Rice is Nice

Rice harvesting time is upon us here in Fukui-ken. And the paddies near my apartment have been dotted signs of the season. Expensive farm equipment plows through some plots in a matter of minutes, but I've also seen 90-year old women stooped over, harvesting by hand. So the harvest is representative of the many dichotomies that exist here Japan: technology or tradition, East or West, modesty or public nudity...

Yes, public nudity. Well, almost.

On Saturday night, my host family kindly invited me to the rice harvesting festival in Maruoka. The evening started off at their home, with a delicious dinner of roll-it-yourself sushi, complete with fresh cuts of sashimi prepared by Grandma Youko. We sat on cushions around a table in the family's tatami room and enjoyed conversation in broken English and Japanese. Dinner - including the rice harvested from the family's plot - was amazing.

We then headed down the street to the festival. First stop was the community center, where we met with a swarm of people crowding around a sunken stage. This was part of a 200-year old festival tradition. This was also where the public nudity came into play.

Dozens of grown men donned sumo-style underwear (e.g. a white strip of cloth covered their 'parts,' with a thinner strip covering not-so-much of their backsides), along with short white robes on top. They were competing to lift a hollowed-out log above their heads. This fierce competition, of course, involved them bending over to pick up the log, exposing their underwear - and everything it didn't cover - to the audience. In attempting to photograph the competition, I inevitably got a lensful of 尻.

During breaks in the competition, the log became a bowl into which unrefined rice was poured, and the men took mallets and danced around the bowl, pounding the rice into flour. They chanted. The scene was fascinating.

The log competition won and the rice pounded, we headed to the neighborhood shrine and waited for the men to follow. They walked barefoot to the shrine, armed with a basket of freshly-prepared rice balls. Festival-goers were instructed to stand in a circle, and the men walked in the middle, dropping the rice balls intermittently. The crowd dove for the balls like they were money - for 200 years, they've believed that these rice balls bring luck for the year.

And I got one, but not by my own merits. It came complements of my host brother, who apparently is much more adept at rice ball-diving that I. We'll see how much luck it brings in the coming year....