Patchwork Yokohama
2. Yokohama Rice
by Pencil Louis
It was while Connie Patchwork was booking a flight back to
Australia that she came across a series of brochures that
she thought would amuse Vince. One tourist company was
advertising "Ultimate Experience" travel. From the covers of
these tour pamphlets, the Ultimate American Experience was
not the New York subway as Vince had originally thought, but
the thrill of riding a bare backed bronco across the
prairie, roping and branding calves and eating baked beans
by campfire light. The Ultimate French Experience was
picking and treading grapes in Languedoc and tasting the
finished product with cheese and olives while the Ultimate
Italian Experience was poling a gondola through the canals
of Venice while pursued by the Venetian water police or was
it the Sicilian mafia?
The Ultimate New Zealand Experience was shearing sheep with
wide-combed shears and the Ultimate Australian Experience
involved travelling back and forth from the beach to the
mountains to enjoy surfing and bunjee jumping.
Vince remembered reading an article about a holiday tour
that involved being thrown into a German Prisoner of War
camp, being beaten up by the guards and interrogated at all
hours of the evening in broken English by the camp
commandant. Undoubtedly, these ultimate experiences were
much the same, catering for the travelling masochist.
Still, they set him to wondering what the Ultimate Japanese
Experience would be - being pushed onto a crowded train and
shoved as you made your way through the subway tunnels, a
day in the life of a sumotori or a samurai. He knew that in
the best tradition of Japanese travelling, the ultimate
experience was considered to be a good meal and a hot tub at
the end of a day's trekking. But this seemed a trifle too
insipid for the very concept of the Ultimate Experience
philosophy. Travelling for the Japanese was generally a
passive experience while these brochures were definitely
offering an active if not action-packed adventure.
It wasn't until Vince read an article in the morning paper
about the emperor planting some rice within the grounds of
the Imperial Palace that he had an idea for his own Ultimate
Japanese Experience. Rice planting, what could be more
Japanese? 95 per cent of all Japanese ancestors had their
feet firmly planted in the rice paddies. Suddenly, taue (the
Japanese word for planting rice) was a must-do for Vince
while he was in Japan.
The Atsukawas had already introduced Vince and Connie to one
element of Japanese rice culture - omochi New Years rice
cake making. The old paper on the shoji sliding screens was
being replaced, the house spring-cleaned and bamboo and pine
decorations arranged at the doorway, when Osamu and other
members of his family got stuck into the omochi making.
Little balls of omochi were left in various rooms to welcome
the gods at New Year, although the rice cakes were made to
be eaten as well. Ozoni, soup with rice cake in it, was one
of Vince's personal favourites.
Omochi rice was a separate breed. The grain was soaked for
24 hours, by which time you could crumble it to powder in
your fingers. It was then boiled for twenty minutes and put
through a sausage grinder. From here, the soft rice was
spread into a thick flat sheet to harden. It would later be
cut into squares and bagged.
Vince was suffering from too much end of year cheer from the
night before and he was even surprised to hear himself ask
about the traditional method of preparing omochi. The words
were no sooner out of his mouth than Osamu was rolling a
hollowed out tree trunk called an usu and had a huge mallet
called a kine in Vince's hands. Both were made from the same
hard zelkova tree wood.
Pounding rice with a headache like Vince's turned out to be
a new style of torture. Each batch took some five minutes to
pound and he found his arms were soon aching after each
jarring blow. Still, he was pleased that he had the
traditional male job. The woman turned the rice over and
damped it with water between each stroke of the kine. Vince
was terrified that he was going to mash Nozomi's fingers.
At last, the mochi rice was the same translucent milky
consistency as that manufactured by the sausage grinder.
Vince was relieved when Osamu suggested that they go back to
the more modern method. Nozomi was not so quickly appeased.
She chided her husband for not pounding the rice himself.
"I have done it many times," Osamu explained to Vince in his
own defence.
Nozomi picked up the sausage grinder to illustrate her point
to Vince, "You see they invent a machine to do the man's
job, but the woman's job is just the same as always."
It was one thing to pound rice, quite another to plant it.
Vince was not surprised to discover that rice was rather a
sensitive diplomatic issue in the land of the rising sun. An
American president had recently visited the country and
seemed to be of the opinion that all Japanese rice should be
grown in California. Of course, a landslide in an election
in the United States is just 51 % of the vote, but, as far
as Vince could see, every Japanese man, woman and child was
adamant that Japanese rice should and could only be grown in
Japan. All this in spite of the high price of rice in Japan.
At more than 500 a kilogram, rice in Japan cost seven times
as much as Californian rice in an Australian supermarket.
He had never seen his friend, Osamu, get passionate over any
other issue. Osamu had admittedly drunk quite a lot of sake
at the time, but he stood on the table, admittedly a low
Japanese style table, and announced to the assembled company
that it was impossible for Americans to grow rice for the
Japanese market because it took no less than 100 years to
prepare a rice paddy properly.
Vince made no bones that he believed that Californian rice
should stay in California. Imported rice was after all also
putting Australian rice producers out of business. Besides,
while he had found Americans generally quite personable as
individuals, he thought that the country regarded themselves
as the great koban of the world. Not even the Americans were
as pro-American as Osamu, but, as they were on the subject
of rice, Vince's comparison of the United States with a
police box delighted him. He had once spent two and a half
months in the country and had found their food totally
unpalatable. He had lived the entire time on hamburgers and
hot dogs, which he thought were good old-fashioned Japanese
staples.
Although Osamu was indeed relieved to discover that they
were on the same side in the rice debate, he was doubtful
about the possibility of Vince treading any rice paddies
himself. He had sucked in a lot of air and suggested that
rice planted by a Californian might not be so different from
rice planted in California. When Vince pointed out that he
was in fact an Australian not an American, and a Victorian
not a Californian, Osamu didn't seem to see the distinction.
Finally, it wasn't Osamu who helped him get into the mud.
The solution proved a lot easier than he had expected. Vince
simply contacted a Japanese greenie called Mr. Sanguchi, the
infamous leader of a conservationist movement called
Greenpeace. Mr. Sanguchi had left his steady job at the
Kanagawa Prefectural Government offices to devote more time
to the conservation movement.
This was enough to convince most of Japan that the guy was
totally insane. After all, he had left a good position with
a respectable annual bonus and a generous terminal increment
and retirement package. And now that public servants were
getting Saturday holidays, his new three-day a week job at a
local piggery didn't really compare.
Mr. Sanguchi didn't seem at all crazy to Vince. They walked
together through a valley with great fields of crops that
Mr. Sanguchi explained had been planted and would be
harvested by groups of ordinary citizens, who would then
share the produce - tomatoes, potatoes and leeks - among
themselves.
Mr. Sanguchi wasn't a conservationist in the western sense
of the word. He didn't plant trees, glue himself to
dam-building bull dozers or save whales. He believed firmly
that artificial chemicals, introduced almost entirely from
the west, had been responsible for most of the pollution in
local rivers. His groups used no such chemicals, planted and
weeded by hand and threshed their rice in machines that
required no electricity.
"See those weeds over there," Mr. Sanguchi gestured to a
brackenish clump on the nether side of the valley.
Vince nodded.
"That's the real issue of rice in Japan." va
"And how's that?"
"That land was a rice paddy twenty five years ago. Then, the
government brought in the law limiting the amount of rice
that could be produced and a lot of the land was left to go
to weeds."
"How long would it take to make that land into a rice paddy
again?" Vince asked.
"Two, maybe three generations," Mr. Sanguchi replied
gravely. "So, you can imagine how much damage your
Californian rice would do to the structure of the
countryside in Japan. Instead of neat paddies lining every
hillside, the land would be destroyed by weeds and erosion.
And we're not just talking about pockets of land like this
one, we're talking about tens of thousands of hectares."
Vince tried to explain once again that, as he was neither an
American nor a Californian, it could hardly be his rice, but
Mr. Sanguchi didn't seem to understand the distinction. He
took Vince to an area where a congregation of chattering
volunteers was knee deep in mud. They were carefully picking
green stalks from a large patch and tying them with straw
into bundles of about 30. These, Mr. Sanguchi explained,
were the rice seedlings.
He led the way to a gooey paddy where two lines of girl
scouts faced each other. Two lines of light cord marked the
row and each girl placed three pairs of seedlings in front
of her and then moved back a pace for the next row, so that
the two lines of girls got further and further from each
other. Between the giggling and teetering to maintain
balance, the girls laid out row after row of seedlings which
looked like typed lines of inverted commas.
Vince developed a sinking feeling in his stomach,
reminiscent of the sensation he usually felt before he went
swimming. This looked like icky good fun, but what if it
were back breaking work. He had hoped to tie some bundles of
30 rice seedlings before he braved the rice paddies, but he
discovered that there were now far less people in that small
area and that all but a few hundred had been tied into
bundles.
When he did eventually slide bare feet first into one of the
rice paddies, it felt as if he would keep sinking until he
was completely immersed in mud. Vince had had an awkward
experience with quick sand when he went panning for gold on
Kentucky Creek near Uralla in New South Wales when he had
sunk up to his waist in the stuff and had to pull himself
out by grabbing the black currant bushes at the side of the
creek. This was a similar sensation and Vince sighed with
relief when his feet found some support. The floor of the
rice paddy seemed to be a network of submerged old rice
stubble that made it feel as if he were walking on a net of
rope.
Vince was the only non-Japanese person in his line of 15
rice planters. He would later learn that they were from the
Kanagawa Public Service, Mr. Sanguchi's former place of
work. Perhaps, they were as nervous as he was for they
seemed intent on ignoring each other as well. One man at the
other end of the paddy lost his balance and sat down in the
middle of the mud. No one laughed or even helped the poor
guy up.
The string was pulled taut across the top of the watery mud,
so that the rows would be straight. Vince would push some of
the heavier mud underneath up so that the seedlings would
have some support and wouldn't sink completely out of sight.
He would position four pairs of rice seedlings in the mud
along the line and then wade back and always just manage to
prevent himself from overbalancing.
It was very pleasant in the afternoon sun. If you did have
to bend over occasionally, you also had time to straighten
up and stretch while the row was being finished. The mud
oozed delightfully between his toes and stuck coolly against
his calves. The whole business of planting the paddy took
less than half an hour and Vince thought he could have
easily done a dozen more paddies. Still, it wasn't so
pleasant that he would have liked to have done it every day
or even every year for the rest of his life.
As the last two rows were planted, the people around him
became suddenly very friendly as if the solemnity of the
moment was gone. They shook muddy hands. The two men who had
been working shoulder to shoulder with him jovially hauled
Vince out of the paddy and pressed a glass cup of ice cold
sake into his hand.
"Is this your first time?"
Vince nodded.
"It's our first time, too. It's not often that a salaryman
gets his feet dirty."
The other laughed handing him a steaming bowl of chanko,
"You wouldn't know it was your first time. It looked like
you'd been planting rice all your life."
Vince wasn't so sure. Scanning the even rows of seedlings,
he noticed that there was a fuzzy bit at the point on each
line where he had been. It was if a seismographical needle
at registered a minor earth tremor at the very place where
he had been planting. As he walked around each paddy, he
realised that his own fuzzy area was unique.
He supped on his chanko. It was a thin gruel of cabbage,
onion and potato grown in the area with a slice of pork from
Mr. Sanguchi's piggery. Perhaps, he decided, reflecting on
his own Ultimate Japanese Experience, he was a Californian
rice planter after all. Others had planted rice for the
first time that day, but their rows looked far more
professional.
Vince quietly washed the sticky paddy mud off his legs with
the help of a hand pump. It seemed to come off in layers and
he didn't get the final film off until he'd had a hot shower
that evening. He never returned to the paddies. He had a
lurking suspicion that the rice seedlings, which were pure
bred Japanese after all, had mistaken him for a Californian
and refused to grow.