We Win

Last night we got back from a few days at our new home in Sakae Mura. A few days ago I wrote about how we "lost" the race with the Jonses to find the best country home. The photo above is showing Tomoe's "we win!" face. Of course its not a contest, so we didn't beat them - but we win in terms of finding a great place for ourselves.

There are, of course, some imperfections to overcome. While our friends are fixing up an old traditional Japanese farm house over 100 years old, we are cleaning up fifty-year-old house made with rather cheap materials. The house was lived in by an old woman who developedAlzheimer and was moved to a nursing home three years ago. Not having been opened for three years, we have a centimeter of dust to clean off of everything. What's more, in her final years in the house she was finding it harder and harder to keep things clean, so the kitchen is giving Tomoe new perspective about the condition she found our kitchen in the last time she left me alone for a week. The second floor is actually quite clean once the dust is cleared - partly because she was not able to get upstairs so there was no one to make it dirty.

The house is full of useless dishes and what-not. Many serving platters, fondue dishes, tea cups, electric blankets, etc. Most of it is still in the original box - wedding gifts that got put directly into the closet when her son got married decades ago. Most of it is going into the trash. Its painful. We want to give away the four huge trash-bags of plates, tea cups, sake sets, and rice bowls. Unfortunately, every house in the village has the same number of useless dishes. We took out anything we thought we could use, but with only two of us, we don't need many more dishes than what we have been using. In the even that we have company or customers stay over, we were happy to find a few matching sets, but for the most part they were typical "useless gift" waste.

Think about that the next time you give someone a dish or decoration you would not be able to find a use for in your own home.

For all the junk, there were also some gems. Tomoe was happy to find some great knives and miso jars. I was happy to find some cool sunglasses and two bottles of home-made plum wine that has been aging for 16 years!

We have big ideas for "renovations" on a small budget. Friday we made friends with a supplier of beautiful and valuable local wood from deep in the Akiyamago valley at cheaper-than-lumber-shop prices. The kitchen will be completely re-made. The living room walls are all tobacco stained and will have to be replaced. If only the house was two-hundred years old it would feel so much better, but as it is we can get a great place with little cost, so no complaints.

The people there are great. One of the "drawbacks" we identified about living in Sakae was the fact that houses are close together and it will be difficult to protect our privacy. On the other hand, we have the support of not only ourimmediate neighbors, but people in every little neighborhood in the village. When looking for a field to plant some winter veggies (spinach, daikon, nozawana, etc.) we were disappointed to find that all the field space nearby our home was already planted, but lucky to have the support of one of the workers at the local office who lives in a neighborhood higher up in the mountains.

This is also a problem, however. On the one hand, we enjoy their willingness to help, but they help too much. Take the field for example. We want a field we can plant some veggies and just try our hand at some chem-free "organic" gardening. (Of course, given the abundant use of chemical fertilizer, herbicide, and pesticide in all the surrounding fields, I am not sure how much we can learn). Thevillage people are so happy to give us a field that they run right out and pour Roundup all over it to kill the weeds for us. They then drive their big gas-guzzling tractor over it to get it ready for our planting. We had already set aside a day to get out there and till it by hand (it would have only taken a few hours). Since it will be too late to plant from seed the next time we get there, they told us to prepare the sprouts and an abundant supply of chemical fertilizer. We are worried that they will be so eager to help that they give our field a regular dousing of pesticides and herbicides without our knowing.

It may take a while to get them to accept that we want to do things a little differently than they have learned, but maybe the oldest of the old folks will understand. After all, in is only recently that farmers have been taught to use any and all chemicals in their fields even when there is only a need for two-persons yeild.

We enjoyed a bath every night at our local onsen (only a five minute walk). The onsen only costs 100 yen ($1) but we still plan to buy the special family pass available to residents that will allow us to use any onsen in the entire Sakae mura area for only 7,000 yen ($70) per year - per household! 100 yen is not the cheapest onsen though, there is also a free onsen if we ever feel up to making the journey deep into the back of Akiyamago valley. There you can dig into the sand along the river to make your own private little natural volcanic bath. We did this on our way home allowing me to scratch one thing off my to-do-in-life list.

On the way there we took a drive (in The Pug - photo below) over the amazingly beautiful Shiga kogen down to Nozawa Onsen Village. On the way back we passed through Akiyamago and across to Oku-shiga kogen. The entire area is beyond words. We can reach it all in less than a day by bike, less than an hour by The Pug. Sakae Mura's ski hill has a 14,000 ($140) yen season ticket, and if we want something a bit bigger, Nozawa ski resort is amazing - especially for a day-visit from Sakae. Its only 40 minutes away by Pug and there are free hot-spring baths sprinkled around the village to warm us up for the short ride home.

We definitely win.