Yeah

The Christmas party was fun.

There were a lot of small kids running around the old house. I played hide-and-seek with some of them for a while. The kids were SOOO energetic; amazing and great.

I got to meet and talk to a lot of people I didn't know or hadn't really talked to.
Almost everyone's job and life envolves nature/ outdoor stuff like woodchopper, carpenter, farmer+yoga teacher, bamboo artist, etc. No one works for any big cooperations. I found it interesting and very nice. I enjoyed talking to them and listening to their stories.

I enjoyed the food too. There were lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, and soups and other dishes that everyone made with love. Great.

I enjoyed the party very much.

A fine day of a snowy day

I did capoeira performance at a small drumming show/concert with the people I practice with. It was fun. Everyone seemed to have enjoyed it :) I'm glad a friend of mine came to see the performance and she said she was impressed.

I made a dish with purple yam and black soy beans and took it in a bamboo container to the Christmas party at Enrique, one of the capoeira teacher's house two days ago. Enrique brought the bamboo container back, which I hadn't expected. He brought some home-dried persimmons in it to toady's practice as a snack for people. It made me very happy. He said it would be a good idea to put a bamboo charcoal inside it, as a natural preservative. (He makes bamboo charcoal by the way) I like the idea and it made me even happier.

capoeira and ping pong

I go to capoeira class 4 times a week
and to ping pong club 2 times a week

i enjoy them both

Tree planting party :)

My dad and I planted some baby fruit trees near the cabin on Monday.
one persimmon, 4 fig trees, one silver berry and a date tree.
We bought the persimmon seedling from the store but Kuzuhara-san and Ooyama-san gave us the nursery trees of all the other 6 fruits. Kuzuhara-san said some of the fig nerseries from his parent tree might bear fruit even from next year.

I'm thankful for their kindness and so impressed that they had multiplied and saved the baby trees as a natural habit! They are cool people.

I'm excited to see the trees grow! yey

doburoku

im going to try making a home made sake, doburoku, or rice wine tonight

I want to connect with people at a deep level. I don't want to know people in passing. I want to know less people, and I want to know them more, and I want them to know me more.

today

went running this morning barefooted
my feet almost went numb

ive been eating a lot of persimmons, mandarine oranges, kiwis everyday that grow locally and organically on Sado

i sent a box of persimmons that i picked, to a vegan running friend who lives in tokyo

im going to attend a conference on organic farming, food safety and environmental issues this afternoon

ill check out a fleamarket on the way
a friend of mine is putting up a booth there

and maybe go to the library as well

its nice out

A quote of Scott Nearing,

the co-author of 'Living the Good Life'

"Do the best that you can, wherever you are, and be kind."

Colors colors colors

exhibition of fine arts
admission=free :)

ah

got in fight with my mom
it sucks:(

Today's stuff

Collected some more Tsubaki seeds while taking a walk
Peeled, and hung fresh persimmons to make dried persimmon
Went on barefood running and ran about 14km along the beach
Strethed on the porch
Made a pair of pants
Made 14 clay figurings for Kuzuhara-san
Looked for road bikes for triathlons

Lots more to do tomorrow...

oh yes

i went to this cave which is about 30min away from my dads cabin
to get there you'd have to climb down the steep hill using a rope and its pretty tiring
but there is this great water fall and a cave which make it worthy.

i jumped into the water (it was freezing cold!), stretched and meditated naked in the sun and was great!: its isolated enough so you dont have to worry about people bothering you.

i think i will go there regularly from now on.

what ive been doing/working on

harvesting, drying and husking the sorghum, sesame seeds and perilla that i grew

collecting Tsubaki, or Camellia japonica seeds in order to extract oil from them
they are tiny so i need so much of them. i go collect them right after i get up in the morning. people in japan used to use the oil as an antirust.

making a natural antiseptic/ waterproof/ dye out of green persimmons

eating persimmons and fresh figs off the trees

training for triathlons and stretching

taking enemas

i think thats pretty much it

rice harvest

so i harvested my rice with a bunch of friends' help at the end of September. we did it all by hand. we hang the rice to dry, husked it and hulled it after the harvest.
the yield was 150kg, or 330pounds, which is less than half the amount of conventional farming. weeds sort of took away a lot of nutrients the rice wanted, despite all the effort my dad and i put into to weed the rice paddy...

i didnt know how labor intensive organic&old style rice farming was, or how cheap rice is being sold in the market, no matter how the rice is produced. i dont know how much exactly would be reasonable/fair as a price of rice but i think the current price of rice is way too cheap. it is the same as that of 30 years ago! while all the other stuff price has gone up. how do you expect farmers to make a living with rice, and other veggies so cheap?

i dont know.
anyway im glad that i got to provide the rice i grew to my family at least for the year.

how lucky

i went see Agnes Chan, a Hong Kong born singer and a UNICEF ambassador speak tonight.
She talked about what she saw/did whille working to help sick, poor people in developing countries like Iraq, Thailand, and Africa, and how that helped change her view of life.

The lecture made me realize how lucky I am, to have a safe, clean place to sleep, food to eat, a healthy body, a great family and friends who care about me...
I think it's my responsibility to appreciate all this and be happy& thankful each day.
It's wrong for such a lucky person to complain about her life or to feel shitty about it.

Nuts nuts and nuts

Whole, wild, local, organic walnutsクルミ, chestnutsクリ and buckeye nuts栃の実　are in season right now! they are 0 yen a pound :) Nobody seems to bother though, except for my dad and I, at least around here... What a strange world.

Pictures: buckeye nuts and walnuts (in the shell), my dad pealing buckeyes (he knows how to make them edible), halved walnuts. yummy :)

Alternative medicine making

Amanosan and I made medicine out of red pine needles. It's gonna ferment in the next 2 weeks or something and will be ready to drink. All we put in were pine needles, well water and beets sugar. Pine trees are everywhere around my dad's cabin so it's pretty much free to make. I'm excited to drink it and see how it works on my body :)

Autumn sky

I love the autumn sky. It's soooo beautiful everyday:)

T shirt design

I helped Kuzuhara-san make Sado tshirts and designed one (the one on the lower left corner) myself.
hopefully they will sell at festivals?

A few more pics from my garden

Amaranths flowers
beans twining around the sorghum
newly developing sorghum roots= amazing!

Today's harvest

Okra, carrots, daikon radish, cherry tomatoes, egg plants, japanese basil, kabocha squash, straw berry tomatoes= delicious!

Garden update2

As of August 30.

The plants in the once abandoned rice paddy are doing great. The fact that it hadn't been used for farming for decades must be one of the reasons.
I'm growing sorghum, okra, tomatoes, red stem, Japanese basil, amaranths, beans, corn, radishes, etc. Sorghum plants are about 2 meters=6.5 feet high, much taller than me now and the ears have formed. The sesame seed plants are about 1meter high and the seeds are maturing in the pods.

Pictures: sorghum plants and sesame seed plants with flowers

yes it's the Ume plum season

it seems like this year is a great year of fruits here in sado. a friend of my dad's gave us about 15kg of Ume plum picked in her back yard the other day. and today kuzuhara-san let me pick their Ume plum at their yard. the two trees were both full of big plums although his family and a friend already had picked a lot before me. i ended up picking maybe 20kg of ume- thats a LOT :0

each of my parents pickled 4kg of ume to make umeboshi, my mom also made ume wine and syrup and I made jam a few days ago, then today i started making an enzyme drink.

whats in the drink?
8kg of ume plum
a bunch of young red pine leaves
7 or 8 bamboo shoots (peeled and cut into pieces)
dokudami plants
japanese pepper leaves
sugar (this is to extract nutrients and water from the above ingredients)

i put all these ingredients in a big bucket in rayers, put a wooden plate and a 10kg rock on top. im going to let this mixture ferment for a few weeks and strain it and make a condenced wild drink. this is totally experimental and i have no idea whats going to happen but i feel this is gonna be fantastic.

well ill let you know how its doing along the way.

pictures: 1. boxes of ume plums, 2. making of umeboshi/pickeld plum, 3. the jam i made, 4. the enzyme drink ingredients, 5. inside the enzyme drink bucket

home made wine

I picked so much silver berry the other day so i decided to make wine out of it.
all i did was crash the berry in a glass jar, mix sugar and water, leave it on top of the fridge with a cotton cloth over the jar, wait for 3 days and strain it.
when stored in the fridge, it had become alcoholic and effervescent like beer or champagne. its a wild yeast's magical job. I dont drink alcohol but it sure was a fun experiment. I enjoyed it.

skies

fighting with weed

as you can see, theres almost no weed in conventional rice paddies (the picture above), but theres a ton in our rice paddy (the one below) because we dont use weed killers.
so my dad and i have been weeding it almost everyday in the past month in the muddy rice paddy in a semi-crouching posture.
its so much work and is hard on my back and thighs. Its no wonder almost all the rice farmers use weed killers.
i personally enjoy weeding our rice paddy cuz its so much better for the eco system and it feels good to soak my legs and hands in a cool mud:)

you are welcome to come play in the mud or help me weed!

I'd like to

build my own house prolly with straw, mud and sand in the woods
make a composting toilet
and live off the grid

bamboo craft

kuzuhara-san, my friend and teacher got this used knife for me when i helped this garage sale last week. i made bamboo chopsticks with it today. the knife works very well so it was very enjoyable.

the picture below shows some of the toys i got to make when i helped kuzuhara-san with his bamboo workshop the other day. the big thing is a bamboo gun, the one on right is a puzzle ring, and the other two things...i'll show you hot to play with them when i see you :)

bamboo is everywhere around me, these toys dont need to plug them in, and they return to the earth. yey!

one of my favorite plants

we call it "dokudami" in Japanese. its scientific name is Houttuynia cordata.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houttuynia)

this plant grows in a somewhat shady place and where the soil is acidic. its super pervasive and strong.
it has white flowers, green& dark reddish leaves, and a strong scent. often people treat it like a nuisance but the whole plant is said to have a dozen of medicinal benefits so people soometimes call the plant "ju-yaku, or ten medicines" e.g. to prevent constipation, arterial sclerosis, high blood pressure, to name a few.

so i picked a bunch of it, bound it into bundles, then hung it over a bamboo pole at my dad's cabin to dry it. ill make tea out ot it when its dry and crisp. i can't wait:)