Welcome to the Tilling Fields

I spent about 10 hours today churning up last years rice paddies in preparation for this years crops. I met with an extended member of the Iguchi clan around 8 this morning for my tractor driving/rice paddy tilling tutorial, and then I was left to my own devices. This was my chariot of the rice paddy for most of the day.

This was my view for most of the day. Tilling the paddies is an insanely boring thing to do, actually. The novelty of driving a tractor wears thin after about 10 minutes, especially since I was generally moving at about 3 miles per hour.

It's the kind of activity that requires just enough attention so as to keep you from doing anything interesting or productive, like pouring myself a lid full of coffee from my thermos. But there were a few things that managed to spruce up the experience now and then. For starters, the scenery was nice, as usual. Then there were the swallows which periodically swarmed the tractor as I was driving along, exposing all sorts of the tasty swallow food in the upturned soil. That was nice. The most dramatic entertainment though was the occasional frog that was jumping madly in front of the tractor in an effort not be run over and/or tilled to a gruesome end. Since the tiller attachment is a bit wider than the wheelbase of the tractor, I found myself peering out the side to see if the frogs had managed to get completely out of dodge. As far as I could tell they all did, which also gives you an idea of how slow I was going. And then there was the radio. My tractor had a radio and a tape deck. Chieko's dad has lots of tapes in there, but I opted for the radio because I wanted to hear some live humans. Not that it mattered, since I couldn't really hear anyone over the drone of the engine, and what I could hear I couldn't understand because it was Japanese that was mostly drowned out by a tractor engine. Nevertheless, for some reason, I kept the radio on pretty much all day.

Despite the monotony, I got a strange satisfication out of driving a tractor at a snail's pace back and forth across a rice field. It reminded me of mowing lawns in college, and the sense of pride I took in laying a set of tight lines on freshly cut lawn. Once you make the final lap around the field, it all comes together, all churned up and brown, ready to be flooded and planted.



Chieko's parents were so impressed with my work that they felt the need to take me out and feed me a bunch of prime Japanese beef, which I did not protest. So now I'm on the floor with my lower half under the kotatsu, and my mind barely clinging to consciousness after piles of meet and a few beers. And that means there's no way in hell I'm proof reading this post aside from spell check. We've got a bit more work here tomorrow before heading back to Kanazawa, hopefully not to late in the afternoon. Have a nice weekend.