Ten'ei Village

I have to admit, I was a little surprised when my British friend Clare sent me a link to a website unassociated with the school advertising a weekend homestay program in a remote village. I was even more surprised when I clicked on the link, and it read, "Have you ever been to Japan?" I almost blew it off. But, the website explained itself. The people sponsoring the trip wondered if we had been to the parts of Japan that weren't city, bustling nightlife, and crowded shopping centers. And you know what? I hadn't.

So, I went ahead and applied for the program. A few weeks later, we met the group of students sponsoring the event; they all seemed thrilled to be doing the program. As it turned out, half of the students were agriculture students who had been to the village before to study rural farming. The other half were Japanese students who had studied abroad and wanted current foreign students to truly get the most out of our time in Japan.

We had dinner with them that night, and they all seemed like neat people. It was nice to finally meet some older students instead of the freshmen and sophomores that comprised the international clubs we'd met.

Finally, the day of our trip came. We clambered into two cars (I was with several Japanese students--one who had studied abroad in Boston and was nice to chat to in Japanglish--, a girl who had graduated and was working for Toyota, a girl from Taiwan who spoke good English and Japanese, a guy from Switzerland, and a girl from England who went to the same school as Clare). Amongst those in the other car were some Japanese students, Ashleigh, and Clare.

As we traveled, we got to see a bunch of beautifully decorated trees, some of the smaller towns between Tokyo and the village, and other gorgeous scenery. When we finally arrived in Ten'ei (the drive was about 3 hours), we went straight to the tiny village hall to meet some of the villagers who were to be our "sensei" (teachers) for the next two days.

After some short introductions, we climbed back into the cars and went to the fields.

The fields. The symbol for rice field is 田, pronounced "ta." If you looked at the freshly plowed soil, you can kind of see the resemblance.


This is me, plowing the field. We were all instruction on the proper way to turn the dirt using that tool (I forget the name, but it either translated to 100-use tool or 1000-use tool). Of course, those haven't actually been in use for a long time in Japan.

This is the way they do things now, which was much more exciting. It's also possibly the slowest vehicle I've ever been in, and there was no power-steering, which made things more fun. Still, it was fun to drive!
So, here's Ashleigh, wearing the silly blue suit that was our designated outfit for the length of the trip, removing the bad pieces of grass from the good ones. These leftovers from the stalks of rice are made into ornaments to decorate shrines. The scraggly-looking pieces must be removed so that the ornaments will be nice.

You just don't get these beautiful views and fresh air in Tokyo. It was amazing to be able to step into a different world for the weekend. As the sun set, we grabbed the poofy parts of the old rice stalks and made "owls" out of them. The ones that the villagers made were nifty looking, but mine just looked like a white puff.

We returned to the village and tried our hand at making the ornaments from the stalks; the only ones who really made any progress were the villagers and some of the more adept Japanese students. I have mine in my dorm room--it does look kind of silly!

This activity was quite easy, and, as they explained, it's a task they give the children. These are edamame beans taken from their shelves that we pounded down on blocks of wood. The pounded beans were toasted over the fire; they keep for months on end that way, so it's a nice pre-made snack during the cold winter months. Ten'ei gets quite cold in the winter (they have a ski area that everyone made a big deal out of--"Have you heard of British Hills!?"), and wandering out to go buy snacks would not be so fun.

From there, we went to meet our host families. Ours lived the farthest away, so we were driven. I was with a Japanese student called Daisuke and the Toyota employee, Miyuki. They were each very helpful and patient with me when trying to communicate. It made life a lot easier for me that they were so nice, because the elderly couple who hosted us spoke with a dialect that I found very hard to understand.

These little Russian-doll-like guys (we called them "Daruma-san" which literally means translates to "Mr. Doll," although we used it as a respectful way to describe the lot of them) at first made the couple seem a little eccentric to me. Upon explanation, it was revealed that each daruma represented a wish that my host father had wanted to come true. From what I could understand, he either started buying them all in high school (or he bought all of them, then). They came with one pupil painted and the other eye all white. When the wish came true, he painted the other pupil in. Can you find one up there without two pupils? Seems like he must be a very fulfilled man :)

This contraption is the table. Each house had one like it (low to the ground; and most houses had a hole beneath the table where your feet could rest), and each house's table was heated. Most of the houses had electric heaters, but my host family had a heat fan that blew heat onto that conductor (the wooden bench) which then heated up the table. The blankets surrounding the table trap the heat! Since rural houses in Japan don't use centralized heating (or, really, any heating other than a fire), heated tables and heated mattresses/blankets are incredibly common. I didn't go into a house without a heated table!

This sign is congratulating the couple on their golden anniversary--50 years!!! It's incredible, isn't it? And they were pretty cute, if old-fashioned. The husband would sit under the warm table while the wife took care of everything--all the food, all the cleaning, everything. Then again, the husband still keeps up the farming: rice, veggies, etc. So, I guess it's a fair trade!

After dinner (consisting of fried chicken, a lot of things made from potatoes and stuff I tried but have no idea what it was made of, rice, and other delicious things), Daisuke and I were driven to the public onsen (hot springs) to bathe. We met up with another host family while there, and it was a lovely experience. This family had two little kids (a 7-year old girl and a 5-year old boy) who were ADORABLE.

This host family took us back with them after the onsen (since we had to have a ride home), and we drank with them and ate a second dinner (homemade sushi and some other things that I couldn't describe in English words)--so much fun! This family was younger and more lively. Kids everywhere are all the same, too; they chased me around and were, of course, very scary--it was quite fun! This picture is of their house :)

Daisuke, "Grandma," "Grandpa," me, and Miyuki. It's polite in Japan to call the elderly "grandma/grandpa" and the middle-aged "aunt/uncle" even if you are just meeting them on the street. In the picture, as well, are the remains of our scrumptious Japanese breakfast consisting of fish, nato (it's bean curd, basically, but look it up if you're curious), rice that Grandpa grew himself, noodles, and fresh fruit. As it turns out, the skin of Japanese grapes is harder than that of the ones in America. The Japanese were all just sucking the insides out of the grapes and throwing away the skins! They were shocked to see that I was eating the whole thing.

After breakfast, we were taken to the lumberyard, where we learned the very important skill of chopping wood:

I was horrible at it at first; you have to hit the log right in the center, and that's pretty difficult when you're using a big, sharp object to do it, but after some practice, I greatly improved. I think our old sensei was a little surprised a foreign city-girl was doing so well!

This is the pile that the students and our sensei chopped together. We were pros. The wood, however, has to dry, and won't be ready for another FEW YEARS, or so they said.

This is where they dry the wood and turn it into charcoal to be used in the winter. We all got to go back to being 5 and write our names with charcoal on the wall. We stayed 5 for awhile when we learned we had some extra time, and we played some children's games. One was a Japanese game similar to red-light, green-light, and another was the Swiss version of duck-duck-goose.

After our fun and games, we went back to the city hall place (it was really someone's house, but it was our meeting place the whole time, and I got the feeling it's a meeting place at other times of the year, as well) to make lunch.

We made these "onigiri," triangle-shaped rice balls. Often, onigiri have something inside of them and are coated with seaweed, but these were empty and coated with miso (a Japanese flavoring--you've probably heard of miso soup) or salt. They were pretty good, but I don't think I could have handled another one for about a week! We had other foods to try with it--a nice soup and some flavors to try with the onigiri.

After lunch, we went on a little walk around the village.
We got to see more rice-tiers and vegetables being farmed along the way.

Ten'ei Village is special as far as rice-farming villages go. It's one of the only ones that only uses warm water for rice-farming (many use warm and cold, or just cold water). As we walked up the hill, we got to experience a naturally warm swamp. It was cold around the edges, but if you walked in (to where I'm standing), you could see the water bubbling--and it was definitely warm! The Japanese all called me brave, since I was the first foreigner into the swamps; I just figured if they knew it was safe, I could follow.

The trees up north had all already lost their leaves, and if you looked at the mountains, the tops seemed blurry from all the scraggly branches. It was a really neat image.

En route, we saw some cucumbers and eggplant picking in the stream. One of our guides pulled out a pickled cucumber for us to taste--it was incredibly salty. A very interesting experience!

There were several of these types of houses: the straw thatches are low-maintenance (and some other descriptions of the use was given to me in Japanese, but I didn't understand all of it). Only a few houses in the village used thatching, though.

We walked to see some shrines; here, one of the students is teaching us how to pray at a Shinto Shrine. There's a ritual of bowing and clapping that must occur for your prayers to be heard.
At this particular shrine, whenever a baby is born in the village, he or she is brought here, and his or her name is written down so that the shrine will watch out for the child.

These trees were "fusai," man and wife. I thought it was cute.

Daisuke is being silly. That part of the tree ended up falling--no one was hurt, but it was pretty funny!

A view of the village. All over Japan, the houses look nothing alike. The different-colored roofs are in stark contrast to that seen in Arizona, and it at first threw me for a loop. It's nice to have some originality in the homes, though!

Here was one of the smaller shrines that we saw along the way. I asked what it was for, but all I got in response was "it's a small shrine." So, I guess we all knew about the same amount!

After our walk, we went back to our little meeting-house and said our goodbyes. We all gave a little speech about what we had learned in our time there, and the villagers gave little speeches for us, as well. I couldn't understand a lot of it, but I do know that the woman who ran the event (a villager in the town) was so touched by our desire to know about the town, she cried during her speech. It was really sweet.

I'm really glad that I got to go to rural Japan and experience the more traditional culture, even if it was just for a weekend. It's these kind of experiences that I really wanted from coming here, and I know I'll remember it for the rest of my life. It also got me closer to some Japanese students who I'll hopefully be able to keep in touch with! It really was an amazing time.