Today I met up with Kuniko’s parents and a couple of her uncles to help plant rice. Kuniko had to go to school, so she missed out on the adventure. I had my shiny new boots to use that day, and I’m glad I brought them. Kuniko’s dad was wearing a Gundlach Bundschu hat that my folks had given him – by chance so was I, so we made a matching set. <\/p>\n
The rice planting is a pretty modern operation – a tractor runs around the rice paddy in a specific pattern, and it is really interesting how it delivers the plants into the mud. They load it with what looks like squares of sod – young rice plants ready to go into the ground. As the tractor traveled there were lots of tiny frogs jumping like hell to get out of the way. <\/p>\n
The tractor looked like fun, but unfortunately I didn’t get to try it out. Maybe next year. In fact, there wasn’t a whole lot for me to do – just watch and help load the tractor with more sod when it ran out. <\/p>\n
We planted two rice paddies. There were a couple more, but Kuniko’s folks did that work yesterday, so it was a relatively easy day. When we finished up we spent a couple hours cleaning the tractor and the trays that the young rice plants had been growing on. <\/p>\n
They had a strange machine for cleaning the trays, and me and one of Kuniko’s uncles tried to figure it out. It had power, but we couldn’t figure out what the power was for. We pushed the trays in one side, and the were rinsed with water on the way through. I figured it was heating the water, but after a while it was still cold. Finally somebody walked by and told us to turn it on, and so we followed the cord back a ways and found a switch. Once it was on, the thing automatically received the trays, cleaned them, and spit them out the other side. At least I wasn’t the only one that was clueless.<\/p>\n
After everything was taken care of I helped with a little modification to one of the barns at the family farm. It was really just Kuniko’s dad working, and four guys standing around offering comments. <\/p>\n
Kuniko showed up around 3 p.m. and was my ticket out of there, so I headed back to the Kageyama household and we drank coffee and relaxed a bit. We snuck out of there before her mom could cook us dinner, and did a little bit of shopping at Carrefour on the way back home. <\/p>\n