IF CHRISTMAS IS FOR KIDS, how do children get in the holiday spirit in Japan, which doesn’t have traditions of dashing through the snow on a one-horse open sleigh, good King Wenceslaus surveying the winter landscape on the Feast of Stephen, or, for bigger kids, having a close encounter under the mistletoe after a couple of cups of eggnog as a prelude to Santa sliding down the chimney? Here are three examples.

The first is a special class for children and their parents in Christmas ikebana, or flower arranging, in Tokushima City. Held in a local community center, it was part of a program sponsored by the Agency for Cultural Affairs. The class attracted 20 primary school students and their parents.

Providing the instruction was a director of a national ikebana association and officers of the local branch association of one of the flower arranging schools. The children used holly, lilies, azalea branches dyed red, and carnations to create flower arrangements with a Christmas theme. Said 11-year-old Hayakawa Yuri: “I was able to do it better than I thought I would. I want to see how it looks in my room.”

Meanwhile, the Susami Aquarium in Susami-cho, Wakayama, which features exhibits of local shrimp and crabs, decided to decorate their main attractions to offer a festive accent to the season. They dressed up two types of crabs as reindeer with Santa, or, to ensure a white Christmas, covered in snow.

One of the varieties given a seasonal makeover was the sponge crab dromidiopsis dormia, which has 15-centimeter-wide shells as an adult. Sea sponges naturally attach themselves to the shell, so the museum employed this trait to stick on sponges reworked to look like Santa dolls. The other was a local variety of spider crab with two-centimeter shells that sometimes disguise themselves with floating debris. The museum has loaded 20 with white thread to represent snow in an exhibit that lasts until the 25th.

Finally, in Rumoi, Hokkaido, municipal workers came up with a clever idea that uses the Chii-chan character. Chii-chan was an idea conceived by city employees to promote local scallop production throughout Hokkaido. Employees drafted 200 of the young scallop shells into holiday service, drew faces on them, and dressed them in red to resemble Santa Claus. The photo here shows them being displayed in a city building.

The Chii-chan/Santa figures are being given as presents to those who contribute to a campaign conducted by the Marine Rescue Japan organization. Some children, anxious for a Santa of their own, have even donated to the campaign.

So who needs visions of sugarplums dancing in your head when you can groove on Yuletide fantasias featuring original ikebana, sponge crabs, and scallop shells instead?

BAREFOOTIN’ IN TEE-SHIRTS and short pants, all the better to deal with the 30-minute turnarounds of pouring rain and blazing sun: yeah, summer has arrived at last in Japan. During the dog days, the archipelago offers all sorts of hot-weather delights, including watermelon, shaved ice, and best of all, the transformation of even the most neo-radical of young women into traditional beauties once they exchange their jeans for yukata (a summer kimono).

What else is going on up and down the islands? Well, take a look and find out!

Firefly festivals

Once upon a time, summer nights on the East Coast of the United States came alive with a light show au naturel created by fireflies. The march of progress and suburbia seems to have ended all that, but the lightning bugs, as we used to call them, are still alive and flickering in the countryside here.

This is Japan, so take it as given that people know just when to expect their appearance every year, just how long it will last, and how to organize the viewing parties and festivals held to coincide with those dates.

Lightning bugs!

The photo shows the fireflies near the Ayu River in Tanabe, in the southern part of Wakayama. It’s one of several locations in the area known as superb firefly viewing sites from the end of May to the beginning of June.

But as with the cherry blossoms and the rainy season, the firefly front keeps marching north, and right now the folks in Yonezawa, Yamagata, are enjoying a month-long firefly festival at the Onogawa spa. The festival is sponsored by the spa’s tourism association and the Yonezawa Firefly Protection Society. The opening ceremony was held at the local memorial firefly tower to pray for the safety of the participants during the event. Those Yonezawans must really like fireflies!

It’s not a festival in Japan without liquor, so right after the prayers they perform another centuries-old ritual by knocking open the head of a sake barrel with wooden hammers and passing the hooch around. They say some people see double when they drink too much, so you can imagine the sort of visions that light up the retinas of the festival-goers when a wave of fireflies floats by.

The viewing in Yonezawa begins on the riverbank right after it gets dark at 8:00 p.m. and lasts until 9:00. The area is such a firefly mecca that three different species breed here, and who but the entomologists knew there were different types of lightning bugs? For a spot of relaxation after all this excitement, the open-air baths stay open until nine, and there’s a tea house set up temporarily next to the firefly tower. The festival fun lasts until 31 July, but some people like to time their visit for the amateur entertainment contest on the 4th and 5th.

Hatsukiri

Sliding over from zoology to botany, here’s a photo of the festival held by the Miyajidake Shinto shrine in Fukutsu, Fukuoka, for the first cutting of Edo irises in a local garden. The purpose of the event, called Hatsukiri—first cutting, appropriately enough—is to present the irises as an offering to the divinities. They’ve got plenty of flowers from which to choose, because the garden has 30,000 individual plants. While the priests grunt, bend over, and swing their scythes, two miko hold irises as they perform a dance accompanied by a flute. More than 200 people came to watch. A small turnout, you say? That’s not a bad crowd for watching two girls perform a centuries-old dance in costume in a garden in a town of 56,000 while priests cut flowers. How many people would show up where you live?

The shrine held its Iris festival on the same day. They place 70,000 irises in front of the shrine and light ‘em up until 9:00 p.m. for 10 days. The shrine has its own iris garden too, started from bulbs sent by the Meiji-jingu in Tokyo in 1965. They now have 100,000 plants in 100 varieties. That’s a heck of a lot of irises, but they need that many to go around for all of Shinto’s yaoyorozu divine ones. (Yaoyorozu is the traditional number of divinities in Shinto. It literally means eight million, but figuratively represents an infinite number, signifying that each natural object has a divine spirit.)

Seaweed cutting

Irises weren’t the only flora getting cut for a Shinto ritual. Four priests from the Futamikitama Shinto shrine in Ise, Mie, boarded a boat with some miko and sailed offshore for some seaweed cutting. They present the seaweed—fortunately an uncountable noun—to the divinities, allow it to dry out for a month, and then distribute it to their parishioners to drive out bad fortune and eradicate impurities.

At 10:30 a.m., the priests set sail on their skiff festooned with red, yellow, green, purple, and white streamers, with bamboo grass placed at bow and stern, and headed for the special seaweed site 770 meters northeast of the Futami no Meoto, sometimes called the Wedded Rocks. (The word meoto designates a pair of something, one large and one small.) Since this is a special ritual, they can’t just start cutting—first they have to circle the divine Kitama rock on the seabed three times, then they haul out a three-meter long sickle and get to work.

Sea goya

Since the subject is aquatic plants, now’s as good a time as any to report that the Fukuka Aquaculture Center in Kin-machi, Okinawa, is ramping up production of a new variety of sea grapes they hope to popularize in Japan after sales start next month. The center has dubbed the new type “sea goya”, after the knobby bitter squash for which Okinawa is famous. (Here’s a previous post about sea grapes in Okinawa and goya in general.)

Tastes as good as it looks!

The center’s director said they discovered these particular sea grapes among a batch imported in March 2008. The new variety flourished in the southern climate, and that gave people the idea to turn it into a new product, particularly as they were looking for ways to juice the market after the prices of regular sea grapes and mozuku seaweed tanked.

They decided to call the new plant sea goya because it’s more elongated than regular sea grapes and has the bitter flavor of goya. The center has already applied to register the name as a trademark, and they’re confident the application will be approved. After hearing about the new product, more than 10 companies inquired about handling the distribution.

Nara ayu

After insects, irises, seaweed, and sea grapes, here come the freshwater fish: namely the ayu, or sweetfish, which we’ve encountered before in a post about their encounters with traditional traps.

Some sweetfish just for you

These sweetfish, however, were caught by means with an even longer and exalted pedigree—trained cormorants. The birds require keepers that are somewhat analogous to falconers, all of whom ply their skills for the Imperial Household Agency because the technique is a tradition of the Japanese Imperial household. (Dig their costumes in the photo at the link.)

Six keepers were employed to catch the fish at the Imperial fishing grounds on the Nagara River in Gifu City, but the keepers can handle up to a dozen birds on the end of ropes, so they must have taken quite a haul. They go out in boats too, but at night, and they take along lighted torches. The fish are attracted to the flame like maritime moths, and the birds dive in after them. The lower part of the cormorants’ necks are collared to prevent them from swallowing the fish, and after they’ve snatched one, the keepers reel them in and make them cough it up. That’s got to be more cruel than feeding a dog peanut butter.

The fish were packed into paulownia boxes and shipped to the Kashihara-jingu, a Shinto shrine in Kashihara, Nara, as well as the Imperial Palace and the Meiji-jingu, another Shinto shrine in Tokyo. Both shrines have an Imperial connection.

The Japanese have been using cormorants to catch sweetfish since at least the 8th century—don’t you wonder who came up with that idea?–and the Nagara River event is more than a millennium old, but this shrine has been receiving the sweetfish shipments only since 1940 to offer in prayer for the safety of fishing and a good catch. (The 1940 date suggests it might have begun as part of the celebrations that year marking the 2600th anniversary of the establishment of the Japanese Imperial House.)

Contributing to the delinquency of minors

Yet another sign of summer in Japan is the yaoyorozu of rice-planting festivals held throughout the country. It’s easy to figure out why—they grow the rice in wet paddies, which are made even wetter by all the rain that falls this time of year.

But the students at Miyoshi High School in Miyoshi, Tokushima, weren’t planting this rice as part of a festival; they were getting classroom credit. The lads aren’t planning to be farmers when they grow up–rather, they’re enrolled in a course covering the brewing and fermentation of food products. They’ll harvest that rice in the fall and use it to make sake.

The rice is grown on a 3,000-square-meter paddy the school rents from area residents. The teachers do most of the planting with a machine, and then some of the second year students wade right in and plant by hand those parts the machine can’t reach. They expect to harvest 1.5 tons of the rice in mid-September, which can probably be converted into enough sake to keep the town of Miyoshi more lit than a riverbank full of fireflies until New Year’s. The school started the project last year, and this year they increased the size of the cultivated area six-fold to use only the rice grown by students.

One of those students, 16-year-old Fukuda Shinya, had planted rice before, but he said the seedlings were more difficult to handle because the size was different than that of regular table rice.

Now why couldn’t I have gone to that school!

Shochu collector

While the high school students were outdoors sweating and getting dirty as they planted the rice for the sake they will later brew, Masuyama Hiroki (73) of Izumi, Kagoshima, was relaxing with an adult beverage as he contemplated the success of his 12-year effort to collect one bottle each from all the prefecture’s shochu distillers. This is Kagoshima, where everyone drinks shochu and almost no one drinks sake, so he had his work cut out for him.

He’s so proud of his accomplishment he’s got them lined up on the wall, and hasn’t twisted the cap on a single bottle. Mr. Masuyama decided to make it is hobby after he retired from a job with the prefectural government in 1996 and started working in sales. His business trips took him throughout Kagoshima, and after he got the idea—probably in a bar during one of those business trips–he made a list and started buying while he was selling. He started with 1.8 liter (1.92 US quarts) bottles, but they were too heavy and took up too much space, so he switched to bottles half that size. He had a few difficulties completing the collection, and no, one of them wasn’t a tendency to polish off a bottle before before he could display it on the rack. For one thing, the smaller bottles were sold mainly to commercial establishments, but he applied his salesmen’s skills to get what he wanted. Another was that he didn’t have much of a chance to go to the prefecture’s many outlying islands on business. After retiring from his second job, it took two more years to finish the project.

Mr. Masuyama says he enjoys looking at his collection while having a late-night drink, but his libation doesn’t come from those shelves on the wall. He hasn’t opened any of the bottles and says it would be a waste to drink them.

Now there’s a man with discipline!

Miko class

Shinto shrine maidens, known as miko, get to do all sorts of fun stuff. In this post alone, they’ve sailed out to the Wedded Rocks to help the priests cut seaweed, carried the sacred sweetfish caught by cormorants, and danced while the priests cut Edo irises in Fukutsu. Even better, they get to handle the money at the shrine during New Year’s.

Doesn’t that sound like a great part-time job? If that’s the kind of work you’re looking for, the Kanda Myojin Shinto shrine in Chiyoda, Tokyo, is offering a beginner’s level course that provides instruction in how to become a miko. Even better, the class will last only one day, on 17 August—the middle of summer vacation!

Kanda Myojin conducts the class every year with the idea of giving young Japanese women a better idea of their traditions and culture, as well as teaching them more about the shrine. Last year, the student body consisted of 24 women who got to wear the red and white outfit for a day as they studied the shrine’s history, the daily conduct of affairs at the shrine, and its religious ceremonies.

Considering they charge only JPY 5,000 yen ($US 52.40), that sounds like a good deal. They’re looking for 20 unmarried young women this year from 16 to 22, and enrollment is open until the end of the month.

The declaration of the eisa nation

Start with a party, end with a party. This particular hoedown is the eisa dance native to Okinawa. Centuries ago, it was performed as a rite for the repose of the dead, but now it’s done for entertainment and is more likely to wake the dead than ease their way into the next world.

Okinawa City issued a proclamation declaring itself Eisa Town earlier this month, and held a Declaration Day Eisa Night event outside the city offices to lay claim to the title. Six groups made their eisadelic statement as they performed in original/trad clothing they created themselves. Eisa Night means that eisa season has officially started in the city, and summer in this city means that local youth groups will give public performances every weekend until the really big show, the Okinawa Eisa Festival in September.

During her greeting at the ceremony, Mayor Tomon Mitsuko said, “We hope you come to Okinawa City on the weekends and enjoy yourselves.” Then the dancing started and everyone proceeded to do just that.

It’s not just for the Ryukyuans, either. One of the six groups performing was the Machida-ryu of Machida, Tokyo, who started their own group in 1999 after a trip to Okinawa. They were so captivated by the dance they had to do it themselves at home. Now the troupe has more than 100 members.

There’s an idea: create your own Okinawan dance and drum ensemble and visit Eisa Town next year. If you want to learn, watching the video is a great way to start!

ANYONE WHO’S EVER EATEN nigirizushi knows about wasabi—the green, horseradish-like paste spread between the fish on top and the rice on the bottom. Yet few who’ve eaten it realize all the trouble people went through to get that condiment on the sushi to begin with, and to keep it fresh once it got there.

For one thing, the wasabi is purposely placed between the fish and the rice to preserve its pungency. The paste quickly loses its distinctive flavor and aroma when exposed to the air. In fact, just about everything involved with the cultivation and preparation of wasabi takes time and trouble. Take a look at the accompanying photo, for example. It shows Murakami Takeo and his wife Torae, both in their 80s, harvesting their wasabi crop last week.

The Murakamis grow their wasabi in the shallows of the Tani River that flows behind their home in Tanabe, Wakayama. There are two types of wasabi, and the kind the Murakamis cultivate is called sawa wasabi. That variety must be grown in pure, constantly flowing water—the colder the better. The couple planted this crop two years ago in the sandy river soil, around which they’ve built a stone wall.

They have to harvest the plant by hand, pulling out the main root from the earth and removing the leaves and smaller hairy roots. They’ll put two kilograms of the roots in a specially built wooden box to ship to market, because the roots also go bad quickly. Some of their wasabi will be sold at shops in the city that purchase produce directly from the farmers.

Wasabi grows wild in Japanese stream beds and mountain river valleys. The Japanese themselves think they’ve been eating it since the Nara period, which occurred during the 8th century, but the plant is so difficult to cultivate they didn’t successfully farm it until 800 years later in what is now Shizuoka City. The story goes that some was given in feudal tribute to Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of Japan’s last shogunate in 1603, and the great man loved it so much he forbade its use outside his castle. It began to be used for soba and sushi during the Edo period, which ran from the early 17th century to 1868. Today, Nagano is the top wasabi producing prefecture when the crops of both the sawa variety and the soil-grown variety are combined.

The distinctive spiciness is due to allyl isothiocyanate, and inhaling the vapor from the plant has been shown to have an effect similar to smelling salts. In fact, some Japanese researchers are trying to use the wasabi odor to create a smoke alarm for the deaf, as you can see from this site, which includes a BBC report. Researchers conducted experiments by spraying canned wasabi extract into a room in which people with hearing impairments were sleeping. It woke 13 of the 14 test subjects up within two minutes—one of them in just 10 seconds.

Indeed, some think that wasabi has numerous health benefits as well. This website makes the case for its ingredients being effective in both preventing and treating cancer. They claim it is also an antioxidant, an antibiotic, an anticoagulant, and an anti-inflammatory agent. Even more, it is said to promote bone calcification.

There’s only one problem: They don’t tell us how much of it we have to eat to reap those benefits, and how much havoc it will wreak on our mucous membranes until that amount is consumed!

WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED that cherry trees are the stuff of legend both in North America and Japan? Every American, for example, is familiar with the fable of a young George Washington, who chopped down a cherry tree during his misspent youth while looking for some action with a new hatchet. Washington is said to have copped to the deed when his father asked him about it point blank. Little Georgie’s honesty won him parental praise instead of the expected punishment for vandalizing the property. Today they’d probably stuff him with Ritalin.

It turns out this story depicting the father of his country as a moral exemplar was concocted by Parson Mason Weems to boost sales of his biography of Washington, the first one written. Perhaps juicing the tale with a little fiction helped—the book ran to 82 editions, the last of which was published in 1927, and it was translated into French. I’m not sure why they wanted to read it—the French certainly have no problems when it comes to creating myths about Gallic public figures.

The Japanese have their own cock-and-bull story about a cherry tree, which is not surprising considering the number of cherry trees in this country and the quantity of cock-and-bull artists to be found in the drinking establishments of any country. But this one concerns the planting of a tree, rather than the destruction of one.

The photo shows a cherry tree of the shidarezakura variety–literally “drooping branch cherry”–on the grounds of the Kumano-Nachi Shinto shrine in Nachikatsu’ura-cho, Wakayama. The shidarezakura, native to Japan, is known to botanists as the prunus pendula, but normal people in the English-speaking world call it the weeping cherry.

This one is deemed worthy of a newspaper photograph because legend has it that it was planted by the Go-Shirakawa Tenno (emperor), who sat on the Chrysanthemum Throne from 1155 to 1158. Now that can’t be right—the life span of the more common Yoshino cherry is 40-50 years, and drooping isn’t going to extend a cherry tree’s life by nearly a millennium.

The shrine insists on its polite fiction, however, and keeps it out of public view most of the year. They make an exception when it blooms, and this year the blossoms came out a week earlier than usual on 23 March.

It might not be a millennium old, but the Emperor’s Cherry, as it is sometimes called, is old enough to have grown to seven meters in height with a trunk 1.4 meters in circumference. Some of those drooping branches are eight meters long.

As often happens when doing research on what seems to be an innocuous story in Japan, other interesting details come to light. For example, this tree is said to be depicted in the Kumano-Nachi Sankei Mandala, or Mandala of a Visit to Kumano-Nachi. The mandala dates from the early Edo period, which would make it the 17th century, so they do like their tall cherry tree tales in Wakayama. Here’s a website showing the mandala, and you can click on it to view sections in greater detail. I couldn’t positively identify the Emperor’s Cherry, but it’s probably in there somewhere. It’s such a well-known work of art locally that high school students made their own, as you can see here. It took them 50 days to paste together 234,000 pieces of paper, which is a better way for teenagers to spend their spare time instead of running around with a hatchet in a cherry orchard.

Go-Shirakawa Tenno, incidentally, was the 77th emperor, and though his reign lasted but three years, he survived long enough to pull strings behind the scenes for another 34. That means he might have outlasted the original cherry tree he planted, despite the stories to the contrary!

Not all is elegance and sweet myth at the Kumano-Nachi shrine, either. Revisit if you will this previous post on the shrine’s fire festival. Those are some serious torches the guys are carrying. And just to make sure that the whole place is pure before the festival, the priests hang a shimenawa, or a sacred rope, at the top of a nearby waterfall. Purity of spirit is not for the faint of heart in Japan!

Since this is cherry blossom season, don’t miss the updated predictions on the cherry blooming front from the Japanese Meteorological Agency here, or on the right sidebar.

AT LEAST ONCE IN THEIR LIVES, usually in early adolescence, Americans make a point to stay up to midnight on New Year’s Eve to watch the ball of light slide down the tower above Times Square in New York City to herald the start of the new year. My niece even went there to see it in person a couple of years ago and still lived to tell the tale.

Never ones to be shy about borrowing an idea that strikes their fancy, the Japanese turn the night sky’s darkness into daylight throughout the country on 31 December. Many venues offer a special countdown coupled with entertainment and charge an admission fee. One of them is Mitsui Greenland, an amusement park a couple of hours down the road here in Kyushu.

More interesting than the ersatz events at amusement parks, however, is the way in which the Japanese have adapted the concept and retrofitted it to more traditional settings, such as Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples.

For example, the Shinto priests in charge of the Himeji Gokoku shrine in Kobe, Hyogo, don’t light up a single ball—they light up 2,000 chochin, or traditional lanterns, on the shrine grounds. The first photo shows the chochin lit up earlier this week during a trial to see if any of the bulbs had burned out. Inspecting the fixtures seems to be another part of the miko’s job description. If you were lucky enough to be there at midnight on 31 December, you would have gotten to see the real thing.

The event is called the Mantosai, which literally means The Festival of 10,000 Lights. Before you start wondering about truth in advertising, keep in mind that it’s not supposed to be taken literally. In China and Korea as well as Japan, the number 10,000 has long been used to mean “a very large amount” rather than 10,000 in round numbers.

The shrine says they offer the ceremony in the hope of a “bright” new year. Explained the chief priest, “This year has been filled with “dark” events, including the financial crisis, but we want to raise a light at the New Year in the hope that people will be reminded of the beautiful Japanese virtue of treasuring a richness of spirit.”

Another Shinto shrine took the opportunity to use the lighting to promote one of its most recognizable assets. The Kumano Hongu shrine in Tanabe, Wakayama, light up their immense torii on the former shrine grounds at Oyu-no-hara from 31 December to 7 January. The second photo shows the dress rehearsal on 27 December, in which 13 spotlights placed around the torii were turned on at 5:00 p.m., just when it starts to get dark in these midwinter days.

The torii is 34 meters (111.55 feet) high and 42 meters wide at the maximum point, so it must surely be an impressive sight bathed in floodlights in the middle of a pitch black field. They purposely used a red light for the yatagarasu crest in the middle of the torii to set it off from the overall blue hue. That’s a mythical sacred magpie with three legs that was reputed to lead people to the proper path in life. Lit up like that, it’s almost as if there’s a neon arrow pointing to the Promised Land and flashing the message, Step Right This Way!

On New Year’s Eve, or o-misoka as they say in Japan, it was lit from 6:00 p.m. to 5 a.m., but for the rest of the week visitors will have to make do with just three hours from 6-9 p.m. (By the way, try this link for a previous post about the Yata Fire Festival at the same location. They use a nice lighting scheme for that event, too.)

Even more spiritually distant from the Times Square fleshpots is the ecumenical spirit of a group in Setochi, Okayama, which provides illlumination to more than one religious institution on Mt. Kamitera. The group was organized to preserve the joint Buddhist and Shinto culture that survives on the mountain, so they made sure to shine a light on both the main building of the Yokei-ji Buddhist temple and pagoda as well as the Toyohara Kitashima shrine. They used 150 lights for the temple, which is a nationally designated important cultural treasure, as well as the shrine and torii. The group gave visitors a taste of the brightness to come when they switched on the lights from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. on the 30th, but then they went the whole Hogmanay on the 31st by letting them burn from 6:00 p.m. until 2:00 a.m. the next morning. For an extra decorative touch, they also placed candles and lanterns along the pathways.

And while you’re still recovering from having stuffed yourself with o-sechi ryori, pickled herring, black-eyed peas, or whatever other special foods custom dictates be scarfed down during the season, you can get clicky with some blasts from the past presenting other aspects of the Japanese New Year.

Here’s a look at the Big Shimenawa in Hiroshima.

What else is there to eat? Well, there’s mochi. And soba. And even whale and shark, for the more discriminating palates.

The Japanese also deck the halls with boughs of pine trees, and all sorts of other things.

And to conclude, the New Year’s firsts shall come last!

MANY FISH BITES, the old song goes, when you got good bait. That’s always been true, but sometimes the clever fisherman doesn’t need bait. The Japanese figured out a more relaxed way to catch sweetfish several centuries ago without worming any hooks at all. They just put something in their way!

Ayu a sweet fish?

The use of the name sweetfish is no hyperbole, incidentally. That’s what all the dictionaries say is the English term for the ayu. No, I’d never heard of sweetfish before I came to Japan either, but somebody somewhere must call them that. They’re certainly very tasty, but “sweet” is not the best way to describe their flavor.

The Japanese have always liked the ayu; in ancient times, they appeared as a good omen in stories. Maybe that’s why they sometimes name girls after them.

Has anyone ever used “my little sweetfish” as a term of endearment, I wonder?

Back to the story, the photo shows a traditional fish trap for catching the ayu that come barreling downriver every year to mate. It was placed on the Hidaka River in Ryujin-mura, Wakayama. (Ryujin means “dragon god”, by the way, but that’s a different kettle of fish.)

The trap is supposed to be quite simple. The fisherfolk stretch ropes across the river and tie straw to the ropes at regular intervals. This blocks the passage of the ayu, who dislike obstacles. Now that makes sense–if you were swimming downstream to mate with someone particularly sweet, you wouldn’t want anything to get in your way, either. It’s assembled in such a way as to guide the frustrated little guys into a sack-like area, where they’re scooped up. Some of the more energetic fishermen use nets instead.

A little research turned up still another way to catch ayu. The fish aggressively protect their turf—or should I say surf—and will pugnaciously try to drive out any other creatures foolish enough to fin their way into their territory. The fishermen take advantage of this trait in a technique called tomozuri, or decoy fishing. The ayu fall for the bait every time. Except there isn’t any bait to fall for.

These traps look effective, but alas, the Hidaka River Fishing Cooperative reports the ayu aren’t all that interested in coming downstream this year. Not enough rain.

Now who would have guessed that it took rain to get a sweetfish into the mood?

THIS POST last June briefly examined the importance of rice in Japan and included capsule summaries of the many rice-planting festivals held in late spring throughout the country. Now you know darn well that if people are going to take the trouble to have a special ceremony for planting the rice, they’re going to have another when it comes time to harvest it. And here they are!

The ritual for cutting the rice itself is variously called the nuihosai, the nuibosai, or even the nuiboshiki, but they all mean the same thing. Some of the rice (and other crops) harvested during these ceremonies is offered to the divinities a month later in a ceremony called the niinamesai. Here’s a quick look at what’s been going on out in the fields. Don’t be shocked—some of it involves putting schoolgirls to work doing manual labor on the farms!

Shingu, Wakayama

Five junior high school girls clad as otome, or rice paddy maidens, hacked away during the nuihosai at the Kumano Hayatama Taisha, a Shinto shrine. The Shingu otome worked in a 10-are (quarter acre) wet paddy planted in April. The paddy yielded 480 kilograms of rice, which made everyone pleased as punch. The rice itself will be used for shrine ceremonies, while the ears were offered at the Ise shrine. (That’s closely associated with the Imperial family, making it one of the most important Shinto shrines in Japan. The enshrined deity at the Inner Shrine is Amaterasu, the sun goddess who is the mythological ancestor of the emperors.) Teenaged Japanese girls don’t have a lot of practice at wielding the scythes, so the onlookers had to give them the benefit of their experience—whack from below and at an angle. That’s one thing about old folks—they like to stand around kibitzing. Here’s another—they’re usually right!

Naruto, Tokushima

Held at the O’asahiko Shinto shrine, this nuihosai started with a Shinto ceremony. Then five karime, or cutting girls, from the local primary school, went to work. Meanwhile, about 40 people watched from the sideline and gave the girls the benefit of their extensive experience. (Whack from below and at an angle!) The rice was planted at the end of May, and the harvest totaled about 450 kilograms. It will be offered at the November niinamesai and to the shrine every day throughout the year.

Sabae, Fukui

Instead of rice, the karime at this nuihosai harvested foxtail millet, a plant frequently cultivated in East Asia and infrequently seen in Japanese supermarkets. Millet can grow to a height of five feet, which might require different whacking techniques than those used for the smaller rice plants. A local farmer planted this small field in June. The crowd estimated at 170 who came to watch and make speeches included area residents and officials from the prefecture, city, and JA (the national agricultural cooperatives association). The millet will be dried and offered both to the Imperial household in Tokyo and at the local niinamesai.

Minamiechizen-cho, Fukui

Fukui also harvests the traditional rice instead of millet, and that’s what the sixth-grade karime are doing here. You can’t see him, but helping out the girls is Ishikawa Tetsuji, who planted the field in May. Mr. Ishikawa said that growing the rice in such a natural setting enabled him to derive a sense of spiritual culture. He said he also felt a particular responsibility because Fukui is the home of koshihikari rice. That’s a super-premium strain of rice created in the 1950s, and it has become one of the most popular in the country. It’s also popular at the Imperial Palace, where the crop was recently offered. It will be used later this month at the niinamesai with Fukui millet and other rice from around the country.

Mine, Yamaguchi

The Imperial household is going to have enough rice to feed the entire diplomatic corps when these ceremonies are all over. Two liters of the rice harvested in Mine, Yamaguchi, which was cut by 15 karime, are also being shipped to Tokyo. This year the job of planting the ceremonial crop fell to Kitahara Masahiko, which he did in May on his three-are (300 square meter) field. Mr. Kitahara allowed as how the great weather this year resulted in an excellent crop. Now when was the last time you heard any farmer anywhere talking up his harvest? The average farmer would rather choke on his cut plug than talk about how good he’s got it. It might make the government think twice about agricultural subsidies, for one thing. (The Japanese usually soft-pedal their good harvests by saying they are mazumazu, or not so bad.) He also said he was thrilled to do the work because it was the greatest honor that could be received in a lifetime of farming.

Hamamatsu, Shizuoka

They call it a nuiboshiki in Hamamatsu, and theirs was held at a rice paddy near the Iinoya-gu Shinto shrine, which every year grows isehikari rice received from the aforementioned Ise shrine. Eight grade-school girls dressed up as otome to harvest the rice they planted themselves in the spring, and they look like they’re enjoying themselves. A group of about 10 people stuck around to kibitz, telling them to whack from the bottom at an angle. The crop this year was about 100 kilos–sounds about right for grade school girls–which was dried for offering at the shrine. More was offered in mid-October at the Ise shrine itself at a ceremony called the kannamesai.

Omaezaki, Shizuoka

Hey, where did that hair-legged guy come from! That’s Masuda Noboru, stomping around his own rice paddy in Omaezaki, where he planted koshihikari rice on 2,818 square meters in April. That yielded a harvest of about 500 kilograms—better than the usual crop, according to Mr. Masuda. He cut the rice plants himself for presentation to the tenno (Emperor) at the niinamesai. It’s a wonder the Imperial family doesn’t have a weight problem with all the food people send them from around the country. The Palace’s cut was 1.8 kilograms. According to the city government, this was the first time the ceremony was conducted in the municipality. Sometimes in Japan a centuries-old tradition can start just this year, and sometimes it can be a one-man operation.

Iwanuma, Miyagi

Iwanumanians use the term nuihoshiki to describe the ceremonial rice harvest at the Takekoma shrine, which dates from 842. The harvest was also a study session–about 50 Shinto priests went out to work in the fields, some of whom were shrine officials and priests from six prefectures throughout the Tohoku region taking part in religous training. A guy just can’t go out there and start hacking–you have to learn how to do this the right way first. (Whack from the bottom at an angle.) After the main priest ritually purified the paddy and offered a prayer, shrine officials and miko (shrine maidens) dressed as otome formed a row to cut the rice stalks. It’s a shame the miko weren’t closer to the camera. The priests bundled the rice and presented it to the divinities in thanks for the harvest. This year’s crop was said to be average, despite the heavy rains of late August. After the rice is dried in the sun, it will be offered at the niinamesai in late November.

Sanuki, Kagawa

Nuihoshiki? Check. Rice paddy? 200 square meters. Niinamesai? Check. The local shrine’s cut? 1.8 liters. Growth time? Four and a half months. Yield? Pretty good, despite the lack of rain and the heat. Participants? About 100, including city and prefectural government officials and 18 members of the farmer’s family. This one seems to have been a ceremony for the regular folks. I hope they’re not looking for a needle in the rice stacks.

Ise, Mie

And here’s the Ise shrine’s own nuihoshiki, which this year was held in the rain. The rice was harvested by the priests from a shrine rice paddy in Kusube-cho. Those are some elegant threads and umbrellas for agricultural work. What’s the guy in yellow saying? “Whack from the bottom at an angle”? The event is a statement for self-sufficiency, as the rice grown and harvested here will be used for events at the shrine. Participating in the event were about 80 people, including shrine officials and area residents. After the initial prayer, they entered the paddy to cut the rice with sacred scythes. Don’t you wish you had a sacred scythe, too? The rice was separated into two groups, one for use in the Inner Shrine and one for use in the Outer Shrine. It was then stored after inspection by lower ranking priests, called negi. Both ordinary rice and the more glutinous mochi rice were grown in the paddy. (The latter variety is used to make the rice cakes for New Year’s decorations.) About 240 bags were harvested, and the first offering will be at an event called the kannamesai on 15 October.

Tsuruoka, Yamagata

This ceremony was held by JA, the national association of agricultural cooperatives, to harvest rice for the Dewasanzan Shinto shrine at their own ceremonial rice paddy. The torii in the photo shows just how close the shrine is. That photo also shows just how much work religion can be sometimes. The 17-are (0.42 acre) rice paddy is known as a kensenden (a paddy that is an offering to the divinities). It was created just last year in the hope for a divine reboot of area agriculture, which has been suffering lately due to bad weather. The work was done by 40 JA employees as well as the miko, and they certainly don’t need any kibitzers telling them how to to go about chopping rice. The event started off with a miko dance, a lottery offering, and a religious ceremony. That’s something for everybody! (I pick the first.)

Kashima, Saga

Those ladies look like they’re having fun. Maybe they’re playing Tom Sawyer and trying to con us into painting the fence. That’s the nuiboshiki in a consecrated paddy at the Yutoku Inari Shinto shrine in Kashima to give thanks for the fall harvest. The miko, clad as otome, formed a horizontal row to cut the rice plants. This traditional ceremony gathers the rice used for the niinamesai on 8 December and is more than 300 years old. To start, 11 miko perform a solemn dance at the shrine in supplication for a big harvest. Then three miko use flutes and percussion to perform a song for an abundant year while the other eight go to work with a scythe. The harvest was better than average, and the priest was glad there was no typhoon damage. The shrine’s rice planting ceremony was covered in the June post, and the miko wore the same clothes then. And then washed them for this ceremony, of course.

Buzen, Fukuoka

Good morning, little schoolgirl…I’m a little schoolboy too! The Otomi shrine leaves nothing to chance during its nuihosai—they have three taosa, or paddy bosses, overseeing the work of the six karime from primary and junior high school on a special 1.5 are consecrated rice paddy. One boss for two girls? Now that’s labor intensive agriculture! This was just the shrine’s 14th rice harvesting event to offer thanks to the divinity for a bountiful harvest. They cut in time with music provided by flutes and taiko drums. The rice was a local prefectural variety planted in June. Fukui Aya, one of the karime, was out cutting for the second time. She said, “When you put on the clothing, it definitely gives you a sacred feeling.”

And with that, the granaries are filled for the winter!

HERE’S SOME NEWS that Japanese sportsmen will cheer: The regional newspaper Agara reports that deer season in Wakayama will start on Saturday, two weeks earlier than usual. It will also be extended for an extra month to end on 15 March. The season has been lengthened specifically to control the deer population, because the animals are causing serious problems for local farmers. As a result, the season will be concurrent with that for wild boar, another animal responsible for significant crop damage.

The financial loss to agriculture caused by deer in Wakayama alone has more than doubled from 16.9 million yen in 1998 to over 36 million yen ($US 366,630) every year since 2003. The volume of crops lost has also skyrocketed. Deer in the prefecture spoiled a total of 24 tons ten years ago, but that had soared to 3,337 tons by last year.

Another aspect of the new policy will be an emphasis on hunting females. In the past, the limit had been one deer per hunter per day, but this has been increased to two—only one of which can be a male.

The prefecture’s office for the protection of the agricultural environment said:

“The damage to agriculture caused by wild animals in 2007 totaled roughly 300 million yen, and deer accounted for a large part of that. The new policy focuses on the hunting of females, and we hope there will be a decline in their numbers.”

The only deer that inhabits Japan is the Sika deer, which is common throughout East Asia. Deer hunting was prohibited in the 1950s because the animal was close to extinction, but the ban was lifted in the 1980s when the population was quickly restored. (Wolves are extinct in Japan and the deer has no other natural enemies.)

The Sika deer is said to be harder to kill with a rifle shot than the variety in North America. The breed is also causing problems elsewhere; year-round culling is encouraged in Great Britain because of the danger they present to forests, but this has yet to solve the problem.

If the deer stalkers in Japan needed any more encouragement, here’s another factor: Sika venison is said to be delicious. I can’t vouch for that, unfortunately, because I’ve never been to a restaurant with deer on the menu and never eaten any served at a private home.

Foreigners who live in the big city might be surprised to know there is a long tradition of deer hunting here. This is a description written in English of deer hunting in Japan in the 1890s. The article says the hinds were the primary targets of hunters because the unborn fawns were considered a delicacy.

That makes me wonder: Was the meat eaten raw as sashimi?

EVERYONE KNOWS what the rice plant or wheat looks like before it’s harvested and processed into food, but perhaps only a few people would recognize buckwheat—the plant used to make soba noodles—even if they were standing in front of it.

But the photo at the left shows a field of soba in bloom near Shirahama-cho in Wakayama, so they no longer have any excuse! A group of farmers in the area decided last year to grow soba as an off-season crop after the rice harvest, which is starting to become an agricultural trend in Japan. This 50-are field (1.24 acres) was planted on 10 September, and it grew quickly enough for the soba to flower by the end of the month.

Wakayama, as it turns out, is not known for soba production. Hokkaido is the national champion by a wide margin, and Wakayama doesn’t even rank among the top ten prefectures for area under cultivation.

Considering the quantity of soba consumed in Japan, it was surprising to discover that 80% of the soba eaten here is now imported, and that imports didn’t begin until 1952. (Before World War II, Japan was an exporter.) The bulk of the imports come from China, followed by the United States. Most of the crop is processed for noodles, but soba sprouts are also eaten in salads. The dried plant is used for pillow stuffing, though production is somewhat limited because the plant is an allergen.

Now that you know what the flowers look like, there are about two weeks left to spot them. The blooms will last until the end of this month, and harvest begins at the end of November or the beginning of December.

But any time’s a good time to eat some!

THE SCENE FOR YESTERDAY’S POST was Tanabe, Wakayama, and by a happy coincidence, here is another story about the city that appeared today.

It’s now the season for harvesting rice in Japan, when the farmers cut the grain, tie it in bundles, stack it on end, and leave it in the field to dry. This farm household in Tanabe has a different system, however: they strap logs together to erect a large frame, from which they hang the rice sheaves.

They’ve been doing it for more than 45 years now. (I’d mention their names, but I’d have to guess at the reading.) The frame itself is five meters high and 18 meters wide, and it holds nine rows of stalks. One of the family members climbs the ladder while another uses a wooden pole to snatch the stalks and swing them up for hanging. The entire process, including the frame assembly, takes two full days.

Years ago, the family used to pile the rice from their terraced paddy in one place for drying. One of the reasons they switched to this method was to prevent the wild boar and deer in the area, whose numbers are increasing, from eating it.

The farmer here is one of the lucky ones—his son and her wife plan on taking over the farm. Nowadays the children of many Japanese farmers want nothing to do with farm labor.

It’s not a particularly important story, but I liked the picture, and I’m always interested in people coming up with clever variations on methods that for everyone else have become a cut-and-dried process.

And with the old method of rice harvesting, it literally is a cutting and drying process!