Selling Our Wares

Tomoe and I have been quite busy getting moved into our new house, her preparing and presenting a booth about macrobiotic and natural food at a local festival, me helping to get the festival set up. We thought we had totally blown our chance at promoting an upcoming volunteer program to help preserve a traditional thatch roofed house in Akiyamago, a part of the village we are moving to. (Volunteers get free accommodation and three meals at one of the local family inns in exchange for one days work in the field which should be surrounded by amazing fall colors).

We are not the organizers of the event, but it is just the kind of thing we want to do with One Life Japan so we are helping to promote it - hopefully if we get a few more people than last year we will win some points with the locals, and it will give us a great opportunity to start relationships with some of the local inns we will be depending on in the future. We have also added a little extra tour in the hopes that we can at least cover the costs of the fliers we printed and the time we have spent so far.

We set our goal at finding three people to join the kaya harvest, and are now blown away to already have several confirmed entrants, and at quite a few more verbal commitments and highly likely participants. Its great to know that people are interested in this type of event. Our hope now is that we don't bring more people than the inns can handle!

In an effort to promote it to Japanese people (so far its mostly foreigners who read our website) we spent the day at a local flea-market and outdoor festival put on by the PolePole Organic cafe in Omachi. This time instead of selling Tomoe's macrobiotic lunchboxes, we took the opportunity to sell a lot of the "junk" that is coming out of our new home. Much of it is still quite usable , but there are way more dishes than we need, and the clothes don't fit us. We hated to throw it away so we lugged a bunch back to Hakuba for the flea-market.

When we arrived we almost chickened out, thinking no one would want this junk, but as soon as we put it out, our area was swarmed with people. It may be because we were selling everything at a 3 items for 10 yen (about 10 cents) price, but it may also have to do with the "hippy-ness" of the crowd. Most of our stuff was extremely vintage, and would not look right on your average salary man.

Anyway, we sold a lot of great clothes and I was happy to see people wearing their new bargains that very day (as in the photo above - we sold her the jacket). We also enjoyed the food from the other booths, lots of cheap organic veggies, and the music. The best part, however, was finding several people with extreme interest in the thatch roof repair project.

We are packing up The Pug again tonight for another trip to Sakae. We should be there for a week this time, then we come back here with a 2-ton truck on loan from the good people in the villiage. We say our "see you laters" to folks here in Hakuba, and high-tail it back to Sakae to finish the house and preparations for our Fall Colors Bike & Hike trip. We now have more participants than we expected!!!

More photos from the Pole Pole Cafe event.