from Tokyo to Niigata with stops in the Joetsu region where Tokamachi is located. Tokamachi,

Not to far outside of Tokyo, the windows are filled with rice fields - lots of rice fields. Traveling on trains inland you begin to realize how much effort goes into the Japanese government's effort to be self reliant when it comes to rice. When I lived in Japan one of the national tragedies was when they had lower significant tariffs on rice to import needed amounts when fluke taifuns and bad weather timing caused a shortage in the domestic crop. Lots of rice seen and eaten on this trip...

Hearty Travelers heading for the gate 
and awaiting brother/uncle

Our Shinkansen destination is Urasa, a town which won the station lottery closest to the farm - about a 30 car ride.

To The Farm...

Riding to the farm was kind of an adventure. The cars used around the countryside are small - a Mini Cooper would be a larger vehicle (I actually saw a couple of them in Niigata trip we took (later entry) with most being on the order of a Fiat 500, though boxier. Naturally the ride involves seeing a lot more rice fields - though not on the wide areas as in the lowland plains.

My brother-in-law, SAKAE, has a tiny Daihatsu which would have troubles with street legality in California. Marie' basically towers over it. Half the luggage was carried in the passenger section; fortunately there is a small passenger so the luggage made it home.

Finally made it to the village and the farm. The village is still shrinking, with a couple more houses empty as the parents die off and the kids don't want to continue their farms. Lands get "shared" with the neighbors (it is still hard for farmers to grow beyond a certain size by combining farms - Sakae's son is one of the few still around active on the farm). Farmers lives are tough and up here they are even tougher when it takes 20 minutes to get to the nearest gas station (in the non-Winter months) and planning is required for going to the market.

To say hi! to those who died in recent years (both Nobue's parents and her eldest sister died since I was last here - she came back for memorials), an early stop at the little Buddhist temple where they are buried. This has always been a nice place to sit - it's a cool little grove that is really quiet (like most of the village).

Being isolated means creating your own entertainment - either that or watching more TV. Sakae begins teaching Marie' and Nobue the art of rice straw weaving. They are trying to make a simple trivit and some old-style sandals. We have a couple of days - we'll see how it goes...
 

As usual, I took far more photos than I could stuff in this page. They are available in various stages of labeling at https://photos.app.goo.gl/JF6iCznQmEe6p7628