It is spring now which means that in the past month all the farmers have been busy preparing, flooding, and planting their rice fields!
Over my two years residing in Japan, I have come to really enjoy the rice field scenery. I like to watch how the image of the rice field changes with each season.
A couple weeks ago I was invited by my friend to go and see rice planting myself! At the nursing home that her mother and sister work at and her father lives in they were having a rice planting day and barbecue for the volunteers.
Some of the rice fields near the care home are actually owned by the home and it seems that locals from the neighborhood volunteer to take care of the rice paddies. There were about a dozen older gentleman and ladies working in the rice paddies when we got there. They had one machine that laid the rice seedlings out on the paddies and several other people were planting by hand. The very last paddy, in a group of seven paddies, was planted by everybody together by hand. Rice planting is actually quite easy, you literally just stick a few seedlings into the water flooded paddy and they stay upright. But it must be tiring to be bent over for hours while you plant, which I imagine is why little old country ladies are all permanently bent over here!
After the volunteers finished the planting everyone headed to a tent set up next to the care home where we had a barbecue. It was typical Japanese BBQ fare- pieces of delicious beef, beef tongue and pork; loads of cabbage, carrots, and onions; and then yakisoba to finish off the meal. They also had a little karaoke tournament, in spite of the constant drizzle of rain that day!
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