Planting Rice – Spring Has Come to Saitama

If you are driving around Japan this time of the year you are bound to see one of the perfect images of Japan, the rice planting. In the old days this would have been done by villagers all over the country by hand, working next to each other, both men and women together, old and young, to plant the rice in the water filled fields one by one. These days it is usually done by machines to save time. I met this old man and his grandson tending to the family fields with the shy young man walking behind the sowing machine and filling any spots the quick machine missed. What used to be the work of a whole village is now two to three people and a day of work. When I spotted them they were just about to fill up the last row in the last field. I used to think that rice plants grew in water (pity my ignorance), until a man from the ministry of agriculture told me that rice can grow in dry land as well, but it is exceptionally hardy to being flooded in water, meaning that farmers early on figured out that if they flooded the fields the rice plants would survive while all weeds would drown and die. When the rice is big enough not to be threatened by the competition from weeds the farmers will stop flooding the fields and save the water to irrigate other fields downstream. It used to be that the highest lying fields would get the most water and the first water, but today we have electric pumps and water rights have been established in courts. In the old days, whole regions could go to war with each other over water rights and farmers downstream would use all sorts of manual pumps to painfully get the water into their fields. Work that could easily be sabotaged by a mean peasant from the village down river armed with only a shovel.

I took these pictures in Saitama prefecture just north of Tokyo, in a the city of Kuki (久喜) I think、probably within walking distance from Wada (和田) station. Enjoy!










　

Kawagoe Matsuri

I hope you aren’t getting tired of my photos from the Kawagoe Matsuri, or the Kawagoe Festival late summer last year! I keep going back to the photos I took and finding interesting faces and situations from hundreds of photos I took during those to days and evenings. The festival itself centers around a few main streets and alleys, but it really sprawls out over a very large area, covering over three stations and everything in between. Even on non crowded days it can take 30 minutes to walk from one end of the festival area to the other, and during the festival itself it can take hours! There’s of course the huge mobile festival wagons battling it out whenever they meet up, but there’s also a number of stages put up around the area where performances take place almost around the clock, traditional dance and music. It really is one of my favorite festivals!

Kawagoe Matsuri – Festival Season

More photos from last year’s Kawagoe festival I’m afraid! I took got so many good shots of the great people of Kawagoe city in Saitama prefecture just north of Tokyo, I just have to keep posting them. The best thing about these groups of people pulling the festival floats is that you can just stand still and keep finding great moments to capture in your camera finder. My favorite this time is of the two boys shouting! When I first came to Japan I was really surprised at how a lot of young people were encouraged to shout, both in martial arts but also in ordinary sports and activities, even old ladies rarely lift something or get up from a chair without saying something. A friend of mine who is a teacher told me that the reason Japanese focus so much on this shouting is because they are naturally timid, and there are few opportunities to make themselves heard in the course of normal life so in order to build a stronger character, children are accustomed from a young age to let out a blood curdling shout even when playing table tennis or throwing a basket ball! It’s a nice tradition and it actually works! The best thing is to hear a couple of hundred neighbors shout together when pulling one of these huge festival wagons though!

Arakawa River at Night

Modern cameras are pretty amazing. I took these two photos, handheld, when it was so dark at night that you really had to be careful walking around. There was hardly any light left and what there was came from the almost black sky, becoming a deep blue when picked up by the camera sensor. In the old days I would have had to use a camera stand and shot for a very long time with film and I’d probably wouldn’t have gotten this vivid blue. You might remember this post, which was taken a few minutes before these photos, at Chichibu’s Nagatoro village, deep in rural Saitama prefecture. This incredibly calm stream becomes a huge river as it gets closer to the capital, and ironic enough Arakawa means roughly “wild river”, in Japanese. I love these three old boats laid up for the night, resting for another day of transporting tourists down the river.