country life

Last night for the first time I slept in the second room of my house. It is the room where until now I have been keeping my clothes and I guess would be the actual bedroom. And now IS the bedroom! It's destiny has been fulfilled. It was a bit like going on holiday, to sleep in a different room. There were no mosquitoes in there though so it was a better option than the loungeroom where I have been unrolling my futon every night until now. I left the window open because it is quite humid nowadays and during the night it started bucketing down. Japanese houses don't really do the eaves thing, so the rain just came straight through the flyscreen and I woke up with a moist doona. The rain is so noisy, even though I have a floor above me so I don't get the rain on the roof noises, there were all kinds of loud dripping and drumming noises going on. It rained like this from 6am when I woke up initally until 9am when I left for the station. When I reached the station it stopped of course. I guess because of the rain, this country is so green. Everything is green green green, even the rice paddys have been planted now so they are sprouting green fuzz. And there are frogs everywhere, big ones, little ones and they are so noisy. At night unless I am really buggered it is hard to get to sleep because they are all out there creaking and croaking away in all their different languages. When I go for a walk they jump onto my legs and scare the hell out of me, or jump under my foot and make a murderer out of me. (Do we call that amphibicide?) There are some really big ugly ones too that remind me of cane toads, I saw a flat one on the road yesterday and smirked at it, even if they aren't pests here I still feel disgust towards them. The air always smells like rain, even when it isn't raining. Except of course when one of my pyromaniac neighbours is burning their rubbish under my window.

I don't know anything about rice growing. Over the last month people have slowing been filling thier small fields with what looks like long grass in painstakingly straight rows which they acheive with a funny little ride on sewing machine. The fields aren't that big so I wonder how they justify the cost of purchasing such a machine. Most people have a field probably the size of 2 cricket pitches. Althogh perhaps they have more than one field in differnet areas. It's not like the country in Australia where one persons's property stretches over 100s of kilometres, here the land is all divided up, and dotted in between houses of families who have no interest in farming there will be a paddy field which is tended by someone who lives in the next suburb. I only ever see old people working in the fields. So I cannot tell if the fields are a hobby to keep grandma and grandpa busy, or if they are actual income for the family and when the older people die the family will keep it going. It seems a big stretch for salaryman Bob to quit his highly paid suit job and go trudge around in a rice paddy all day. And I also don't know where the rice goes. Is this the rice that ends up on the supermarket shelf or is this just for their own personal consumption? I don't know how much rice one tiny little paddy like that can yield, it doesn't seem like it would be very profitable. Perhaps all these issues are the reason why the rice farmers are so well subsidised and protected by the government. There is no imported rice in Japan and there is not likely to be any. Without the guaranteed market and heavy subsidies, how could such small farmers turn a profit? So good luck Little Johnny trying to get Koizumi to let you export Aussie rice here.