Japan on 1,000 yen a day.

Was over the river at the store yesterday and saw this guy come cycling through the village. It is rare we see any foreigners in this part of the world, and rarer still foreigners touring by bicycle, but with full panniers that was obviously what he was doing. I stopped and asked him if he needed any help or information, and asked the obvious first question "where have you cycled from?". My jaw dropped with his answer "England!"

Justin, from Sheffield, left England at the end of July, cycled across Europe, then Asia, and arrived in Shimonoseki on a ferry from China on January 18th. He then did a circuit of Kyushu before coming back to Honshu and is now on his way up to the northernmost point of Tohuku before heading back down to Tokyo for a flight to Canada.

His answer to the question "why?" is simple and obvious "because I like cycling".

Since 2002 he has cycled his away across all the continents of the planet, with brief returns to England to work at a job for a few months to raise the cash to go cycling again. Other than the times people invite him into their homes for the night he camps out every night by the side of the road and prepares porridge, vegetables, and japatis to eat everyday.

Our offer of a cup of English tea he found impossible to refuse, and while chatting our offer of fish and chips and a bed for the night was accepted.

He is travelling the back roads in Japan, and reckons Japanese roads are some of the steepest he's encountered. In terms of being a cyclist he reckons the Japanese are the worst drivers in the world, but he has no real complaints and is thoroughly enjoying his time here.

So, if you live along the Japan Sea coast, keep your eyes open for him during the next month, and trade a bed and a meal for some fascinating stories.

Shimane by numbers. Part 2

More fascinating fun-fun-filled facts and statistics about where I live.

Per capita there are more museums and art galleries in Shimane than any other prefecture bar one. I have been unable to find out what that prefecture is, so if anyone knows, please let me know.

Why do we Shimaneans have more museums and galleries?

The answer is simple, because we are an incredibly sophisticated and cultural people!

We have museums for sand!

And we have museums for water! Actually this is one of my favorite museums I've come across in Japan, it's only a few minutes from my house. I will post more on it later.

In Hamada we have a huge Childrens Art Museum.

And lets not forget concert halls and auditoriums like this one in Daito, a town of 5,000.

The cynical among you might suggest that the real reason we have so many museums is because Shimane is the biggest recipient (per capita) of central government public works funds, so as well as all the museums we have...

........bridges to nowhere..........

... well protected mountains,........

.. and well protected rivers and coastline!

One final statistic...... it is estimated that 90% of the public works in Shimane are subject to dango! Dango is the Japanese word for bid-rigging, whereby a small group of companies get together and decide among themselves which company gets which project, and then they set an extremeley overpriced bid.
Bid rigging is of course illegal, but like many laws in Japan it masks the fact that bid-rigging is the standard way of doing things in Japan. The construction companies make huge profits, some of which is channeled to the political parties that bring the pork, the bureaucrats that award the contracts get nice cushy post-retirement jobs in the companies they have awarded contracts to, known as amakudari, and the prefecture gets infrastructure it neither needs nor wants. The losers are of course the tax-payers who fund the process.

I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago, so was really miffed when someone sent me this link to a New York Times article last week that covers the same subject even using Shimane as the example.

Omoto Shrine. Hamada

Tucked away up a little lane about 200 metres from the Otoshi shrine near the harbour in Hamada is a small Omoto Shrine.

I have been unable to find any information on the shrine. Omoto probably refers to the kami Omotojin, or it may refer to the fact that this shrine is built on the earliest shrine in the area before the Yamato Awashima Shrine. Or it may mean both things.

There is a small kagura-den and a small secondary shrine in the grounds, and I found these paper flowers which may have come from a Hana Mikoshi.

I love wandering around the alleys and narrow lanes of the old parts of Japanese towns. Without traffic it is easy to imagine how things were in earlier times.

Some people put plastic bottles of water around their doorways and houses in the belief that it will stop neighborhood cats from peeing there. I have no idea if there is any truth to this old-wives tale, but several houses in the area had put plastic flowers in the bottles which added a nice touch.

Omoto Kagura

It is believed that the root of Japanese religion, AND the root of Japanese performing arts lie in shamanic trance. Shamanic kagura was once commonplace throughout Japan, but was suppressed by the Meiji government. Only one place in Japan still has traditional shamanic kagura and that happens to be the place I live. I will be posting a lot more on this subject as it is the focus of a lot of my research and there is almost nothing on it in English.

The focus of Omoto kagura is Omoto, or Omotojin, the local land-based kami. Up in Izumo it is called Kojin, and like Omoto is represented as a rope snake. There are about 60 sites in my area that are considered Omoto shrines, though only a few have shrine buildings. Omoto kagura is practised at a handful of shrines, each shrine working to a 5, 6, or 7 year cycle, so some years there is no Omoto kagura , some years several performances.

Omoto kagura is performed by priests, and in fact all the priests of the county take part. As in the old days, the villagers perform theatrical kagura during the intervals between the priests various dances.

The supreme importance of Omoto kagura to the area is indicated by the number of offerings on the altar. I counted more than 40 different things on the altar at this performance in Ichiyama, compared with less than a dozen at a normal ceremony.

The dance in the video is called Tsunanuki (rope-pulling) and is probably the most well known of the various dances. If an Omoto kagura is successful then someone will be possessed by Omotojin and will answer questions by the priests usually on such matters as the coming years agricultural cycle, upcoming dangers etc. The grandfather of a friend of mine became possessed by Omotojin on 5 different occasions in the last half of the 20th Century.

February harvest

This should really be "daily harvest", as we get eggs every day. We currently have 15 chickens, from a high of about 25 a few months ago. A few of the older ones passed away from old age, and a few made their way into my favorite recipe Noisy Chicken Soup. All you need for that is a noisy chicken and a cleaver.

We no longer have any cocks. The noise was simply too much, and chickens can be gotten for free anytime, so we dont need to produce our own chicks. I kept this one cock around for a while though simply because he was so ugly.

The eggs are free as we feed the chickens kitchen & table scraps, weeds they really like, we get sacks of last years rice at harvest time, and a good part of their diet is nuka (rice bran and germ). Sacks of nuka are free as the Japanese dont eat it, preferring the tasteless, barely nutritional white rice. We do feed the chickens a little store-bought mash, and this we buy from the money we get from selling our surplus eggs. We have a lot of people who will take all the eggs we can sell as they are said to be really tasty (must be the bran)

Of course the other product is chicken shit for the garden. Store-bought chicken shit is really cheap, but it comes from factory farms and is loaded with antibiotics and other drugs that end up in the soil.

Picking cabbages, lettuces, spinach, spring onions and carrots right now, and gearing up for planting as spring seems to be here....

Lonewolf & Cat

I was down in Hiroshima today, and when I saw this guy my spirits were really lifted. His sign says "nekkozureokami" which means "Lone wolf and cat", and is a take-off of a very famous character / manga / movie series / TV series called "kozureokami" which is translated into english as Lone Wolf & Cub, stories of a wandering samurai who wanders Japan dispatching bad guys with his sword while accompanied by his young son. There was a movie made in English called Shogun Assassin which apparently is a cult classic.

And here is the cat he travels with, all decked out punk style.

The gentleman himself had more safety pins than the cat, and an amazing collection of broken watches on his arm.

I was most impressed with his sheer eccentricity, not a common trait in Japan, and his creativity.

I had just seen an art exhibition of graduating art students, and while a few works were technicaly proficient, there was not one little spark of real creativity in any of the work. And here was this guy, bold as brass, exhibiting a creative life.

I have myself been homeless more than once, and can see the possibility of being so again, and I'm sure that those of you who have known me for years know that I could end up just like this guy.

I was tired and running late, and now regret that I didn't try and make contact with him. Next time I go down to Hiroshima I will keep my eyes open for him.......

Tada-Ji Kawaii

One aspect of Japanese culture that I find often overbearing is the kawaii culture. usually translated into english as "cute", it is everywhere. Usually another "k" word:- kitsch-, is more appropriate, but sometimes there is some genuine cuteness, like when I was at Tada-Ji. The buddhist statue above is made from fishing net bouys.

On the steps of the main hall, a buddhist Tanuki (racoon-dog). The usually visible huge testicles of the tanuki are here syutably covered.

The red caps and bibs on statues are seen to be cute by many foreigners. I'm not sure if these are mizuko Kannon, or mizuko Jizo.

In front of the temple was a small mizuko Jizo altar. childrens toys are commonly found at Jizo altars.

Tada-Ji Nio

Nio, sometimes called kongorikishi, are pairs of statues found guarding many temples. Often found in the entrance gates to temples (niomon), nio were originally Hindu deities that have been incorporated into buddhism and function as protectors.

The pair at Tada-Ji, a temple just outside Hamada, are particularly fine examples, with each statue being carved out of a single kusunoki (Cinnamon tree).

As with the komainu (pairs of guardian lions/dogs that guard shrines and temples) one of the 2 statues has its mouth closed, and the other its mouth open. This represents the sounds "ah" and "n", the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega.

I've been driving past the roadsign that points to Tada-ji for years, but this was the first time I'd actually been there, and I was very pleasantly surprised. It's a very old Shingon temple, founded in the 9th Century by one of kukai's pupils.

A freegan day in Japan

I've had a bit of correspondence recently concerning freeganism in Japan, so......

I'm not exactly sure what freeganism is, except it's a new word for living sensibly, for stepping back a little from the process of consumption and waste, and for finding different ways of relating to other humans other than through the medium of money.

I'm not the smartest cookie in the cookie jar, but it's obvious to me that much of what ails the planet, and those of us living on it, can be traced back to overconsumerism, and overproduction of waste, both things I can do something about in my daily life.

Japan is a wonderful place to practise freeganism as there is rampant over-consumption, and waste on a massive scale.

There are two factors that contribute to Japan being ideal for freeganism, first, that by and large the Japanese do not like to buy second-hand things. Obviously, there are exceptions, and the situation is changing in the current "economic downturn", but thrift stores/charity shops are a rarity. The second factor is that to throw away anything in Japan costs a lot of money. This is a good thing, but has negative consequences;.. I remember cycling north out of Kyoto and being stunned by the amount of junk and trash tipped over the side of the roads into the stream banks.

So, let's take a look at my day yesterday.

About a week ago I began to get worried. I was running out of firewood. I have plenty of firewood for next winter, but it is still green and shouldn't be used yet. So we drove up the river a little ways to a side valley where they are doing some forestry. Forestry in Japan mostly means one thing, clearcut! followed by monoculture planting of tree farms. After they have taken out all the logs that are usable there are huge piles of waste,.. trimmings, small trees etc.

We found the guy who was in charge of the 3 man crew and asked if we could take some of the scrap. "Please do" was his reply, as all that we took would be that much less for him to deal with!
A win-win situation, so we loaded up the van with some older stuff that could be burned right away.

On the way back home we stopped in at the village across the river as Yoko said there was a house being demolished and we could probably get some scrap wood there. Just as we got there a huge truck was about to pull away loaded with timber from the house. "Do you live far?" asked the driver. "nope" was the reply, so he followed us over to our parking lot and dumped the load there. We had saved him a 20k journey. 2 hours later he returned with a second load.

The house was not old, maybe 30 years or so, so most of the timber was in perfect condition, mostly 4 by 4's and 4 by 6's, so as well as a winters worth of firewood I now have enough lumber to build a new woodhed and workshop.

In the evening we got a phone call from Mrs. S., a farmer in nearby Oda village. She calls a couple of times a year to see if we will take some chickens off her hands. She has a big chickenshack and just lets the chickens do their thing, so she ends up with more cocks than she needs. Males are a waste of food and space (as I'm sure many japanese housewives would agree :)) For some reason quite a lot of people who keep chickens here don't like to kill them. Possibly a buddhist thing, but more likely related to the spiritual pollution connected with blood and death.

When I picked up the 10 chickens, Mrs. S. was so grateful for the favor I was doing her that she gave me a half-sack of chicken feed, a half-sack of last years rice....(for the chickens I hasten to add... no Mikasa business practises here), 2 kilos of leeks, and a huge chinese cabbage.

So, this morning me and my cleaver got up early..... The young hens end up in the freezer, the older hens and the cocks I used to eat, but nowadays just use them to make gallons of tasty chickenstock.

So, I sit in my cozy, warm house, belly full of leek and potato soup, the room filling with the aroma of chicken stock reducing on the stove, and ponder my investment portfolio. No matter what the vagaries of interest rates and economic climates, I won't be going hungry or getting cold.

Japan Photo Contest

This is the view up the valley from Tanijyugo. I live on the other side of the mountain on the left.

Which has nothing to do with this post except that it is a photo of Japan, and the good folks over at JapanVisitor are having a Japan Photo contest.

It's open to amateurs, free to enter, and cool prizes. Full details here

http://www.japanvisitor.com/index.php?cID=358&pID=1912