I'd Rather Be...In Japan

One Cup, One Life...

I recently posted this over on my friend Colin Beaven's blog, at No Impact Project. I thought I'd put it up here as well.

 

Kawagishi-sensei is a Zen Buddhist monk, and he’s a teacher at the high school where I work. He teaches calligraphy, which is a traditional art in Japan. Like high schools in America, there are many clubs that students here can join.

In the calligraphy club, students practice the art of painting Japanese Kanji, the Chinese characters that make up part of the written language. Painting calligraphy is an old tradition in Japan, and the characters look lovely, even to my untrained eye.

Kawagishi-sensei has been teaching calligraphy for over 30 years. My Japanese isn’t good enough to speak much with him, but a couple of times a week we try to chat. I noticed that every day he drinks his tea in a special teacup on his desk. It’s a beautiful ceramic cup.  The rich, textured colors shine in the light, and I assumed it must be new because it’s so polished.

When I asked him about it, he told me that he’d bought it with his first paycheck as a teacher, thirty-five years ago. It was made in a famous Japanese style called Aritayaki. This cup of his has seen him through three and a half decades of his life. Every day he uses it, and it’s still a gorgeous cup.

What struck me was how much this cup must mean to him by now. It also seemed very kind to the environment to use just one cup in all that time. I know that if you took all the cups I’ve used over the past thirty years, they would probably need their own landfill. How many paper cups, Styrofoam coffees, coke bottles, water bottles...how much glass and plastic have I used and thrown away in the course of my days over the years? Too many to be sure.

Apart from the simplicity of using one cup is the fact that it’s made of clay. It was dug from the earth, molded by hand, glazed and fired in a kiln. It made me think that consumption itself isn’t necessarily bad. There are ways to own things that can be fun, and even meaningful, and also friendly to the environment. What if everything I owned was acquired to celebrate an occasion, and lasted a lifetime?

Rice Harvesting

It's fall, a beautiful time in rural Japan. The trees are beginning to turn colors, the persimmons are ripening, and the rice that's been growing in green fields all around is finally ready to harvest.

Watching the green rice grow is fun. More exciting than watching the grass grow, I promise. The rice fields start as dirt. Then water is let in and they become mud.  The rice is planted in the mud in clumps, in an arduous and tedious process.

They look hair implant plugs on a bald man. The rice begins to grow, turning the brown fields green. The kids like to catch bugs in them after school, and each night the sound of thousands of chirping songs lulls me to sleep. That's Kazu in the middle.

The fields can be gorgeous, especially at sunrise on my way to work.

From Japan 2009

This summer, the rice fields provided a nice foreground to the misty mountain behind our apartment. I watched Star Trek during the long rainy season, while the river rushed by, the mountain misted, the rice grew, the rain fell, and the frogs chirped.

From Japan 2009

Eventually, as the rice matures, it grows to be tall grass with beads of rice at the tip. It looks a bit like wheat.

From Japan 2009

The rice starts to smell a little like baking bread, and then it's ready to harvest. We drove to a friend's field to cut the rice in the traditional way. We use a little curved knife called a kama, and it looks like a small sickle. 

From Japan 2009

The the rice is bundled and tied together with a piece of straw.

From Japan 2009

 Then the bundles are hung to dry over wooden beams.

From Japan 2009

We took a break for curry and rice.

From Japan 2009

It's hard work, and tiring, but it is fun to connect with a way of life that's been keeping people fed for thousands of years.