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Moon viewing
Last night was お月見, the traditional moon-viewing night. The September full moon is said to be the most beautiful. This is the start of the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, where they eat delicious moon cakes to celebrate. In Japan, we have tsukimi dango (a pyramid of small mochi balls) and restaurants put fried eggs on everything.…
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Phoenix vase
The Kawasakis have been piling up metal junk for recycling – old siding, rusty tins, bent wire fencing – and on Tuesday they came over to load it into the k-truck and take it away. Amongst the odds and ends towards the bottom of the pile was a vase. Mr. Kawasaki thumped it to listen…
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Ishida Tetsuo and the Bird-Tailed Chisel
In the long-ago time when Edo was founded, there was a stone carver called Ishida Tetsuo. He came from a long line of quarrymen who lived on the Boso Peninsula, where stone was pulled from the mountains and turned into building blocks for the new capital city. He apprenticed with his father, who had left…
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Goodbye, Tilly Good Car
Tomorrow we say goodbye to Tilly, our 1999 Daihatsu Mira Gino. I have been emotional about this all week, because I anthropomorphise her. She is cute; she is stalwart. She loves to wait for us under the shade of trees. She is fearless on rocky roads. She delights in hooning – going a little too…
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A Reflection on Sayonaras
Today I said goodbye to a friend from our neighborhood who is leaving for new adventures. She’s been a colorful character in our area for several years and as the only middle-aged white American women in this part of Chiba, we’ve become close and had each others backs for the unexpected events of country living. …
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Did we have Covid-19?
Test result said “negative,” but the Omicron-like symptoms said yes. We will never be sure. For about a week, Tod & I had raw sore throat & congestion, cough, runny nose, exhaustion, brain fog, and digestive problems. But neither of us had fever, so no way to get an official PCR test. On the 3rd…
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Walks in the Woods
Southern Chiba’s low and rolling mountains are criss-crossed with old roads, ancient cow trails, and other overgrown signs of past habitation. Walking them together is our happy time on weekends. Tod is very good at spotting interesting little mountain turnoffs that lead to a beautiful drive and/or a lovely hike. Many of the trails are…
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The Tile Mines
Recently, Fujii-san acquired 12 tons of tile that was going to be sent to the dump by a construction company. 8 enormous bags of it that needed to be lifted by crane. Each bag is filled with completely random odds and ends from projects. There’s all kinds of stuff in there, bathroom tiles for floor…
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Time to rest
At the end of today, it was done. The kominka is nothing more than ashes and a few piles of straw and rubble. There’s more to do, of course. Those piles of hay need to be moved and the lot flattened out and readied for the next stage. But we’re all overdue for a break. …
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Quiet on a hot tin roof
The weather today was sunny and felt more blistering than the 23C the weather apps said. Everyone at 555 seemed tired. Despite that, we all worked hard and many things happened. The yumbo lifted off the large section of totan sheeting that had blown off the roof in 2019. I have been wondering how we…
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