Today, we drove out to beautiful countryside location to the home of a lovely lady who recently lost her husband. Our mission was to load up a approx 200 kg mochi making stone. Massively dense and unbudgeible at first. Took some levers, hoists and dumptruck power moves.
But don’t worry, I had the assistance of my wife, the widow, her mother-in-law and her 12-year-old daughter. There’s no more invincible force than Japanese women but in this case, was not the ideal crew!
The giant stone was joined by menagerie of different ceramic plant pots, some bizen fired drain pipe and all sorts of other odds and ends.
We then went around the corner to a café (keep in mind, we were in a small hamlet and the drive was littered with Sakura, plum and peach trees in splendid bloom along was lazy river with elderly farmers doing their works and even Russian looking dacha cabins with garden plots for hobby gardeners to visit from the city) and ate a ridiculous ¥600 bento lunch.
Turns out the boss (who runs the sorta Bento café in a little hamlet which i am trying to recall the name) was born in 1974… He bought this one when he got his drivers license, the car is also 1974 and currently has 74,000 km.
Of course we talked for an extended period about my 1974 bus and the history of Volkswagen (including the Brasilian and Mexican versions) and, sat inside, checked the engine etc. and how this thing could run and until100 years old with proper maintenance.
The wife (or daughter?) drives a new-school Beetle, he had a couple of canoe/kayak-y boats, mountain bikes and a kura – which of course i inquired about and he hasn’t done anything special with but thinking about a karaoke lounge.
Anyhow, was cool to see this kind of tiny lifestyle business as our area could really use something like this. Also, noting, despite his house.biz being a traditional farmhouse with the tatami rooms, had a wheelchair ramp. Hooray for accessibility!
Update: the mochi rock is installed! Heavy. And no, its not a birdbath.
