The littlest hobo...
- Adam
- Oct 29, 2017
- 4 min read
After two weeks in Izu it's time to move on again. I'm getting used to backpack living, it's quite liberating just having the one bag of clothes and a few luxuries when I've been used to surrounding myself with shelves of books, ornaments and tat for the last ten years in London.
Despite my moaning about the lack of activities Izu wasn't a bad experience at all. My Workaway host Rob's trying to build up a network of willing local businesses to kick-start the local tourism beyond the surf/hike outdoors bracket, so most days he'd try and have something lined up. We might visit a coffee morning at a Zen temple one morning (I think a new experience for everyone involved, French pastries and Hawaiian dancing in sight of Buddha) and then go exploring an abandoned building the next (which was creepy as shit). A couple of mornings we were put to work harvesting rice at a new smallholding which is especially brutal work, I now understand why it's bad etiquette not to eat every last grain.
This is the website for the project: https://theotherhousejapan.wixsite.com/website
Hopefully it'll all come together. Rob's a great guy and he's taken on a mammoth task, especially considering that a lot of the local businesses are very wary of the thought of tour buses full of gaijin stomping about their sleepy town like it's a theme park.
I've dressed this trip up with a subtext of achieving some personal career development, and Izu was a good place to scratch off that list. In the UK media industry there's more and more call for people who can produce, shoot and edit as a one man band. 'Shooting Preditor' it's called. I know, what a fucking horrible buzz phrase. I can shoot a bit but my hands-on editing's not much cop, so I'm shooting a few videos on my travels, getting the hang of Premiere. In Izu we developed a good relationship with Yamada-san, a head of the local commerce office. Once he saw that I could be useful he was keen to get me into every business he could which worked for me, factories are great filming practice. Here's the playlist so far, the first few are pretty shonky but I'm working out the shortcuts:
For me Izu was just a bit too laid-back for where my mindset was after Hokkaido, moving to a zen-hermit hideaway when I was just getting my teeth into Japanese life. Time to move on.
Next up on the grand tour of back-country Japan is Kofu, a few hours north west of Tokyo. I'm staying at Nakagomi Orchard, a huge fruit farm growing apples, grapes, persimmons and more. It's hard work in the orchards, strimming down weeds, fixing greenhouses, laying fertilizer, all the fun but you feel like you've achieved a proper day's work come nighttime. Our boss Kazu is a funny guy. I'd guess that he's about sixty, but he's in that age range where it's hard to tell if a Japanese person's old and in great shape or not, which basically covers most locals from the age of about forty up to ninety. He doesn't take any shit and has that disdain that only country people can have for city folks, but he's always giving us more fruit than we could ever eat, we've got a comfy shared house and big dinners so it's a great setup.
Nagagomi is in the middle of Yamanashi Peferecture, which I've been told is about the most generic scenery people would associate with Japan, open farmland with. But as a visitor it's all about Fuji. On a clear day there's an amazing view of her in the distance (and of course Fuji is a 'her'), and like an island holiday where you come home with a thousand sunset photos I know I'm going to end up with a lot of identical Fuji snaps. But it's impossible to avoid. It's hard to explain, but the mountain's such a dominant force once you know it's there. The shape is a picture perfect volcano - ask any kid to draw a mountain and it'll look like Fuji - and she stands alone, like the Lonely Mountain in the Hobbit, and your eye naturally drifts toward her. It makes it worth it the back pain from a morning fighting power tools, sitting down to lunch with a postcard view.
Fruit-picking in Japan is another case study in their cultural heritage. There's almost zero mass production here, as we would think of it. Everything's done by hand and every single fruit is cradled like a newborn. I've never seen peach and apple trees with each individual fruit wrapped in its own little safety cover. It's painstaking work to achieve the best quality possible. To put it into perspective people give fruit here like you might give someone a nice watch in Europe. A single bunch of grapes or one mango exported to Singapore can sell for about £50. It's a serious business which makes it a bit sad that one typhoon left us hand-collecting nearly 4,000 windblown apples, too bruised to sell.
There was one interesting experience early on. Kazu was telling one of the other volunteers about tattoos as a few of us had them. To him, tattoos=gangs, especially on locals. It's not a unique viewpoint, especially away from the cities. We went to the nearby onsen later that day and the first thing I saw was an older Japanese guy with a full back piece of a koi. After a while in the I realised that another a guy had at least four stab wound scars, a bigger guy who always seemed to let him have the best seat in whichever bath he was in, like he was holding court. There's no way of knowing to be sure but it just hammered home that in Japan gangs are alive, well and a big part of local society. I just kept my head down and tried not to stare too many Japanese body parts in the eye.
Two weeks working here and then it's on to Kyoto to be a tourist.
Oh also, free kittens...
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