I had a great life as an English teacher in Japan: a nice apartment across the street from a bakery, a job whose only requirement was to wear a tie and speak English, and a great group of friends who I could go out for sushi and beer with almost any night of the week. It was comfortable, but it was quickly becoming that gluttonous residue that comfort creates: routine. I was to begin service in the Peace Corps in nine months, so I figured what better for this 27 year old in the cushion of good health and financial independence to do than explore Asia. Already on the other side of the world, I wanted to see if I could find somewhere farther from home (I did: the deserts of Silk Road China). I wanted to discover where the culture of Japan originated from. I wanted to dive coral reefs, see jungles and rare primates, and meet people who had worries greater than shopping and dieting.
I had a year and a half of Japan behind me; however there were still a few loose ends to tie up. I wanted to spend a little more time closer to Japanese folks, I wanted to see more of the country and I wanted to exhaust the last of my Japanese language ability: I wanted a home stay.
After a roaring sayonara party and a few dozen more mild sayonaras, I took the bullet train from my home near Osaka to Kyushu, the southernmost island of Japan. I turn a new chapter in my life as I cross the channel separating the islands, pondering how quickly I could be back at my apartment nibbling cookies. The first step is always the hardest. One of the last students that I had while teaching was a middle aged working woman who happened to be from Kyushu, I leaned close and looked 
her in the eye and said how about Osaka, she leaned closer and whispered, I don’t like it! She’s been there for twenty years, and still thinks the people aren’t as friendly.
A cool drizzle fell as the father of the family picked me up at the station. A thin sixtyish year old man with conspicuous glasses and hideous teeth, he wore a smile that put my worries to rest. We pull into his driveway, a real driveway! I come inside and meet their family as we wander around the wide, spacious house, not at all lacking in cheap, wooden interior. The father tells me the work schedule and I ask if someone could wake me up. “Get yourself up!” he laughs.
April 7. Today we drove around the town dropping off and picking up various farm objects: fresh milk, compost, straw, crates. At the farm’s market-store I bagged groceries; maybe tomorrow I will be able to do the register. It’s a little intimidating handling money in a foreign language. Then I picked strawberries. The weather was clear, and the father pointed at the mountains in the distance and said that you couldn’t see them thirty years ago, on account of air pollution. The family’s son also lives at the house; he’s my age and works on the farm. Earlier I met their daughter; she had been the one sending me the emails in English. She’s a little catty, but charmingly sweet. They sit around the TV at night, gazing at the screen like it’s a new innovation, mindlessly watching hit music countdown shows. I feel like I’ve traveled back in time to my mother’s childhood in the 1950's.
April 8. Japanese sweets are gross. Because of the historical culinary limitations of their traditional agricultural system, the Japanese were forces to make sweets out of two lone ingredients: rice and salt. Imagine the result. They love choco and cake-ie, but in the 21st century, they still clutch onto their tiny dollops individually wrapped in excessive amounts of packaging. They also don’t drink water. I see people on mountain hikes with nothing but a kiddie sized plastic bottle of tea. You won’t find many glasses larger than a whiskey tumbler in this country, and good luck with a drinking fountain.
April 9. I ask the son if the farm will be his in the future, and he says, yup, I won the lottery (he’s the oldest son). He seems resigned and accepting to the fact that not many westerners would be: he might rather be in another place but doesn’t show it. The younger son lives in the
nearby city and the daughter lives at home but works in the city. At the store there was a five year old girl who was fascinated by me, she says hello, her only word of English, and then shrieks to her mother, I saw an English speaking man!
April 10. I took a walk through some hills in the area, and talked to as many strangers as possible. People kept asking me if I was from the Nakamura farm, they all knew! Pear flowered trees and miles of neat little tea bushes clung to neat hillsides, I stopped at a little soba shop and everyone wanted to talk to me. The last person I met that day was a used car dealer. I walked up asking directions and he stopped everything he was doing to interrogate me about American sports. Then he ordered an employee to drive me home. Back at the farmhouse, the daughter made me curry.
April 12. A man came to dinner at the farmhouse, he was a farmer wearing toe socks, and he looked a little like a Japanese Bruce Willis. He spent most of the time watching TV while we ate, then he stopped and asked me what Spam was. Finally he drove home, on a tractor. Earlier that day I mowed the grass below a grape orchard, their farm offers a beautiful view of the town, wrapped in a blanket of tea plantations; mountains rise gently in the distance. Japanese people still respect farmers, the father assures me, people care more about the environment than they did thirty years ago, and farmers are seen by many as stewards.
April 13. I came across a group of old ladies today that I swear could have been 150 years old. Their faces looked like earth. I climbed a mountain path dotted with shrines, one was built into a cliff and I took a nap there. At the summit of the mountain was another, I ducked inside from the torrid wind, shut the doors, and found myself in pitch blackness. Nothing but thick walls and an unassuming altar. Mist in the mountains of Japan is beautiful. Hiking down, I discovered some nuevou Buddhist temple, and then thought to myself that the only thing missing from my day was an onsen, and what was I to find around the next bend but, yes, an onsen. I love this country. I start talking to some old men at the baths (who else would be at a rural onsen on a weekday afternoon). I wait for it to start raining, and when they ask me how I will get back to the train station, I put on the saddest face I can muster. Riding in their van, the thought occurs to me, Japan can be cold and anti-social, but county folk always come through.
April 14. A girl who used to work at the family’s farmers market came by today with a cake she had made; she apologized profusely. She said it was no good and that she screwed up the crust. Before that she said excuse me no fewer than seven times for the inconvenience of sitting in their house for five minutes. The father took me to a nearby kofun, the ancient burial mounds common in Japan from 300-600 AD. This was before Buddhism came to Japan and before Shinto was developed, but over time objects from these religions have been placed inside. How weird is that, to stick some completely unrelated objects in an ancient tomb, like putting a crucifix in the Parthenon (or maybe someone did that one time). At this site you could go underground and see where the actual tomb for the body was; he told me that the tombs originally held gold and other precious artifacts, but they have all been looted through the years.
April 16. It rained most of the day and the neighboring dairy farm was louder and more pungent than normal. On TV during dinner they were watching a show where teams of comedians ride through an amusement park like simulation and monsters would spit out obscure kanji (Chinese characters) and the contestants would have to identify them. Imagine defining words like penurious. Kanji is fascinating though. For example, the character for planet is an amalgamation of the character for star and the character for wandering. Later the daughter, who is about my age, said to me watashi tachi furo o haite mo ii des ka (do you want to take a bath together), to which I said, once more please, and she repeated it more clearly, watashi saki furo o haite mo ii des ka (can I take a bath first). Close calls. The day before I made spaghetti for nine Japanese people and a fewKorean friends. There we were, sitting on the floor, slurping spaghetti with chopsticks like it was ramen, and I tell myself, you can lead a horse to water . . . A couple people said they liked it but then they started talking about eating bamboo shoots.
April 17. I spent the afternoon working in a Bento shop making Japanese box lunches with a handful of old women. Bento, not sushi, nor anything else, is the epitome of Japanese food: very small, very neat, but nothing really tastes very good. It takes hours just arranging all the food in tiny dollops aro
und the tray, forget actually making the food. The owner of the shop is a divorced woman whose husband gambled away all their money at the track. Now she works sixty hours a week making food. She said that things were getting better for women in Japan. We talked about food and she said that you canput anything in sushi rolls as long as it’s a pleasing color and not too wet.
April 21. We went to Aso volcano by car in a group of four: the daughter Manami, the cake girl, a Japanese friend of mine that I knew from Nova, and me. The trip was like a Japanese TV show- they were ohhing and ahhing at the scenery 
and stopping for snacks every fifteen minutes. The volcano was amazing; a huge crater with a pool and steam rising out. They were selling sulfate or some sort of volcano derived insecticide at the top of the volcano. So often I love this country, but times like this I can’t stop but think, just leave one enough alone for godsake. The day before we went to a cave where there were Buddhist carvings inside; just a little gravel shoulder on the side of a road, one can only imagine the things that have happened their through the years that no one cares about anymore.
April 22. I spent the day with my Nova friend and her mother; we met in Nara but now she lives in this area of Kyushu. We ate lunch then went to a reconstructed prehistoric village from 1500 years ago; there were sunken earthen pit dwellings, wooden towers, and no shortage of traditional shrine looking buildings. It was remarkable how reconstructed it looked, but I guess the ruins weren’t much to look at in the first place, so maybe its justifiable. Afterwards we went to an onsen, its truly amazing how beautiful and natural looking they appear on the inside, truly a private world removed from the rest of Japan. It must be the only place in Japan where people aren’t hurrying, where people don’t bump into you, and where some machine or shop clerk won’t talk to you. My friend’s mom said that Japanese boys are spoiled because the father is the one to discipline the son, but he isn’t around. The mother, on the other hand, is always around to be able to discipline the daughter. My friend is 24, well employed, and even after being independent in Osaka lives under her mom’s thumb. She asked permission to have a sip of sake with dinner.
April 24. On the plane to Hong Kong, I’m finally leaving Japan for good (I discovered later I would make a short stop on the route home). After staying with the Nakamura family for a few weeks, I got to see a lot more of normal Japanese life, as well as farm life. The father of the family is a very happy man who seems to enjoy his life and his family, and his home; almost everyone that I met in this area had been there their whole life; I guess there is reason to move away but no reason to move in.
The farmers in this area are not briefcase farmers, but they do talk on cell phones while they attend to a pear orchard or pick strawberries. Only one child inherits the farm while the others hold normal jobs, the father told me there are few or no subsidies, price supports, or tariffs on foreign products (wheat and soybeans only). I still find it difficult to wade through all of this and discover how Japanese farmers manage to subsist; one can’t help but notice the disparity between the tiny farms and the farmer’s large homes and new cars. Studies show that the average Japanese farmer receives $28,000 per year in subsidies. These distortions are finally being noticed as harmful, and in this case the victims are food producers in poor countries who cannot sell their food in western markets like Japan because subsidized local food is cheaper than imports from Africa. Food security is a defense often given for these subsidies, as agricultural self-sufficiency in Japan is among the lowest in the developed world at 40%. Nevertheless, in Japan there are cultural factors that promote local markets that can’t be gleaned from reading the Economist: most Japanese would pay much more for a Japanese product, especially a food, over a foreign one, and food is a product that people are accustomed to forking over money for. Additionally, one ride around any suburban area would show that Japanese live closer to farm life than we do in America- tiny farms are scattered amongst residential communities in ways we just don’t see at home.
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