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Let me just say that I feel as though I've completed an important rite of passage. I have stepped over the threshold into a new realm of personal identity. At last, I can call myself a true cook. I have made ice cream. From scratch. Without a machine. And it was delicious.
This is kurogoma (black sesame seed) ice cream. Since the first time I sampled this unique flavor a little less than a year ago, I've been enamored with the distinctive creamy-nutty quality that makes it, quite possibly, my favorite flavor of ice cream (Maybe even better than mint-choco-chip. Just maybe.). And, if the taste weren't already enough cause to hanker for a bowl of icy goma goodness, top it off with the exciting bonus of getting to eat something that looks like it should have just come out of a cement mixer. See the full recipe here.
Tonight, however, my creative juices flowed not through culinary canals, but rather into a reservoir of of a more crafty nature. A few days ago, after thoroughly admiring some innovative scrapbooking techniques by giddy giddy, I was all pumped up to make a shadowbox/scrapbook/diorama/collage of my own. Well, shadowboxes are lots of fun, but tonight I only had the energy to make one, rather than a full-on collage of shadowboxes. My own creation ended up looking very Japanese: it kind of reminds me of a butsudan, a Buddhist family alter found in Japanese homes. My version, of course, is not explicitly religious; rather, it commemorates a small paper crane that was anonymously left in my bicycle basket and which I discovered, with much delight, as I was leaving school one afternoon. Anonymous gifts from students are the best. Even if it's just origami. 
Leaving day. Shigemi drove me up into the mountains so I could see a spectacular view of the town from above. Rice paddies were stacked like a giant staircase up the hillside. It’s hard to imagine the effort that must go into growing food up there on such steep terrain, and the enormous amount of work that went into leveling these “steps” out in the first place, hundreds of years ago.
On the way up the mountain, I saw a house of similar age and architecture to the one I’ve been staying in the last five nights, only the one I spotted had a straw, rather than a tin, roof (Shigemi told me on the day I arrived that the tin roof had been installed about twenty-five years ago). There is a different kind of life going on here, one that I don’t usually get to witness in the booming metropolis (or so it now seems) of Moka.
The amazake that I spent eleven hours making yesterday turned a bit sour, which means that the temperature dropped below 50°C while it was cooking. I don’t mind the sourness so much – in fact I rather like it – but I know it’s not the way it’s supposed to taste, and so I feel a bit bad that the family is now stuck with the rest of the batch.
I’m waiting at the bus stop now. The bus should be here in about ten minutes. It feels like I just got here, and yet the time before I arrived (i.e. Nagasaki) seems so long ago.
Now, at last, I understand the reason for the existence of quarter tones. I will never be able to relive this moment. A realization that’s been plaguing me all day: I am in Japan, and in four months and two days, I will not be.
This is real Japan, with a realness that I’ve been utterly missing out on for the last year and a half: the click-pop of the strings of the sanshin as I warm my legs beneath the blanket of the charcoal-heated kotatsu. I am living in a world that I never could have dreamed existed in even the most imaginative years of my childhood.
Japan. It has tortured and changed me. I have loved and hated it in almost equal measure. What will I be, exactly four months from now, when I say goodnight to my last day on this island for who knows how long? Perhaps I will never come back. I am prepared for that. But, oh! I will miss this country so much!
Today was Good Friday. It was also the last full day of my homestay on a Japanese farm, organized through the network of the WWOOF program. Through email, I got in touch with Shigemi, the woman of the house, and we agreed that I would come stay with her, her 86-year-old mother, and her two teenage children for a certain period of time, during which I would work on her farm in exchange for room, board, and a chance to learn a little bit of what she has to teach (which is a lot).
I almost didn’t come. Standing in front of the ticket machine at the train station, I nearly decided that it all sounded too difficult and I was feeling too homesick and depressed lately, and I just wanted to go home. I had a bit of an emotional breakdown. I called Josiah and told him I was having second thoughts. He encouraged me and, in the end, I went ahead and bought that train ticket. And, wow. I am so glad I did. I learned things I never expected, like how to prepare takoyaki (bits of octopus fried in batter and rolled into spheres about the size of golf balls) and that, if your house is cold enough, you don’t have to refrigerate perishable food but can just leave it out on the kitchen table for days at a time (the house was definitely cold enough). The entire experience was a little bit miserable. But it was also a little bit life changing.
Just a little.
Shigemi finished practicing the sanshin and put it back in its case. When I said, “Maybe this is my only chance to ever hear this instrument played," she replied, “No! When you go to Okinawa you will find that they have one in every house.”
When I go to Okinawa? Yes, I suppose I do want to go. “Yes,” said Shigemi, “you have to go.” It seems that every word of conversation that passes from Shigemi to me is a bit awkward, but it's also laden with wisdom. I nodded. "Okay," I said.
After five days, I’ve just about come to like being here. But five days was enough. Or, maybe, it was more than enough. Maybe it was everything.
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