Beauty?

うつくしいもの美しいと思うえるあなたのこころがうつくしい

-みつお

Believe beautiful things are beautiful and your heart is beautiful.

-Mistuo

This is a fitting phrase for this month, when everywhere you look you are surrounded by beauty and you cannot help but smile. I sit now on the balcony of our house staring across the field at a hill of full bloom cherry trees and shoots of brand new grass. This vibrant green is so important here in fact that there is a separate Japanese word for it.

Recently, a friend’s blog challenged me to come up with a six word phrase that describes my life right now. I spent a good week pondering, swapping words and inserting interesting verbs. Here is what I came up with:

Living contentedly, uninvited worries creep in

But funny thing, today I finally get around to writing this on the blog, and it feels wrong. I got a phone call today from the Hamada BOE and they have decided my schools (Yasaka, Mikawa and Mihashi for those close enough to know what I am talking about) and I should have about 6-10 classes per week. Worked into my already existing part time, it makes 4 half days and 1 full day (weds.). This feels like a perfect gift and just the right balance of work and home. I will go to school in the morning and receive the smiles that I love so much and still get a chance to tend our growing garden in the afternoon and prepare dinner. There is also room in the schedule should I decide to do more (or for the fall when my class at the University finishes).

Oh, but don’t worry, I will still find something to stress over soon. Probably how my classes will go, if the teachers will truly be motivated to create a great program, is my Japanese good enough, who are my students, etc. ;)

Yesterday, I had to drive out to Iwami for my flower lesson, and what a beautiful day it was for a drive. The plowed and fertilized rice fields are now being filled up with water. About half the fields are now muddy pools and when the road and the field are at just the right level, the shimmering flatness reflects the sky and is indescribable. I had to pull over the car.

As it is the first week of April and time for the school year to begin again, it is also ‘safety week’. Fluorescent banners line the prefectural and city roads flapping their messages to drivers. Drive slowly. Remember to watch for young children and the elderly. Don’t drink and drive. Let’s aim for zero injury accidents. Fasten your seat belt. Put your child in a safety seat. The reminders are rather distracting as you strain to read the rippling strips of cloth. Real safe.

Tomorrow, the first day of school, will bring out the patrol. Teachers, parents and local community members are organized by each school to wear green armbands (an indicator of safety), stand on their pre-determined corners early on their assigned mornings. They are there to ensure that the children are using cross walks, raising their arms to be seen better as they traverse the roads, dismounting bikes before crossing, not running and definitely, not carrying on in any forbidden, unsafe way. This continues every day for one week. After that, the kids and safety are abandoned until the fall safety week, except for some towns/schools who have designated a separate safety day each month on which they do the same activities. Jokes aside, this is a safe place. Hamada’s crime report last year had numbers below 100 for most categories such as theft and murder.

I always drive the same route between Hamada and Iwami but yesterday, stopped at a light that is almost always green, I noticed a little restaurant (that has probably always been there). As I read the sign I realized it offered river eel (probably from the beautiful river coursing along beside the road) and soft shell turtle dishes Wait, what? Did I read that right?

Funny because just a few weeks ago, an advert landed in our mailbox selling soft shell turtle oil pills. Apparently, this oil is invigorating and helps seniors to regain their energy?!? The brochure came with full color photos of said energetic seniors, the turtle ‘factory’, the pools where they are raised, what the turtles look like (pointy heads and beady eyes) and finally the oven that the turtles are roasted in before extracting their oil (yes when the photo was taken the turtles were roasting). Ok, yeah, you are thinking what I was thinking, ew, gross. Who would eat a turtle?

But here is the thing. Who am I to say a particular food is gross when there are probably things that I eat that another culture finds revolting. Recently, I had a friend tell me the Chinese grossed her out with their bird nest and live monkey brain eating. Ok, perhaps an extreme example, but I countered, asking about the world’s disdain for the Japanese eating of whale meat. Why should one group of people decide what another can be eating or not, particularly, in countries like China, where many families don’t have enough to eat to begin with.

Many of these food traditions arose in times of shortage, before the arisal of modern farm technologies, and avoiding the tendency to believe that anything traditional should be preserved for preservation’s sake, I don’t think we can immediately expect cultures to conform their habits to what we (yes, it is usually America leading things) believe is right. Yes, I also have my own dietary preferences but I don’t think that anyone should follow them just because.

Regarding my own food ideals, I think people need to learn about and experience nature (and taste the difference in flavor home grown veggies possess) and then decide how they want to live and what they want to put in their bodies. I hope people can learn that the human body doesn’t need meat once a day (and especially not three times a day) to be healthy. I hope that by learning about how damaging the mass farming of animals and plants is, people decide to eat in a simpler, local, low impact way. But if they don’t, what can I do? We all have our own journey and choices to make. I believe cultural foods follow the same rules and I will definitely not be eating soft shell turtle anytime soon.

Amusingly enough, just down the road, the town also has an equestrian center and all you can eat buffet. You can take your ride on Black Beauty and then head inside to feast on a huge meaty line-up, which includes horse tongue and flank. And if you still needed a little more unbelievable, you could stop by the town’s set of pornography vending machines, offering I assume (not brave enough to pull over there) magazines, panties and the like. Apparently, the town is too small (or embarrassed- who buys those things anyway? certainly, not over 50 % of the population) to have an actual shop!

美しいでわありません。

Not so beautiful.

I think I will end there.