Return to Pasar Moon

Last year, when we first made the acquaintance of the good folks at Pasar Moon, we were immediately welcomed into this small, close-knit family.  Though Pasar is ostensibly a cafe and campground, we arrived at the beginning of the season, when customers were in short supply. The daily routine involved the two of us, Pasar's proprietors (Aki and Natsu), and one other WWOOFer.  Basically, we were special; we were kept up to speed in the goings-on of opening Pasar for the year, there was plenty of obvious work to be done, and we were the featured entertainers at an impromptu party they threw.

This time, we had no way of knowing what to expect, so in our pessimism, we feared we would be lost in the shuffle.  I don't know from music festivals.  I've been to a couple in my day, sure, all of them different.  For whatever reason, I most expected that the annual Pasar Music Festival would be most like the "Purple Nozzle" festival we attended in Korea: loud, dirty, crowded, expensive, running until the wee hours of the morning, and generally just an event by and for people who make me feel about a dillion years old.  To be honest, I was a bit worried.  We'd planned a lot around attending this festival -- Aki's invitation to perform at the festival was the main reason we came back to Japan in the first place -- and as were about to arrive, we realized we could be heading for an event that we might bitterly hate.

When another unfamiliar staff member dropped us off at the front gate, all our worries were erased.  There was Natsu, warm and competent as always, and Aki, too, happy to see us in his own grumpy way.  Many new friends awaited us, too, and we learned all their names (and promptly forgot them) over one of Natsu's amazing meals.


"Aki-san, we want to help!" I blurted out at one point.

"OK, ask Natsu," he told us as he clicked away on his computer.

"Natsu-san, we want to help!"  She smiled and said there would be plenty of work for us to do if we wanted to help out.  Even though part of our visit as guest musicians involved free room and board, the thought of just standing by without pitching in filled me with shame.  Besides, we didn't just want to be visitors, we wanted to be part of the Pasar family again.

"First, though, we have to rehearse," Jenn said.  Also very true: somehow "rehearse for our show" kept getting put off, preempted by to the previous week's goal of "escape the typhoon."  Natsu agreed enthusiastically and showed us to the Dragon Room.

So named because it is a room.

Before long, we made the acquaintance of two of Pasar's current WWOOFers: a 17-year-old American gal who, after five weeks at Pasar, had become the beloved mascot of the place, and a 24-year-old Austrian mechanical engineer who very quickly became a giant pain in our butts.  The first words out of his mouth were a humblebrag (never a good sign): apparently at his last WWOOF host in Malaysia, he was made the manager of the cafe within a month of working there.  He left, he said, because it was too much work, sometimes 16 hours a day by the end of his stay there, and he was paid in beer and cigarettes.

Still, we made the most of our situation, trying to stay true to our pledge of support to Natsu: the Austrian and I wove together a roof of young bamboo for a hangout spot, we helped Natsu in the kitchen, we set up tent after tent and we practiced until our little fingers turned bloody.  All in wonderfully typhoon-free weather, naturally.  For the first 24 hours, while it was still uncertain if we were volunteers or part of the family, we had found our groove, and life was sweet.

Things changed when the festival opened on Monday.  The formerly spacious campsite and buildings made of reclaimed materials grew full and noisy, not with the young rave crowd of Purple Nozzle, nor the young, dreadlocked hippie crowd we'd been expecting.  For the most part, the two hundred or so attendees were either families or single older dudes who had grown exceedingly weird in their age and single-ness.



It's funny, but when all these people both exciting and ordinary filed through the entrance, I felt more than anything like that awkward, friendless 13-year-old at the middle school dance again.  Should I just invite myself into the happy reunions that our Pasar friends were sharing with these colorful characters?  Just sit at the Bamboo Bar and strike up a conversation with the guy with the enormous dreads?  What business did I have joining conversations when I frequently couldn't understand what these people were saying?  What if they didn't like me and stuffed me in a locker?  I solved this dilemma by hurriedly finding work that needed doing, although that presented a problem in itself: to find Natsu-san, who's busy every second of the day, and ask her to find a chore that can be done by someone with no appreciable skills, then explain it to me in simple Japanese...well, as often as not, I wondered if I might not be more helpful by just staying out of the way.

The festival began with a ceremonial appeal to the Earth, the theme of this year's festival being "Earth Week."  Or, rather, it was supposed to, but things got going kind of late, and if there was such a ceremony, I must have blinked and missed it.  Jenn and I missed the first few performances on the outdoor stage, opting to find somewhere quiet for some last-minute rehearsal.  At 9:00, we entered the Dragon Room, raring to go, only to find that there would be a meditation seminar opening for us.  I suggested to Jenn that we sit in on the meditation, eager to get some enlightenment and stuff; she told me that it would just make us fall asleep, but I insisted, hoping to build some good karma by attending another performer's (?) event.

There was much chanting, singing, playing of lyres, and extremely groovy explanations that went clear over my head.  10:00 came and went.  "What time is it, do we still have some time?" the meditation instructor asked at about 10:15.  "Uh..." Aki said, looking for his watch, before she interrupted.  "Well, we'll just do this one more activity, then."

When at last the meditation event and post-event chat had wrapped up, Aki had left the room, so we stormed the stage unintroduced.  Well, "stormed" might not be quite accurate.

"Should we start?" I asked, surveying the room.  There were maybe six very sleepy-looking people in the audience, most of them left over from the meditation and presumably too relaxed to get up.

"I don't know...I guess so?"  At the back of the room, someone cheered, so we struck up the band.

It wasn't a great show, maybe, but without a doubt, it was a good show.  The audience was very appreciative, especially one drunk Michigander who wandered in at one point, but it remained in the single digits for the whole show.

"Okay, so, we're going to take a break," Jenn announced, "but, uh...we'll be back for a second set."

"Maybe?" I added, ever the showman.

By 11:30, we were back in our tent.  At least, we thought, we wouldn't have to worry about the music and dancing going until 5 a.m.; this festival was clearly meant for geezers like us.  The only sounds that drifted into the tent were the crickets and the waves crashing on the nearby shore.

Dori Village in Photos (And Videos)

Our first day, we were put to work weeding one of the gardens, a task that would acquaint us very well with a particularly vicious local weed that left long, nasty scratches on our arms.  Ass kicked by a plant...not my proudest moment, perhaps.

This was meant to be the "before" picture, with the "after" picture being one of me smiling in front of a fully-weeded garden.  I was going to take it when we finished.  Oh, what a fool I was (am).

We took a break from weeding for watering and an activity known as "weeding, but with a stick."

Aaaand there were goats.  Baby goats!  Baby goats with a taste for sweaty T-shirts!

Even on the ancient rice paddies of Gyeongju, multitasking is king.

While bonding with some of the kids who stay at the farm (some sort of farmstay/homeschool arrangement, as far as we could tell), we pulled out our iPods and decided to test everyone's Battle Power with our official Battle Power Checker App.  Nobody cross Gi-ha, or he will end you.

Part of our duties at Dori Village involved helping everyone set up for a busfull of kindergarteners who would be coming to learn about green energy.  We scrubbed the bathrooms in that disused elementary school until...well, until we were done scrubbing them.

Part of the eco-friendly fun: cotton candy!  We were going to hook the machine up to a solar panel, but...eh.

The main attraction of the field trip was demonstrating how a bicycle could be hooked up to a dynamo to power a blender, which we used to make tomato juice in front of the kids.  The only downside was that I kinda don't like tomato juice, but we must all do our part for the earth.

A poster that was put up all over the school.  Eww.

After a week of labor and fun, it was time to get on the bus to Seoul.  Employment beckoned.

Yongjae very kindly drove us to the bus terminal with our bikes, bags, tent, and brick collection.  We hoped our bikes would make it through the bus ride intact.

See you again, Yongjae and Songdam!  Hopefully before our WWOOF membership expires!

Meanwhile, Back on the Farm

"I'm absolutely, 100% certain that we're going the right way," I announced.  "90%, at least."

The afternoon sun beat down hard on our sun-browned skin.  The day had grown quite lovely as the road grew less hospitable: we had had to abandon the nice riverside bike path when the river had stubbornly refused to go right to our destination, leaving us no choice but to get on the road with the monster trucks, tanks, taun tauns, etc.  My head was still reeling from having to switch my glasses-mounted mirror to the other side, but we pressed onward, hoping to make it to our WWOOF host before sundown.  Google still threw up its hands and suggested taking a bus when we asked it for directions, so we had to go to Navigation Plan B: we actually cracked open the atlas we bought in Busan.  Discovering that its maps were far too zoomed out to be of much use (and also that the farm appeared to be located in an geologically unique zone located in the crease between pages), we went to Plan C: Google Maps again.

The expressway turned to a rural byway, which turned into a country road as it wound its way into a valley in a mountain range we had been studiously avoiding for several kilometers.  Now, when the road shrank still further to the width of a single car or one of our bikes (but not both), Jenn was losing faith in my (Google's) navigational skills.  The addresses climbed slowly as we pedaled further into the valley, the mountains looming closer ahead of us.  Do-ri 34, 36, 38...

"What's the address, again?"

"...1006," I said.  The sun grew even hotter, our shirts sizzling as sweat sublimated right out of our pores.  We pedaled harder, praying that some trick of advanced mathematics would put 1006 right after 40.

At last, somewhere around 88, our already threadbare confidence in Google Maps gave up entirely.  I turned back to ask a trio of ajima for directions as Jenn pushed on a bit farther.  By the time I caught up to Jenn (having learned from each lady that Dori Village was in front of us, behind us, and did not exist at all), she had bumped into our host who happened to be passing by in a truck.  He directed us to the farm, which turned out to be still further into the valley, to the veritable cranny (or possibly nook) of the mountains.  Jenn relayed to me as we grunted our bikes back into motion that we were told to bring our bags inside and introduce ourselves to our host's parents.  And me without my tie...

We were greeted warmly by a charming old couple, and after establishing that we spoke no Korean at all, they ushered us upstairs to rest.  The house, one of several on the grounds, was vast, with numerous living rooms, lounges, rec rooms, and countless bedrooms.  We hauled all of our panniers, sleeping bags, and musical instruments to the second floor of the house and dropped them in an empty bedroom.  I immediately tramped back downstairs to see how we could go about earning our keep, only to be told, "Rest, rest."  Somewhat at a loss, I returned to the bedroom, where Jenn and I proceeded to sit around for a few hours.  Every so often, one of us would go downstairs to try to volunteer once again, only to be told to "rest."  Figuring it was possible that our body odor posed a danger to their houseplants, we showered.  By the time we had finished, we were being called downstairs to dinner by our hostess.

Seated at the long table were the couple who had welcomed us, another older lady, a 30ish athletic-looking man, and a skinny, glasses-wearing teenager.  Our host, Yongjae, was nowhere to be seen.  Set on the table was a feast: brown rice, fried potatoes, spicy chicken stew, salty-sweet fried seaweed, and, yes, homemade kimchi.  Somewhat sheepishly, we sat at two empty places and were welcomed warmly by everyone at the table.  After a moment, they all bowed their head and began praying together in Korean.  "What sort of place have we come to?" Jenn and I asked each other with a glance.

As we helped wash the dishes (finally being given something to do), a freshly showered, mild-mannered young man walked in and introduced himself as Yongjae, our host.  He explained that we would have plenty of work to do the next day, but for the rest of the evening, we should just recover from our long ride.  We turned in late for us, about 9:00, and wondered what this "Dori Village" with its large, vaguely-defined family, would have in store for us.  At least, we wondered that for the 15 seconds it took us to fall asleep.

Later...

Leaving Pasar

See you for next year's music festival, Natsu and Aki!

Pasar 3: Showtime

The appointed hour had come.  The accordion was found collecting dust at Pasar had been repaired, the cafe had been set up for business, we'd sent off our documents to apply for our work visa, and most importantly, the flag was finished.

Design by Jenn Thomas of Jenn Thomas from Jenn Thomas/Jenn Thomas, featuring Jenn Thomas

Modelled by Jenn Thomas

Under the full moon, Jenn and I set up our instruments on one of the three empty stages.  We'd spent the day rehearsing and dragging wooden furniture back and forth across the yard, finally determining the arrangement best suited to polite appreciation and/or dancing on tables.  By 7:00, nobody had turned up.  We started on the beers that we'd brought to share with our hosts.  By 7:30, the starting time for our concert, we were still alone and on our second beer.

Eventually, our audience arrived: a dozen or so married women from the neighborhood, bearing snacks and bottles of wine.  Fortunately, that didn't stop them from taking advantage of the Pasar Moon kitchen, which turned out curries and one delicious pizza after another.  Jenn and I took the stage for our first duo concert.  Under the circumstances, our old band's name, Raku 3, seemed inappropriate, so we went by Jenn's stage name, Jenny Dreadful.  It felt good to be performing again; after all, we'd carted our instruments around the previous 1,000 miles, so we might as well get some use out of them.

The show, sadly, was lackluster.  This was our first time performing in nearly a year, and though we'd spent the past few months jamming by the roadside, we weren't quite as polished as we would usually like.  The audience was pretty different from our usual crowd of friends appreciative old drunken bachelors, too, having turned up more to hang out with one another than to see us.  Still, we gave it our best go, and the contributions to our nagezen basket (literally, "thrown money") were generous, except for the person who gave us a wedge of cheese.  Despite the protests of Aki, who was oddly absent from this event except while we were playing, we deposited all of our takings right into Pasar's donation box.  He told us about how Pasar is meant to be a space to support artists and musicians, and that the usual policy was to comp all non-WWOOFing artists their room and board.  The money was ours, he insisted, not the venue's.  When he left to get a cigarette, we dropped the cash into the box; after all, we had just found a job, and places like Pasar need support themselves.

When all of the pizza had been eaten and our donations had been counted, Natsu stood before her friends and patrons to explain the bill situation.  From this year, she said, Pasar would not set any prices for its food or drinks, but would instead rely wholly on Love Donations.  Whatever the customer was moved to pay for what they received, that would be what they should pay.  If ever there is a customer who can't afford a dime, then their meal should be eaten with clear conscience.  "Japanese people are very bad at this because they're so shy," she had told us earlier, "but this is important to our idea of Pasar Moon."  They listened patiently, receptively (despite Aki's doubts) as she spoke, and when she finished, they all contributed heartily to the box.  More beer was opened in celebration, and we retired to our room to pack up our instruments.

As I flipped the lightswitch, I caught a glimpse of something dark and thin scuttle out from behind Jenn's pillow.  My heart sank, as I knew instinctively what it was.  I calmly put down the ukulele, told Jenn to step back, and screamed my little heart out: "Mukade!"

Attention, current or future mortal enemies: if you could just skip ahead to the picture of a ducky, that would be great.  See you there!

Centipedes are my greatest fear in the world, and are my persistent theological proof that we are not living in the best of all possible worlds (additional proofs involve the non-existence of a Spider-man or -men).  On the rare occasions in which I've encountered them, I've turned into a squealing, useless bag of slop (more than usual, even).  Fortunately, in this case, Natsu-san heard my cry and ran to the rescue with a cup of hot water and a set of tongs.  She plucked the foot-long, writhing black nightmare up and dropped it into the water, where it danced about in fury before falling into a very convincing faux-death.  As far as I know, it still lives at Pasar, feigning death and waiting for me to return.  She told me then that there had been several mukade spotted that day, one of them having stung Aki on the leg mere hours before.  Perhaps it had something to do with the full moon, she suggested.  Maybe they just didn't like the show.

We took what was left of our beers into the living room, leaving the party to collect our thoughts.  Jenn rubbed my back and reassured me that that was probably the last centipede anywhere in the whole world, and that there was no chance of another one living under my pillow and waiting until we fell asleep to lay eggs in my eyeballs.  Natsu came to find us before too long, and saw me in a daze.

"Are you in shock?" she asked.  I nodded limply, and explained that I would probably be unable to sleep that night or any other night.  She nodded back solemnly. "OK, let's get drunk.  Do you drink tequila?"  

We spent the next hour or so trading recipes for tequila shots and discussing our lives.  What we spoke of I won't reveal here, suffice to say how stricken I was for the first time at the appropriateness of their names ("Natsu" meaning "summer," "Aki" meaning "autumn"; Natsu is in her thirties, Aki in his fifties).  If there were any other mukade that night, I didn't notice; Natsu's home remedy was extremely effective.

Pasar 2

The next week at Pasar was blissful.  In the mornings we slept, helping Natsu bake fresh bread for breakfast, then leisurely began a few hours of work.  Since Pasar is mothballed for eight months of the year, the work mainly consisted of getting it shipshape.  We scrubbed floors, wiped down furniture, got the garden ready for planting, and washed all the dishes.  We also assisted our hosts at getting their "traditional Japanese bath" ready to use; this device, a rusty iron tub sitting atop a fire pit, brought to mind Bugs Bunny cracking jokes as he's about to be cooked, or maybe Charles Adams cartoons of pith helmeted explorers surrounded by cannibals.  Still, the bath was extremely comfortable, even if we did get eaten alive by mosquitoes.

We also declared war on the paper wasps that set up shop throughout Pasar's wooden buildings.  Having some experience with dealing with these particular beasties (a gang of them set up above our washing machine in Osaka one terrifying night), I took it upon myself to go Schwarzenegger on their thoraxes.  Step One: spray the hive with poison.  Step Two: run like hell.  If ever my resolve for destruction wavered, all I had to do was look into one of the hives, which were filled with grubs ready and eager to hatch and eat my eyeballs in revenge.

Though they may appear disgusting, these grubs
are actually completely sick and grody as well.

Thankfully, these wasps were mostly harmless, though we did occasionally hear the helicopter-hum of the dread スズメバチ, the Asian Giant Hornet (or "yak-killer hornet") that kills more people in Japan every year than bears and Godzilla combined.

Speaking of deadly flying insects and other fun things, our job hunt was in full swing by this point.  Since the internet connection of Pasar Moon took a backseat to its stunning view of the sea and unsurpassed conversation, we made many a trip to the local Lawson to check our e-mail.  Eventually, we were faced with a dilemma regarding our job prospects: we could take a high-paying job with long hours, a low-paying job with short hours, or a decidedly average-paying job with "meh" hours, all of which are located in Seoul.  Eventually, we made our choice, though not before a few dramatic bike rides across town to check our e-mail.

The menu at Pasar changed by the day; Natsu's always-excellent cooking was made up of fresh-baked bread made with natural yeast, homemade curry, and whatever seasonal ingredients could be foraged from the mountains and the sea.  One night, we ate like kings on tempura'd mountain vegetables, abalone sashimi, yuzu-marinated sea cucumber, and fried whelk, all taken for free from the area.

On another occasion, we drove up to the mountains to pick wild raspberries to make into jam.  Though it turned out to be a bit too early for raspberries yet, we brought in quite a haul of bamboo shoots and leafy greens.

Also a mushroom called a "Jew's Ear," but I don't really wanna talk about that.

While another WWOOFer and I busily scrubbed things, wiped things, and stacked things on top of other things, Jenn was tasked with designing an official Pasar Moon Flag, a task to which she brought all of her determination, as well as a pair of my ruined jeans.

And every night, the sunset grew lovelier still.

Pasar Moon: A Love Story

It wasn't immediately apparent that we had arrived at our destination.  The yellowing afternoon light was cast over a strange collection of buildings and materials, rusty iron bars, long bamboo poles, all overgrown with ivy and flowering vines.  The brightly-painted murals led us to believe that Google Maps hadn't misled us, that this was the (farm? cafe? concert venue?) whatever-it-was we were looking for, but it seemed that no one was home.  Sunburnt, dripping with sweat, almost certainly filthy from days on the road, we dismounted and wheeled our bikes around this odd place aimlessly.  "すみません！" we shouted occasionally, hoping to attract someone's attention.

We leaned our bikes against a wooden platform and entered one of the buildings.  Our eyes dazzled from the afternoon sun, we could barely see into the house.  As we walked in, we heard a soft "Hello." Removing our sunglasses, we saw a thin, dark-skinned man with shaggy gray hair sitting on a beat-up couch.

"Hello," we replied.  He looked back down at his computer and coughed quietly.  Shrugging, we took off our helmets and sat around the table, following his lead.  After a few beats we introduced ourselves.  He confirmed that this was, in fact, Pasar Moon, our WWOOF host for the next week and a half, and introduced himself as Aki.

"Would you prefer to speak in Japanese?" Jenn asked Aki.

His eyes widened.  "Can you speak Japanese?"

We nodded, and he slumped back even further.  "Whew, what a relief, that's much easier!" he sighed.

Over the next hour or so, he and his wife, Natsu, explained a little about Pasar Moon to us.  Practically, Pasar is a cafe, campground, and concert space, holding a music festival every August and opening for business whenever customers happened by from Masuda or Hiroshima.  Conceptually, it's a space for people to experience the natural beauty of the mountains and the seaside, and a place for artists to be able to produce art freely (artists and musicians stay and eat for free, Aki told us, and they take all of the earnings from the concerts).  For most of the year, the two of them live in a little house in Java, but for the summer they return to Shimane to re-open Pasar.  We had arrived just a day after they had, so there would be much work to be done to get the place customer-ready.

"Oh!" I suddenly remembered, "I have our WWOOFer permits right here."

"Nah, I don't need them," Aki told us.

Natsu-san went on to tell us about our duties: sleep until we're not tired, breakfast is whenever, usually around 10:00, and then we'd be asked to help with whatever cleaning or gardening needed to be done.  "Take a rest whenever you feel like it, and if you don't like doing a certain task, just do something else instead," she told us.

Oh yeah, we thought at each other, we're gonna fit in here just fine.  Quite a chance from our last WWOOF experience, to be sure.

The sun began to set over the coast, and the four of us walked the 20 meters to the beach to watch.  We stood in the campground (in which there was a sign, "This is everyone's park"), took pictures of it, and breathed in the early summer air.

Over Natsu-san's spectacular curry, we discussed our instruments.  It was decided after some deliberation that we would have a concert under the stars on the next full moon.  We helped with the dishes, pitched our tent on a bed of weeds, and fell fast asleep, dreaming about the old accordion propped up in a corner in the living room.