first Woofing day

Even before breakfast, at 6.30am there I was, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, cleaning the loo, loo floor, utility area etc. Stomach rumbling, hoping breakfast wouldn't be too much later than 7am. And it wasn't: brown rice with seaweed paste, soy sauce and spring onion, miso soup. Yum yum.

The brown rice is cooked in what Juan thought (when I Skype-toured him) was a giant pressure cooker; in fact a magic rice cooker that mysteriously refills with no one doing anything. I finally got to the bottom of this today: we eat rice cooked the previous day (easier to digest?); it is topped up with the next batch of rice (yeah, how does the first batch avoid getting over cooked?). And, since we never finish it, er, when does the cooker get cleaned? Every week or so.. Wow... What was that we all learned about never storing and reheating cooked rice?

After breakfast all hell broke loose when Fuko and Kanta found out that the school stickers they'd been earning for e.g. going to bed before 9, clearing away their bowls etc had got mixed up. Kanta just couldn't get over it, inconsolable. Fuko, on the other hand, went bananas and then moved on. Interesting how the school is involved at that level, in establishing routines that we might expect parents to decide on an individual basis. But that is one of the key differences about Japan.

So, back to the cleaning and was I perhaps trying to earn a sticker with my zealous scrubbing of the bathroom floor? Needless to say, e-cloths, "telescopic" cleaning handles and anything fancier than (?) baking soda are not part of the woofer's cleaning kit; I was on my hands and knees throughout. Then to the living areas where I attacked places that I swear haven't been cleaned this year, e.g. between the sets of sliding doors that are shut off during winter. This is the quintessential Japanese house: most of the downstairs a huge area of tatami matting, with removable door panels to increase or decrease the room size. The children can have a ball, running around doing cartwheels etc. At some point they will learn restraint, take up less space, those diminutive poses...l

The rest of the morning we were outside: a bit of grain harvesting then clearing a couple of the raised beds. The technique we used must be permaculture - cutting the weeds at ground level rather than uprooting them (unless too big), then leaving them on the alleys between the beds, seed heads and all. This is what Masan describes as growing with love, and that's what this place is all about. I have found the original Japanese hippy family! I asked him what his neighbours thought of him. The answer was mixed: they acknowledge his contribution to the community    - strimming in the area around his property, but they object to his "natural" style of farming on the grounds that it attracts more insects, and is not beautiful.

Beautiful. There's a lot to be said about that word. Last night we celebrated Machiko's birthday and my drinking posture was corrected because it is more "beautiful" for a woman to place her non-glass-holding hand horizontally beneath the glass, lifting the glass with both hands. Blimey, that's gonna be tricky to integrate!

Work ended at lunch time and I've spent a pleasant afternoon mooching around. The bath invitation was earlier than usual (it would be completely unacceptable to decline!) - and the water once again too hot to actually get into. So I did a mixture of cold sloshing with the shower, and scooping and diluting from the bath.

Must stop now. Early supper then out to the village autumn festival.