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Tane-maki
It’s spring and all the farmers at Oyama Senmaida are busily preparing for rice planting season. This week, I lent a hand with 種蒔 tane-maki, which we’d call sowing in English. On Monday, we prepared 220 seed trays for the Sake Owners program. The sowing is staggered to match the planting dates in late April…
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Pressure Cleaning
Not pressure washing, but deadline pressure to do a cleaning and reorganizing task that I’ve been putting off for too long. The studio. With a guest arriving this afternoon, I decided that Wednesday would be the ideal day to pull the studio apart and rearrange it. My art supplies and tools are pretty much where…
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Serpentine Shores (and Hills)
Our local geology is fascinating. We live along a narrow belt of serpentine that crosses through the Chiba peninsula. Nobody has quite figured out how it got here. On Sunday, Tod & I joined Oyama Senmaida’s geotour – it’s a long-running program coming back after a six year hiatus. Geologists Naoki Takahashi and Nobuko Ushimura…
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Dual Pricing for Tourists
Japan is in the process of considering dual pricing for tourists. The government’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism is meeting now with a plan to make a report this summer. But in the Japanese way, if they have announced they are studying it, the plan’s already made and the report will merely provide…
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Cotton-Indigo Trust 2026
I just registered for the next cohort of the Wata-Ai (Cotton-Indigo) Trust at Oyama Senmaida. I enjoyed the program last year. A second round is going to let me build on the basics that I learned. We use abandoned fields at the top of the rice terraces to grow indigo and multiple types of cotton.…
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Lawrence Bacon
Once a year, we buy a slab of pork belly at Costco and ask our friend Lawrence to turn it into bacon. He learned to cure and smoke bacon at his mother’s side in Georgia and has taken the art of cured meats to the next level with all sorts of exotic charcuterie he makes…
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A lifetime of weaving
Morita Seki is retiring after 60 years of weaving. She is 92. I saw an article in the Bonichi about her “final exhibition” at a gallery in downtown Tateyama and I had to go to meet her and to see some of her work. By the time I got there on the 20th, day before…
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Triptych Weaving
The creative process led me to creating a trio of small weavings about the creative process, specifically writing: The Blank Page;Concept of a Plan;First Edit. I really only meant to make the one in the middle. I wanted to practice a tapestry joining technique – looping the weft threads of two different colors – to…
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February Woods Walk
Feeling some cabin fever, I needed to get out of the house to take “a stupid walk for my stupid mental health.” Luckily for me, the woods are right here at my doorstep. I opted to take one of my favorite routes to the top of the little mountain to the east. I stopped by…
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Being a Person
I ran into this quote recently and it lodged itself in my head: “Someone once told me the definition of hell; on your last day on earth, the person you could have become will meet the person you became.” Wow. Ouch. As a child and young woman I was frequently told I had “potential.” I…
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