Business Trips and Influenza

Was away on business earlier this week and during the trip managed to come down with a terrible cough, aches and fever, making for an uncomfortable trip home. Influenza type A or “the Hong Kong Flu” is going around the house. I can’t remember the last time I slept for 36 hours. I went to the doctor and received some medicine yesterday, and feel much better today, still a little weak and groggy but much improved, which is good because I have another trip planned next week and I need to be at the top of my game. Anyway, unfortunately I (obviously) haven’t been able to work on the house, and probably won’t be able to do much until after next week. Stay tuned.

The House: And Work (Finally) Begins

This will hopefully be the first of many posts to come documenting the (limited) restoration of our little farm house. I will try to do one a week. I say limited, because we have a 5 year lease (although according to the contract our landlord has to have good reason to not renew the lease every 5 years, whatever that means). Anyway, the short lease term naturally limits the amount of funds we are willing to dump into the place. So the priorities, Roof and weatherproofing, Floors and termite-proofing, Kitchen and Bath… in that order. No frills, just make it habitable and comfortable (as much as an uninsulated house can be anyway!).

Today we removed all the tatami mats, which were old and tattered and in many cases half composted. According to the newspapers under the mats, they were installed in April of 1968, 44 years ago! We started cleaning out some of the contents of the house, and removing floor boards that were rotted. I got a good look at the substructure and was pleasantly surprised. Except for a section under the dinning/kitchen threshold, the structure is in excellent shape.

Can you eat it?

Every Japanese person I have known for any length of time has delighted in a game I call, “Feed Unusual Things to the Foreigner,” and my in-laws are no exception to this rule. Since I first started coming here I have eaten the odd bits of just about every animal that walks, flies, or swims in Japan, but yesterday was the first time I ever ate this:

There was much household ribbing and speculation during the day about whether or not I would be able to put this interesting edible into my mouth. The “Champion-Unusual-Thing-Eating-Foreigner” award goes to whoever can identify this guy. He was eaten raw, with some grated Daikon, Shoyu, and Kabosu.

What you see is not what you get

In the ongoing saga of The House, we met again yesterday with the owner, this time at the property with the purpose of meeting the “Ku-cho” (kind of like the head of the neighborhood HOA),and surveying the property. The owner had spent the entire morning and a good chunk of the afternoon at the city offices trying to determine which plots of land where his.

Japanese land is subdivided into plots, some of which are barely big enough to piss on, and invariably the plots that people own are scattered all around. So it is with our landlord-to-be. His land when laid out on a map looks like someone took the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and scattered them over the floor. Most of his land happens to be up a narrow path that has been made nearly impassible for at least the last 20 years due to overgrowth of bamboo.

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We hacked our way up there and found plenty of rock wall terraced fields, most of which were fairly covered in bamboo growth. There is potential up there, but it will take some serious reclamation effort. Do goats eat bamboo??? We did find some Kabosu trees up there and took home some low hanging fruit…

Anyway, the unused land in front of his house that we thought might be his… isn’t. We don’t know who it belongs to yet. All in all it looked to be quite a bit of land (my prior estimate of about 20,000m2 is probably close, but the locations were way off) but much of it is clearly dominated by bamboo.

He also handed us a contract. It was long, which worries me, and unreadable to me because of all the legalese, which worries me more, and from what I could tell didn’t include much of what we discussed the last time we talked (but like I said it’s hard for me to tell). I am going to have some trusted friends look at it.

Inch by inch, we’re getting closer.

Walking for snacks part II

1. “Dagashiya” This is a little store that sells candy to the neigborhood kids. The house is in the Machiya or “Nagaya” style that was typical of Japanese towns from the before the Edo period all the way up until WWII. Usuki still has many examples of these old houses in the “old” section of town.

2 & 3. The local Shinto Shrine. This shrine houses the Spirit that is responsible for looking after the welfare of our neighborhood.  There are a couple of smaller shrines here as well, one for a Spirit that is said to help one achieve their goals, and another that is said to help in locating things that are lost.

4. A well along the roadside was a convenient resting spot. These wells are all over the older section of town (TLG’s parents have one right next to their house) and date back to the Edo period.

5. Street lined with temples and tea houses. One of the remaining streets that have kept the character of centuries past. The city helps fund the restoration of places like this, which in turn draws tourists. Yes, this is a street that cars can and do drive on!

6. Buddhist Temple; There are lots of very large and beautiful temples in town. I don’t know much about them all, except for our little humble temple on Chinnanzan.

Enter the Matrix

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.  -Morpheus, The Matrix

I posted a video a couple posts down about quantum physics, and it seems to have inspired my good friend kenelwood to post about what he calls “The Matrix” which is, I suppose, as apt an analogy as one can make. He says;

I think it’s a mistake to put consciousness at the center and trust it absolutely, and brush off reality as just illusion or hologram. Saying we are all connected at the most fundamental level is designed more to be inspirational than helpful, like it is now! And in practice people and the Matrix make exceptions, like they do now! I like the idea that there is something deeper, forever and always, and there is no end to change or trouble or opportunity.

Which I think somewhat misses the point, unless I am completely misunderstanding something (if so set me straight ken). So since I made the faux pas of posting a video without any substantive description of it, or even my take other than, “Oh wows! I likes!” I thought it would be good to elaborate.

WARNING: I am far from being a physicist (in fact I was really bad at science) so please be kind if I completely boff something up.

What the video (I think) was saying is that, at the fundamental level of the basic building blocks of the universe, we are all made up of the same thing, which is pure consciousness or pure potentiality. And not just people, but trees and rocks, and cars and oil rigs, and the moon and sun and stars, all are “potentially” connected.

That doesn’t mean that you and I are the same person. Individuality exists in the “classical” Newtonian world of our experience, but what string theory seems to say is that spirit exists as well, and that “pure conciousness,” “pure potentiality,” “the unified field” is the One Taste of the Buddhist, the Face of God of western religion.

It is the source code of the Matrix.

What does that mean exactly? Our observable world, the world we experience through our senses, is the world of Newtonian Physics, made up of bodies in motion, cause and effect, gravitational force. It is a world of solid objects; mountains, forests, fields, houses, people, all real, all can be seen, and felt, smelt, heard or tasted. But what are all these things made of? Well atoms right? We all learned about the elements, but now when we go down to the the scale of atoms, we’re in the world of Nuclear Physics, and things get weird. The atoms are mostly vacuum, nothing but space. Their mass comes almost entirely from their nucleus of protons and neutrons. And orbiting that are the electrons, an elementary particle with almost no mass at all, simultaneously everywhere, until the moment we try to look at them.  And what are protons and neutrons  made of? Quarks, which are another elementary particle. And these elementary particles, which include the forces like electromagnetism and gravity and so on, well what are they made of?

That’s where string theory comes in. String theory says that the elementary particles are all made of strings and these strings vibrate at different frequencies and the frequencies at which they vibrate determine what type of particle they are. Their vibration determines whether they will be a quark, or an electron or a graviton, or any of the other elementary particles. But now what are these strings then, what are they made of?

One theory is that they are pure mathematical potentiality. In other words they are the essence of choice. A sort of primordial consciousness. And so at the fundamental basis of the Universe we have just an ocean of pure consciousness, and everything we know; matter and energy is a manifestation of it.

Almost all religious traditions around the world reference this source. Some call it God, or gods, some call it Enlightenment. What ever you call it, one thing is clear; the human mind can access this source via meditation, and in doing so can expand consciousness. And this comes back to Integral Theory, all things have their correlates in the other quadrants. The subjective consciousness is represented in the physical world by the strings described in string theory. That is why I found the video so exciting.

In a world dominated by objective scientific flatland, some scientists are beginning to see references to Spirit in the very fabric of the Universe.

Seeing a man about a house (Part III)

In the continuing saga of The House: We drove up again to see the owner of the house. This time we came with or sempai, “Mr. Yamamoto” who you may remember from this post. He brought with him his own contract as an example, which he used to rent his house (which after ten years he bought and is now under an incredible remodel).

I’ll be brief. It was a successful trip. We talked with the owner for two or three hours. Mr. Yamamoto and he knew each other, both having met previously and by reputation and mutual acquaintances.  Much of the discussion had nothing to do with the house and instead how our family, Yamamoto’s family and the owners family had only one degree or less of separation on many fronts. It was a real lesson for me on just how closely tied Japanese rural communities are, going back generations.

Anyway, when we finally did get to talking about the house we we showed him the sample contract and all of our reasoning. He gave us his point of view, including his worry about the laws surrounding renter rights, of which he is very aware. His biggest worry is that we will use Japanese law to take his land from him. He said that while he would never sell the land, he has no idea what his son might do with it once he is gone. And that it is possible his son may not want to keep it.

But the biggest breakthrough was just getting closer to a deal. We have to look up the meets and bounds of the land in order to draft the contract. We settled on rent (he pays taxes) of 10,000 yen ($130) per month. Which given that the taxes on the land are probably about half that amount, its probably a pretty good deal.

I will start serious work on the place from February, hopefully. Today, I went there just to temporarily shovel out the remnants of a caved in wall in front of the toilet, and hang up a blue trap to keep the elements out.

BEFORE: The pile of dirt on the floor had been there probably since the last typhoon season.

The floor was obviously going to be damaged from the wet dirt sitting there for months. I shoveled the dirt out and swept up as well as I could to allow the floor to dry, but the floor boards and sub-floor will have to be rebuilt in this section.

AFTER: The boards in front of the toilet are rotten and need to be replaced

The boards are rotten through near the exterior wall. You can see the wall itself is gone, All that is left is the exterior cladding.

I put up the blue sheets, which will at least keep the rain out for now.

Just beyond the door there is our one and only toilet. This is going to be fun to deal with. I already stepped into the access port on the outside of the house once and had to drive home with a leg soaked in… well you get the gist. Our plan here is to put in a composting toilet. Which will be far more sanitary and much better smelling than the hole-in-the-ground.

Last I leave you with a peek inside the barn. The doors are hard to open and the place is CRAMMED with stuff. I have a feeling I might find something really old and cool in that place. We’ll have to see come February.

I'm pretty sure that thing hanging on the wall was for winnowing rice...