Northern Tohoku – the three prefectures just south of Hokkaido, Aomori/Iwate/Akita, on the northern tip of Honshu- has its own rhythm and life. They aren’t so far away from ‘modern’ as to be unaware of the ‘outside’ – they just have the freedom, and space, to not care. Here, the four very distinct seasons provide the bassline for a cultural rhythm of life going back thousands of years.
Spring
Rural Japan from north to south is dominated by the seasonality of the rice harvest. And Spring is the first explosion of activity after the long winter’s tea. おじいさん (Older men) start plowing fields their great-great-grandfathers used to plow. Now they use tractors, where once oxen or horses, but other than that it is largely the same. The fields are about the same size, though fewer farmers to take care of them – mechanization allowed that – but there isn’t the ‘wide open plains’ here to really add more farmland so efficiency is king here. The women help with this where they can – but this is firmly ‘man’s work’.
Gender roles here are both traditional and practical – there is simply too much to do to NOT split up the work! The おばあさん’s (older women) might help with the rice starts, or accompany the man as he works the field, and keeping the rice canals, the little ditches that keep water levels in the paddy, cleared of brush is a whole community project. But for the most part she owns her own rapidly accelerating work load!
The ‘house garden’, the garden providing vegetables to the family home, is generally the woman’s domain and spring is the launch of that critical project. Way up North here is a much cooler clime – USDA Plant Hardiness Zone 6a- with a winter minimum of around -23 Celsius. The cooler, and shorter, growing season determines the garden crops. Tomatoes, piman (green peppers), string beans, asparagus, lettuce and cabbages, daikon and other root vegetables, all shine here. You can grow some hotter crops – we grow gyoza, a bitter melon resembling a cucumber with warts – but we put those on strings up against our dark brown house siding, facing south – to get the necessary sun and heat load needed to ripen.
Spring also means getting your honey bee hives ready to go! We rely on wild Japanese honey bees from the local mountains – wonderfully adapted to local conditions! Every spring you need to open up their hives, carefully sweep out the dead bees and check the overall condition of the swarm. They aren’t terribly aggressive – you can see that I am not using a lot of ‘bee protection’ in this check (one of my OLD Navy coveralls!)- but it is still very cool in the mornings and my hives are pretty sluggish still. We had a hard winter and lost a couple of hives this year. There was a ‘false spring’ about a month ago that woke up the hives and they got very excited about spring – but with no pollen available I suspect they just didn’t have the reserves to support an early surge of activity with no payoff. Many of the beekeepers in our area lost substantial portions of their hives as well – you kinda don’t get over opening a hive up and seeing 3000 dead bees at the bottom… you nurse them thru the winter, protect them from predators, clean them from mites…. I like to think they recognize me due to smell and movement. And then …they don’t make it. Part of farm life- but it does twist the gut a bit.
Everyone in or out of Japan has heard of 花見- Spring Cherry blossom viewing! And up here in Northern Japan it is no different…well… a little different. We are more than a month behind Tokyo and the Kanto Plain cherry season! And its still quite cool out – so we dress a bit warmer. The true bonus though is that, as well as being cooler, the humid season hasn’t even begun to arrive – so the weather is FAR more pleasant for sitting under giant cherry trees, picnicking, some beer and sake, and enjoying the perfect weather 🙂
Japan’s Cherry Blossom Forecast – learn the best time for ‘hanami’ in your area of Japan!
Spring in Northern Japan is ended with not ‘work’ but a brief pause before the heat and humidity descends – with ‘tabehodai’ (all you can eat) cherry picking (and eating!) A major spring income for local farmers is opening their orchards and fields to the ‘city folk’ to descend and, for a small per-person fee, eat as much as they can right off the tree 🙂
Its rather fitting really, Spring opens with hanami – spring cherry blossom viewing – and ends with cherry all you can eat/pick! Incoming is the heat and the humidity that even Tohoku can’t escape – but for a couple of months the cold and snow of winter and the oppressive heat of summer has politely allowed Northern Japan to truly enjoy what many, including myself, says is the ‘best’ season of Japan – SPRING!
(though Fall is a very close second 😉
