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Autumn Harvest 2010 in Fujieda, Shizuoka (9 October 2010)
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Govinda Narayan Timilsina
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It was unfortunately rainy – A date of 10th of October in Japan used to be climatically a sunny-expected day. A local organizer in Fujieda, Shizuoka, said that the day of the event last year was also rainy. ‘There must be a rain-man or rain-woman here’, he said. This might be a traditional reasoning for unwelcome rain, but it might be better explained in the 21st century, a century of climate change, by the prolonged summer in Japan… We will see back this experience 30 years later.
FOLENS participated in an autumn one-day field visit on 9th of October organized by Department of International Environmental Agricultural Science, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology. The visit was to an organic, non-pesticides (herein after ‘non-chemical’) tea farmer in Fujieda, Shizuoka. FOLENS has visited the same farmer in June this year for learning non-chemical tea farming and small-scale agriculture in a rural country-side of Japan. This October visit was to follow up the June visit by experiencing harvest of rice, village autumn festival and traditional food processing. It was not heavily raining in the morning and we harvested half of the 0.5 ha paddy field in which we had planted in June. In the afternoon, although the rain was increasingly heavier, traditional dancing was performed in a small hall of the village shrine as planned. From school girls to experienced grandfathers, dancing along with the sound of traditional flute and drums was making a typical autumn atmosphere of Japanese rural farm village. After watching the dance, we moved back to the large farm house and experienced processing of Japanese native potatoes: ‘Kon-nyaku-potato’ and ‘Jinenjo-potato’. Kon-nyaku-potato was relatively easy to deal with, but Jinenjo-potato required time and muscle for complete mash-up.
Commonly attracted by the active, sincere, and delightful personalities of the Fujieda local young farm group, the autumn event drew attention not only from us but also from people in Fujieda, city-dwellers in Shizuoka and other prefectures. The unwelcome rain eventually provided more time for talks with such people in Fujieda – they said it was called ‘blessed rain’. (tf)
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