Miso Making

My mother-in-law decided she had better come along after all and just risk getting the flu so she could supervise the miso making operation. She always has lots of advice, like how to mix the ingredients properly or how to clean the iron cooking pot (with a pumice stone). After all the bickering over ingredients, we still aren't sure how much rice and wheat was added or exactly how my aunt innoculates the grains but I suspect she buys the powder from the farmer's union store. I asked how many kg of rice we use for each batch and she shows me a bowl, her special miso-making-measuring bowl that she always uses and she knows just how many scoops to use. It's not a real precise recipe. Hygiene, well, that's another thing. I don't want to tell you about the flies that got mashed in or the twigs or dirty hands - let's just hope that there is enough salt in this stuff to kill most anything. The miso will continue to ferment for 4-6 months before we eat it. As it ages, it gets darker and darker with soy liquid (really thick soy sauce) forming on top. The video shows the process....then you'll know why people just go to the store and buy it.

Rice Harvest

We had a pleasant day for harvesting the rice. I learned how to drive the new (used) combine. While y husband bought the combine with my son's tuition money, it does do a better job than our old one. The old combine allowed frogs and straw and bugs and seeds to be mixed in with the rice - adding a little more protein than I wanted. Also, the old machine dumped the grains (and frogs) into 35 kg bags that had to be individually carried from the field to the truck. The new machine has a tank that holds about 200 kg that we dump directly into the truck.

I will not suffer from communication shame anymore. It is true that my Japanese ability is my disability BUT three people who are Japanese and speak Japanese screwed up the harvest plans so we ended up without enough rice to take to the JA mill after all. Who knows what they will do to us - either a fine or banishment from the farmer's union! We are taking all the rice to a private mill.

Harvesting for Dummies (this is my guide!):

1. Cut the rice around the corners by hand with a trusty kama (most useful handtool). The combine cannot turn the corners and we utilize every bit of space for rice.

2. Prepare machine (oil it, fuel it up) and prepare big blue bag in truck.

3. Park the truck near the field. Drive combine to field. (Repeat for each field.)

4. Harvest. Call Yanmar guy every 5 minutes with a question. Repair as needed! Feed the cut stalks (from the corners) into the moving blades of the combine trying not to severe fingers or limbs.


5. Load the rice grains into the big blue bag on the truck. (Keeping in mind that the bag holds 750 kg but the truck has a 300 kg weight limit so we carry 500 kg and drive very slowly!)

6. Drive to mill.

7. Unload rice into drying machine. Return to the field.

8. Bundle long straw that is left in field and/or burn the chopped up straw (when we cut the rice, we have the option of setting the combine to cut the stalks or leave them long)

9. Clean combine, oil it up; clean and store big blue bag.

10. Return to mill next day where the dried rice grains are run through a mill to remove the chaff (the hard outer shell on the grain) and nuka (bran). Catch the rice as it streams out of the mill in 35 kg bags, tie them and stack them up! Pay the miller.

11. Load the truck with the bags. Carry them to storage house or sell or in our case, just give them away to freeloading relatives.

12. Have a beer.


When we want rice, we go to the storage house, take out the quantity we want and mill it- run it through the rice polisher to remove the remaining bran to make the rice as white as we want it (I usually go for semi-brown rice).

It's a simple life!

Results: Since the Occupation, our fields became standardized. One standard field (10 meters x 100 meters) is called one-tan, and this year, one-tan produced about 10 hyo of rice, which is a really good harvest. We expected less. A hyo is a traditional measure which equals about 60 kg, the size that the old-style farm bags held. Those bags were thick heavy sacks, called tawara, woven from rice straw - we have a few in the barn even now. In recent years, the size of the bags has become smaller and now one bag holds 30 kg (66 lbs.) white rice (31.8kg with some bran). (I can just manage to carry around a modern sack- I don't know how people carried those tawara!) When we buy and sell our grains, traditional and modern measures are used, which makes it really confusing! Sometimes they count the bags but they always write down the number of hyo (so we know how many bags we would have if we used them), and the actual number of kg (which varies if the bags are not filled consistently). My mother-in-law asked me how much our total harvest was....I said, "It was alot," and left it at that.