Vignette

Today I took the Nikko Line to Shimotsuke Osawa and walked to a new restaurant. The food was good, the owner was pleasant, we had a nice chat; he told me that he was moving into an old style Japanese farm house in December. He's doing all the work himself. Mentioned that he was a carpenter as well as a cook. I look forward to eating there when they open.

What struck me today was a vignette on the train home. I was seated opposite a young family of six. That in itself is unusual. Usually two children seems to be the norm for most Japanese. Four young children is unusual. As we chugged along, the oldest girl, maybe she was six or seven, was being very attentive to her little brother of perhaps one. He was motioning that he was thirsty so she gave him a drink from a sippy-cup. He beamed at her. She beamed at him. He was in a good mood and she played with him, smiling, scrunching his cheeks, mentioning to her mom how cute her little brother was. He beamed and beamed. Her little sister of about three, obviously thought I was either strange or fascinating. She slouched on her bench and looked right at me. I waved at her and said hello. She became very shy then, turning to her mom for reassurance. The whole family was so good at taking care of each other. No one seemed stressed out or cranky. Does this just happen? Did I happen to catch them at a good time? They seemed very authentic. They exuded an aura of calm and innocence. It was my balm for the day. Just what I needed.

Electric Vehicles (EVs)

An electric car is still a car with all of its inherent problems except the exhaust from the tailpipe. It steals space with roads and parking. It's a fast, dangerous piece of machinery that shouldn't mix with people, but is allowed to. It doesn't solve a basic issue with cars; the privatization of transportation. It doesn't make us any slimmer or get us exercising more. It still needs insurance, fuel, and maintenance, and still causes traffic jams and stress. It's the illusion of a new green panacea. It lets us assuage our consciences without making any basic changes. With it we can stay in the suburbs, cling to our old lifestyles, and gain the panache of change without the substance.

ピッツェリーアヴィアナポリ

今日、お天気がよかったので、突然魔が差して、”ピザが食べたい！ポタリングしたい！”と思って、矢板へ向かって行きました。初めての矢板でしたが、予想した通り小さな都市、（大きな町？）です。ま、でも矢板見物を後回しにして、今日はピザを食べに来ました。先日、ローカル誌に載っていたヴィアナポリというピッツェリーアがまあまあ駅の歩ける距離内にあって、（第一条件満たされた）、そして美味しいピザを作るにはなくてはならない石釜がお店に置いて有ります。こんな店が矢板に有るのはちょっとびっくりでしたが、トライしてみようと決めました。矢板は宇都宮より更に３０分北にある町で、駅を出て、携帯の地図を見ながら１５分ぐらい歩いたら、お店にたどり着きました。結構賑やかで、満席だったのでウエーティングリストに名前を書き、呼ばれるのを待ちながら隣に座っていたお客さんとおしゃべり。ちょっとすると、タイミングが良かったせいか、あまり待たないでテーブルへ案内してもらいました。ロマーノピザ（モッツァレラチーズ、バジリコ、アンチョビ）を頼み、先ずサラダが出てきました。折角の日曜日なので、久々のビールも。ピザが来たらサイズにおったまげた。大きい！アメリカンサイズみたい！でも、お店の方は残した分を持ち帰り用にしてくれました。デザートはノッチョーラというヘーゼルナッツのジェラート。最後にエスプレッソをもらって、失礼しました。僕の条件は全部クリアーしました。１。食べ物は美味しかった。２。対応はフレンドリー。３。お店の雰囲気は居心地良かった。４。お店まで楽に歩けた。又，行きます。

矢板駅

サラダとイタリアンビール

ロマーノ

持ち帰り用の残り物

ジェラート

エスプレッソ

Autonomy

Autonomy. 

Recently on Streetfilms I saw a video describing a progressive narrowing of children's range of mobility over the last forty to fifty years. Children who once had the freedom to explore and roam their towns and villages are now restricted to their streets, virtual prisoners to small proscribed areas in their neighborhoods.  The cause, a car centered transportation system and ultimately federal, state and local policies in thrall to the car. 

When I was young I had a great deal of autonomy in my mobility. My parents rarely had to chauffeur me anywhere. I walked to school, walked downtown, rode my bike to friends' houses and stores. I was not a rarity. It was the norm for children in my town to be independent. I was free to explore woods and fields and make little field trips. This independence nurtured autonomy:  planning what to take, contacting friends and what routes to take. Coming and going were up to us, within reason. Our independence gave us and our parents the freedom to be free of each other for a while, a healthy need. 

Children in Japan still have access to the autonomy which has been lost in America. School buses are not the norm here. Students are expected to get to school on their own. They walk, bike or take public transportation. In most of Japan, chauffeuring your children doesn't even occur to parents. Movement is one's personal responsibility here, from elementary school onward. Safety is not a concern as Japan is incredibly safe. (Safety is a given here). And most children move in groups. As a result, like me when I was a child, their activities place much less stress on their parents than their American counterparts. 

If we wish to give autonomy back to children, we must give them safe, car-free ways to move about. We need more road diets, more human-interaction-friendly streets, more separated bike lanes, more public transportation and zoning reform. This would allow the facilities children, and by extension all people, use daily to be reached within safe walking or biking distance and those long haul errands done by public transportation. 

A life of autonomous mobility recognizes our need to provide transportation that serves a broad set of values: health, equity, community, environment, safety, work, and pleasure. When we recognize that car centered design is more a burden than a liberator, then, hopefully, we will take action to change it. 

There's So Much to Learn

I started gardening again last May after roughly a 40 year absence. I don't remember gardening with much fondness or enthusiasm when I was a child. It was a chore. An inescapable duty as a family member. This was due to youth perhaps. Wanting to be with friends rather than weeding or rotatilling or watering or the hundreds of other things that need to be done to make a garden productive. 

I was in my head much of the time then. And gardening requires attention. To be successful at it requires active participation. Thoughts of drawing, Mad magazine or Saturday morning cartoons were distractions. Unfortunately, they were also my mantras. 

My parents had no such distractions. My dad loved work in general and coming from a farm family had the requisite knowledge for gardening: what the best fertilizer was (aged horse manure), composting, making sure any wood ash ended up in the garden, when to till, how deep to plant, when to plant, when and how to thin, what to plant next to what to keep away pests, what to grow yourself and what not to waste one's time on. 

My mother knew much of this also and was in charge of provisioning us through the long New York winters. From late August to October she was busy canning beans, tomatoes, pickles, and applesauce. Our basement shelves were lined with jars of yellow, green, red and pink. Like so many jarred vegetable soldiers waiting to be called into action. Our root cellar was full of white and red potatoes, onions, apples and squash. Our garden was a cornucopia; I slept walked through most of the experience. 

So, here I am. Approaching my sixth decade and just now rediscovering gardening. So what's different this time? It's not the solitary activity it once was. My mentor, Mr. Maeda, is generous with his knowledge and patient in teaching me about gardening. We talk and I learn anew or am reminded of things buried in my subconscious. How to use a hoe, how to thin, how to plant, when to plant. But, of course, some things are different. I've learned how to construct a hotbed to give sweet potatoes a jump on the gun. I know how to plant and thin daikon radish, a skill unneeded in the an American garden. I've planted sweet potatoes and peanuts for the first time, learned that peanuts don't need chemicals or pesticides to thrive and are therefore safe to eat no matter what their country of origin. The drives to and from the field are filled with conversation about topics I didn't know previously: rice fields are kept full of water until about two weeks before harvest to keep the weeds down; sweet potatoes and peanuts will not grow much further north than where we live; northernJapan is too cold for most root vegetables; there are two kinds of fireflies in Japan. It's all very edifying.

I know so little still. If I had to survive on my present skills as a farmer I wouldn't last a year. That knowledge gives me tremendous admiration for the millions of small farmers around the world who manage to feed their families year after year. It also explains why farming is an inherently conservative occupation. One doesn't meddle with success until what you are doing doesn't work any more. Tradition and experimentation in equal parts. It's a constant puzzle to figure out how to stay ahead of the game. 

There's so much to learn. 

The Pea Patch

As usual, Thursday was field day. It was warm, but not hot. It had rained a little earlier and had fortunately spared us in the field. We hilled potatoes, dug up and transplanted green onions and harvested what was ready. The beans that we planted and and trellised about a month ago are now coming on. The beans are difficult to pick as they are the same color as the leaves. You have to constantly change your angle to see them.

As I was picking, a little salamander skittered out from the leaves. He must have been hunting insects. The bean patch is a micro-jungle full of all sorts of tempting delicacies for a salamander, I'm sure. He stayed very still and I reached over the top of the trellis and shot this.

The pheasant was very vocal, crying from various places on the perimeter of the field. I glimpsed him briefly in the next field of pampas grass. I did not see his mate, but then she blends more easily with the dun color of the pampas.

It is interesting how quickly vegetation becomes an ecosystem for whatever critters are in an area. We have a type of badger that makes its appearance in the summer. It's nocturnal so I haven't seen one as I'm there only in the daytime. The badgers love what people love: corn, tomatoes, eggplant and peanuts. Insects are prolific and are a major problem in an organic garden. Last year most of the potatoes were ruined. A type of lady bug decimated all the leaves on the plants and stunted the potato growth. The harvest was a disaster. Most were hardly bigger than the seed potatoes we originally planted. Mr. Maeda says that can't be helped. You have to figure in a certain amount of loss in organic gardening. He said that if he was doing this for his survival he would judiciously use pesticides as needed. But he isn't. So he doesn't. He prefers not worrying about it and being able to eat his produce without the concern of chemicals. It's obvious that the wildlife prefer it that way.

Hunger

In 2006 I went to Guatemala for three weeks of Spanish language training. I didn't learn much Spanish, but I did get quite an education. I got a front row seat to globalization. It wasn't pretty.

I spent three weeks in Antigua, a popular destination for tourists and Spanish learners. The language school was staffed by locals who may or may not have known anything about pedagogy, but it provided them income and most of their students, me excepted, were fairly comfortable in Spanish anyway. The city was old, the first capital of Guatemala, and therefore full of historic churches, a lovely square, and cobblestone streets. Amidst the historic grandeur of the past, however, my fellow students and I were constantly accosted by people selling beads, hand-woven clothes, and knick-knacks. They were overwhelmingly women and children and they were everywhere: on the street, in hotel lobbies, in cafes and in restaurants plying their wares until they sold something or were chased off. 

My host family provided two meals a day, breakfast and dinner. Meals were simple and good, but I noticed at the market that prices were expensive. My fellow students and I sometimes went to restaurants at night on weekends; Not fancy places, rather average. Surprisingly, prices were not any different from prices in the US. There were almost no Guatemalans to be seen in these establishments other than the staff and the ever-present women and dirty, barefoot children selling things. Our host mother said that life was hard for the average person. The wealthy were doing well, she said, but that was only a tiny fraction of the population. According to her, most people were struggling. 

The children I saw were gaunt. Hollow cheeks and rather short in stature, attesting to a life without enough to eat. One evening two children approached the table where some fellow Spanish teachers and I  were having dinner to sell us beads and hand-woven bracelets. Although we didn't buy anything, my Spanish speaking friends began talking to them. "Where are you from?", "Where are your parents?" (No parents. Grandmother took care of them.) "Where do you live? (Under a bridge.) We let them sit down and ordered dinner for them. The Guatemalan waiter didn't look too happy about two little waifs of maybe ten and eight sitting at the table with us, (we were surrounded by other tourists), but since they were there at our invitation, he didn't say anything to them. Toward the end of the meal, the grandmother came along and put the remains of the meal in a plastic bag. She looked very tired and very old, although I don't know for sure how old she was. They said thank you and disappeared into the night. I still remember their faces. 

Other than learning Spanish, the main purpose of our trip was providing school supplies to a school in a small Mayan village. We had all brought pencils, pens, paper and articles of clothing such as T-shirts, sandals, and jackets for the children. Their school was a small two story concrete building that had been constructed with aid from a German NGO. It seems that the Guatemalan government does not see  building schools and providing texts and teachers to poor Mayans as its responsibility. The teachers lined their students up for the supplies that they had organized into bundles.  The students were grateful. The teachers were grateful. I felt inadequate and quite humbled. But I could leave. They stayed. It was dizzying to look into the maw of poverty and exploitation

Guatemala changed me. I saw people hungry in a land of plenty. Most of the land was under the cultivation of multinationals. Rows and rows of bananas, broccoli, mangos, etc. People in the country walking miles to springs for clean water. Pickup truck "taxis" full of people in the back, roadsides littered with plastic bags ands water bottles. Roads you had to be careful on because of bandits. Tiny plots tilled on mountains because the best land had been confiscated for bananas. And then coffee. And then asparagus and broccoli. Gaunt children and a drunken man staring at our bus at a rest stop. Like Native Americans everywhere, the Mayans of Guatemala are exiles in their own land. These were the images of in-your-face globalization that have been branded into my memory. It's not happy. It's not up-lifting and it's not democratic. Guatemala's gift to me was to let me witness it first hand.