At home in Japan, part 3: Homegrown in Wakayama

Shrines and altars aside, I got a sense that the Yoshimatsus were intricately connected to their land.  Yoshimatsu-san, even though he was a retired school teacher and principal, identified himself as a farmer.  At first I thought that maybe he was referring to the vegetables that he grew in practically every available square inch of his yard: edamame, kabocha, myoga (they called it Japanese ginger, but it’s something more complex and delicious), and kuri (thin cucumbers).

Yoshimatsu owns roadside rice fields like this one.

But I soon found out that although he had only recently purchased rice fields, his family has owned orange groves for generations; the plots he now tends were promised to him when he was a boy. 

As I drove through the landscape of Wakayama, past rice field after rice field and orange groves planted on hills so steep that farmers must ride a kind of rudimentary monorail just to tend their fields, I kept thinking of how I’d heard that the Japanese government protects its farmers from competition from agricultural products from abroad (particularly the U.S.).   But one of our American guides said that for the most part, that wasn’t true.  The government certainly didn’t have to protect these orange farmers, whose fruit had a sweetness and delicacy I’d never tasted.   The Japanese are mostly uninterested in oranges that have to be picked while green and shipped across the Pacific.  Apparently, the Japanese have very high standards for fruit.  (This may partly explain the $269 melon I saw in a Tokyo department store.) The peaches and grapes are huge, and everything is flavorful because it ripens on the plant and then is quickly shipped around a relatively small nation. 

Yoshimatsu pruning his orange trees.

This makes sense; the Japanese have always been all about delicious local food.  I’m guessing the word locavore, only recently current in English, might baffle the average Japanese.  They’d probably think, “Duh! What other kind of food would you want to eat?”  Wherever you go, they tell you what’s local and what’s fresh.  They’re so into freshness that when you’re dining in a restaurant with other people and your food comes first, it’s almost rude of you not to start eating immediately:  you have to eat it while it’s fresh.  They’re so conscious of the localness of food that when they go traveling, the train stations are packed with local specialties that you’re supposed to take as a gift to the people you’re visiting, as culinary souvenirs known as omeyagi. 

A bowl of myoga stood ready for our nagashi somen.

Local food was certainly in evidence when we had a barbecue and ate nagashi somen, cold noodles that flow around a kind of watery race course. That evening all four generations were present, eating vegetables from the garden right behind us.  And these were the same people who all work together in the fall to bring in their small rice harvest.

Our Kyoto guide later told me that the demands of rice-growing have helped determine the cooperative nature of Japanese society:  it’s very labor intensive and not something one can do alone.  You have to rely on others, perhaps your extended family.  And it helps if they’re close by, several generations living side by side in an ie household.

At home in Japan, part 2: A sense of place

The whole extended Yoshimatsu family. 

My second homestay was three nights in Arida, Wakayama prefecture, where my hosts Yoshimatsu Toshitake and his family lived a life that seemed almost untouched by all the flagrant Westernization I’d been seeing.  They seemed to live in a classic Japanese lifestyle, in what is called an ‘ie’ (ee-yeh) household, in which several generations or branches of the family live within earshot of each other.  Three houses separated by just a few feet house Yoshimatsu and his wife, who are in their sixties; his parents who are in their late eighties; their older son and daughter-in-law who are in their thirties; and their seven-year-old grandson Kazuki.  

The tatami room in which I stayed at Yoshimatsu's house.

Yoshimatsu’s house is built in the traditional Japanese style.  Outside there is a lot of wood and curved tile roofs.  Inside there are many tatami rooms and long hallways and space under the house and under the roof to create breezes that cool the house down.  I slept in a beautiful tatami room with intricate wood carvings above the sliding doors, and the next room contained the family Buddhist altar and Shinto shrine, as well photos of ancestors going back three generations. (I was told that this usually goes to the house of the eldest son when his parents die, hence possibly the reason there was no altar room in the Momosawa house.) There are three separate rooms to cover the functions of one American bathroom:  toilet room (with separate urinal and tiny sinks for handwashing); bath room (i.e. bath and shower); and another room with a typical bathroom sink and mirror as well as a washing machine. And then in various places are deployed different squads of slippers, the ranking of which I never mastered.

Clearly, Yoshimatsu and his family had lived here a long time.  A little field trip that Yoshimatsu took me on made clear how deep his roots were in this area.

First, we went to his Buddhist temple, a short walk up the hill, where the monk’s wife (that’s right, Japanese monks are not celibate, thanks to Honen, as I later found out, the founder of Pure Land Buddhism) served me tea and a sweet (something just about everyone I met in Japan in a non-commercial setting did).  This made me feel a little better about the excursion, which Yoshimatsu, in his imperfect yet enthusiastic English, had prefaced with “I’m going to show you my grave!”  I had imagined a dug-out rectangle in the earth, or at the very least a blank headstone waiting to be inscribed.  But of course, it was the multi-generational stone memorial to the same three generations of his family whose photos hung near the altar in his home, which he then proceeded to wash and adorn with flowers. 

As he made what struck me as a perfunctory gesture of prayer (probably for my benefit), I thought of an article I had read about whether the Japanese were religious.  Yoshimatsu, as many Japanese do, said he wasn’t really religious, not really a Buddhist. But according to the article, what’s important is not so much what Japanese people say; it’s what they do that counts.

Yoshimatsu prays to the kami.                           

The next day, he drove me up to his local Shinto shrine, a steep walk up a hill that he and hundreds of others make every New Year’s.  And then on the way home, almost as an afterthought, he took me to a little shrine by the side of a creek.  To me it looked Shinto, but it held an image of Jiso, a ubiquitous roundish stone figure who is seen as a protector of the souls of aborted or stillborn fetuses and other lost souls.  Our guide in Kyoto called Jiso a bodhisattva, but I can’t help thinking it’s from a native tradition that’s older than Buddhism.  The story that Yoshimatsu told is that when Honen (mentioned above) was a child, he was walking with his nurse who, frightened by a wild animal, jumped into the creek.  Yoshimatsu’s family and a few others personally maintain this shrine and hold a yearly festival on this spot.  And then something the Kyoto guide said made sense:  the Japanese erect a Jiso not at the grave of the deceased, but at the site of the trauma.  It’s the place that the soul unexpectedly left this world that matters.

The Jiso shrine that Yoshimatsu tends.

Whether Jiso is a bodhisattva or not, this sense of place is very Shinto.  In

Shintoism, good luck, bad luck, success or tragedy are connected to a particular place either because the kami are there or because they’re absent.

The noren in the entry to Yoshimatsu's house.

Maybe Yoshimatsu is not really religious, but he certainly has a Buddhist respect for the dead and a Shinto sense of the sacredness of place.

At home in Japan, part 1: Home is where the shrine is?

I hope I’m not just romanticizing, but I’ve come to the conclusion that ‘home’ usually means a bit more here than it does in the U.S. Or let’s say, something more specific. In America we sometimes talk about homes as commodities; real estate agents trade in them.  And while some of us do have traditions we attach to our homes, there just aren’t as many traditions regarding home as there are in Japan.

The Yoshimatsu family shrine.

To put it simply, home is where the shrine is.  And altar.  And tatami. 

Japanese homes (like some public buildings) have a hierarchy of rooms.  The entryway is where you leave your shoes (always neatly lined up and pointed out) at the genkan, or boundary, where you put on your slippers (which are always neatly lines up and pointed in).  You usually wear slippers around the house, except in tatami rooms, where you take off your slippers.  (The family altar and shrine are always in the nicest tatami room.)  But in the toilet you usually switch to a special pair of toilet slippers. I was also told that Japanese farmhouse kitchens used to have dirt floors (some older ones still do) where people would wear shoes and boots they’d take off before entering the rest of the house. 

The Yoshimatsu family altar

Just as there is a hierarchy of rooms, there can also be a hierarchy of footwear. There are older houses whose piecemeal augmentation over a number of decades necessitates the donning and shedding of various ranks of slippers depending on where in the house one goes.  This can make running through the house very complicated and difficult. And for someone with size 12 feet in a size 8 country, uncomfortable as well.

What I know about Japanese homes, aside from what I’ve read, comes from the three homestays I’ve had during my two trips to Japan.  My first homestay on this trip  was in Obu, a “suburb”  (though not the kind of place to which you could attach the word ‘leafy’) of bustling, workaday Nagoya; my second was in Arida, a small-ish (i.e., by Japanese standards) town in hilly, rural-ish Wakayama on the Kii peninsula, which is on the southern side of Honshu.

Two-year-old Yue Momosawa knows what to do when she enters the house.

I loved my first homestay family, the Momosawas.  They were warm and welcoming and generous, but they didn’t always fit my preconceived notions of what a Japanese family is like, many of which were formed by my first homestay 11 years earlier.  They didn’t have an altar or shrine, they slept on Western-style beds, they seemed to use their tatami rooms for storage, they didn’t use bathroom slippers, they didn’t seem to take traditional Japanese baths, and I didn’t see a low table in the house.  Of course, they didn’t wear their shoes in the house; Tetsuya, the husband did eat natto, that much-maligned concoction of fermented soybeans; and they did start meals with “itadakimas” and ended with “gochisosoma.”  But I got the feeling that some aspects of their lives were evidence of the creeping Westernization I’d seen all over Japan. This may be partly due to the fact that Rina, the mother, is half Chinese and lived in Shanghai until she was 12. Or it may be partly due to the fact that they both work long hours for an arm of the Toyota corporation in Nagoya, and with all the commuting and working and childcare, they’re freaking exhausted.

I had a great time with the warm, generous Momosawas.  But it wasn’t until my second homestay that I fully appreciated how untraditional they were.