Nighttime Noodling

I have been to no fewer than three sake breweries under school auspices now. The field trip today was to Ryozeki brewery in Yuzawa. It snowed the whole way there and I got to watch the countryside become more and more frosted as we drove. Midway through the drive there I realized that the bus was going very slow, and looking at the roads I thought for sure we would have to turn around. But no, apparently this was rather average winter driving conditions and our driver pressed on.

This was definitely the most educational trip to a brewery, the last one's main source of information was a video in Japanese about the process, and the first one was also mostly about the process but without really getting into the reasons for why things are done the way they are.
For instance, I learned that in the north of Japan, where it is naturally colder, the yeast from the koji grows more slowly because of the temperature and therefore fermentation takes longer and more of the rice is dissolved, making for a sweeter product. In the south fermentation takes only 15 days, it's usually around 25 up here, and the sake is dryer. According to the fellow giving the tour, his English was very good but I think he was nervous because he talked very quickly, the difference in flavors is well suited to the regional preferences. In the south lighter flavors and meals are nicely complimented by the dry sake, and in the north the preference for stronger flavors makes sweet sake more popular. Modern climate controls make it possible to produce either type of sake now, so Ryozeki produces dry sake to be sold in the south. Up here pickles are more popular and some are made with the rice cakes leftover after the sake is strained and pressed- they put either eggplant or ... he gave one other example but I seem to have forgotten it, but I have seen pickles made out of all kinds of things- anyway the item to be pickled is placed in the center of a rice cake and the leftover alcohol goes to work.

Another amusing tidbit is that when the governmental revenue service would come to do inspections, the president of the company would let the inspector "sample" the sake until he was fairly drunk, and then offer to let him go into the warehouse, maybe it was a grain storage area, to make sure they had made truthful reports, but the stair to reach it was too steep and narrow for someone who had been drinking. The president/owner of this brewery, like many of the other breweries in the north, was a major landowner. This worked out because a landowner would have large quantities of rice to sell, but if it couldn't all be sold it couldn't be let go to waste, so they made it into sake. In the south the owners of breweries were usually people who were in the shipping business, since for them the goal was to get the sake to Edo for sale, and they were the wealthiest and would have best access to rice because of their transportation.

These are all pictures from Monday, I think I had some good ones. The snow was melted yesterday by the rain, but today more fell, just not as much stuck. On the highway there are signs that tell the temperature and it was 0 degrees C at 4pm heading south and inland. They also have these barriers along the roads that have segmented metal screen things to stop snow from drifting onto the road, today I saw the screens being cranked up in preparation for winter.

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Change of Season

I had been speculating for the past few days that it would snow for real sometime soon, since it did for two minutes on Friday. Yesterday afternoon the snow began drifting down, but it wasn't cold enough to stick. In the morning I had gone for a pleasant walk in the misty rain, enjoying the moist late fall scenery. This morning I shuffled down to breakfast because it was milk day and was greeted by a winter wonderland and more people up and moving around than I've seen before. I was disappointed to discover that the hellish warmth that had usually characterized the cafeteria in the morning was no longer present. Maybe too many people were going in and out of the one window-like door that connects the cafeteria to the outside...

Anyway I didn't really think I would wind up going for a walk this morning, but I decided to put on my boots and jacket and take a few pictures, after I got the guy at the desk to let me into my room since I was locked out once more because I hadn't put on the right pair of pants with keys in them to go down to breakfast. Once I was outside I decided to go see if anyone had ventured into the woods yet. I was the first, so the lure of fresh perfectly undisturbed snow in an empty forest overcame the desire to go back inside.
It was magically quiet in the woods, just the sound of falling snow and the occasional small bird zipping around. I really did feel like I was walking in a winter wonderland. The clearing that just yesterday was densely carpeted in moss was now covered in a few inches of snow.

I think this hat is a little too small for my head since it didn't keep my ears warm at all, it just kept rolling up over them. My hair is mostly this weird fuscia color... I should redye it, or something. I kind of want a cool Japanese hair cut, but it would be expensive, and kind of a waste if I just do it with my patchy hair, plus I have no idea what kind of style would work out well with my hair, since it can't do some of the things that the people here manage since theirs is so thick.

The way I have been and the way I'm going. Philosophical, ne?

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Natsukashi Fall

On Sunday we went to Oyasukyo, which is a lovely gorge in the south of the prefecture where there are natural hot springs. The hot water bubbles out of splits in the rock at about 98degrees Celsius. In other cracks along the walkway it was a mist or a dribble with lots of hissing and spitting and reeking of sulfur. At one point there is a huge cloud of the steam to be walked through and it fogged my glasses up completely. There had been a mudslide recently so part of the trail was closed and visitors had to descend and ascend along the same trail, instead of being able to walk along the bottom of the gorge.
This apparently a very popular place to visit because it was quite crowded with people, even old people climbed the 60m of rather steep stairs up and down. Of course that made it rather difficult for me to get good, unoccupied pictures of the place, so here are some good ones that were small details.
I liked the leaves swirling down to the bottom like snow, the picture doesn't do the scene justice.



These were taken from the red iron bridge that spanned the gorge.
These two are to give a sense of where I was at the bottom, you can see the path and the billows of steam if you look closely. I don't think they are particularly good, but it shows looking over the edge of the bridge and the looking directly ahead to the north, I think.The point of this field trip was to see the fall colors, which we did. However it also showed me the merciless way the Japanese cut down swaths of their forest and the replant with only one kind of tree. Look below at the green cedars. They are all over the place in Akita, if not completely covering a hill, then marking very clearly where the straight lines of the clear cutting stopped. This cedar is a local tree and a cartoon version is the perfectural mascot, it really weirded me out when I first saw one. I'm not sure if I mentioned it, but when I stayed at Plaza Krypton they had some trees directly in front of the huge lobby windows facing the hill that somehow had cartoon eyes and a big red smile stuck to them. For the sports festival the had the tree in all manner of sports, even carrying a rifle for marksmanship or wearing a gi for martial arts competitions.
We also went to a theme park called Akita Furusato Village, it was... not what we think of as a theme park, but that's what it was. There were regional arts and crafts, displayed in a museum setting as well as vendors where you could buy such things. There was a "Wonder Castle," a modern art museum with local artists, a planetarium, and other things to amuse young and old.
I had fun, but would definitely not pay money to go there again.

That's all for now.

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