Setsukeian 2: A Day in the Life

Pictured at right: the guest house where we slept.  Not pictured: coffee.

At 6:30 every morning, we awoke just in time to hit snooze and sleep until 6:55, which left us precisely enough time to throw our futons into the closet and stumble downstairs to report for duty.  We were expected to be ready at 7:00 sharp to undertake our vital morning tasks: while one of us would help Setsu-san in the kitchen and begin the lengthy table-setting ritual, the other would clean the toilet and feed the chickens.

Now, you may mock me for this, gentle reader, but I'm a little afraid of chickens.  I will point out, as I often have, that from the drumstick down they are in fact dinosaurs.  Still, I developed quite a rapport with these two chickens, especially since Kei-san let me use a giant stick to fend them away (to my delight, I found that I had already learned the word for "defense stick," bo, not during my lengthy study of Japanese but in my lengthier study of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles).  The pair looked pretty lonely in their big coop all alone, especially when Kei-san told us of their tumultuous life history that involved their mates being exsanguinated in weasel attacks and injuries sustained during sex, which explained why the rooster and hen were kept in separate pens.

By 7:30, breakfast was ready, and it consisted unvaryingly of toasted white bread, a salad frequently made of the previous night's leftovers, miso soup, and mayonnaise and jellied seaweed (for the bread).  Please note the complete absence of coffee.  We four ate family style in the dining room, Kei-san having arrived from his morning visit to the neighborhood temple just in time to dig in (funny how his luck always held out on that front).  Indeed, we felt very much like family during our two weeks on the farm, right down to lively conversations over meals and frequent scoldings for doing our chores improperly.  These familial feelings only waned when we thought of how we were Setsukeian's 482nd and 483rd WWOOFers respectively; we found ourselves irrationally jealous of our 481 siblings, though we were also comforted with the knowledge that there was no way we could be the most inept WWOOFers they'd ever had.

When breakfast was finished and the dishes were washed, we hurriedly changed into our "working wear" to get ready for our first three-hour shift at 8:30.  Our working wear was no less crummy than our "room wear," you understand, as our glamorous life of bike touring only left us room for three shirts apiece.  Still, Kei-san was adamant, and when he would see us sneaking up to our bedroom for a quick nap in our working wear, he would chastise us heartily, claiming that we would dirty up our room with outside-dirt.

Here Harry is heartily enjoying one of our many break times.

We labored from 8:30 until noon, with a half-hour break for tea and sweets at 10.  Our tasks varied from day to day, but they were always oddly gendered, something for which we were unprepared.  While I was sent to cut the crass, hack bits of wood into smaller bits of wood, whack rice into giant globs of mochi, or do other heavy lifting, Jenn was put to work sorting rice, sorting beans, kneading bread, or even sewing applique.  Being enlightened 21st-century folk, we had figured that every WWOOFer would be put to hard labor; it was difficult being cool with the assumption that I would be stronger and fitter than Jenn purely based on my possession of a certain quantity of testicles (which, frankly, were pretty unhelpful for most tasks).

I did this with my testosterone.

Lunch was eaten outside during good weather, probably to avoid having us change back into our room wear in order to help Setsu-san in the kitchen.  It was always delicious and extremely starchy, usually either udon soup with rice, ramen with rice, or grilled rice balls.  By the time we finished with lunch, we had just enough time to pass out from caffeine withdrawal before getting back to work for the afternoon.  I was put again to the hard stuff: harvesting field greens, building a playground out of wood, planting rice, spitting, etc..  Meanwhile, Jenn was weeding the garden or sorting more rice, all the while thinking of all the books she read as a child that featured 19th-century farm girls doing needlework and longing to be outside with the boys.

Traditionally gendered divisions of labor make Jenn FURIOUS.

From 5 until 6:30, we were allowed to take showers and use the Internet, though not usually at the same time.  Of course, since by this point we were frantically looking for jobs online, our rest time usually was squandered on scouring job boards and other nonsense.  The rest of the evening was spent helping Setsu-san in the kitchen (not that she needed any real help), eating her amazing meals, generally being impressed with her, and then passing the fuck out at 8:30.

This routine was always the same save for special events such as the appearance of a corgi-sized tanooki that bounded down the path and under the house in broad daylight.  One night, the guest house was reserved by customers, visitors who had WWOOFed at Setsukeian years before and had since gotten married and had a baby.  The promise of a change, of visitors coming, filled us with bizarre excitement, and again we felt connected to all of the books we had read about 19th-century American farmsteaders.  We left the farm only once, our holiday, to go into Kyoto to visit the monthly flea market that commemorates the death of Kobo Daishi, a revered figure in Zen Buddhism who apparently had a fondness for good deals and fried food.  Of course, we were free to go out whenever we wanted, but the nightlife of Nantan was a little much for our blood:

"On break/vacation."

The main drag of Nantan City.