Walking

 I am not sure what his prefabricated building was - maybe it was just used as a shed for farm tools. The house in back is traditional Japanese style and looks quite old, so the owners may be some of  the people who lived in the area when it was truly countryside.

 The roads in this area are really narrow, but still two way. If cars meet, one has to back up.

 Here is more of  the canal system. The water is split into two streams to irrigate two different areas of rice paddies.

 This building houses a religious newspaper of some kind. I could not even tell what religion it represented but it was definitely religiously oriented.

 At this time of year, families with young boys fly these banners. The ones on the left are hollow tubes that are painted to represent carp and the other flat banners have the boy's names.

I came to a wide road that I followed for a ways. The apartment building looks like it is in an inconvenient location but it is only about a 10 minute walk from the train station and the stores around it.

A new walk

 The weather was wonderful so I decided to take a long walk. This time rather than following the main roads I took the back streets. This one had a small canal on each side with flower gardens along the edge. It was very pleasant. At the top right you can see a little patch of a large vegetable garden.

 I walked down to that patch an took this picture, looking back the way I had come. It appears that vegetables and flowers are grown here in the spring and then later in the year maybe it becomes a rice paddy.

 The canal system is very intricate. This shows the main canal that parallels  the road with a screen stretched across it to stop any foreign objects. Considering the small amount of stuff that has been trapped, I guess that one of the local farmers cleans this frequently. The smaller canal that exits the picture at the top is connected to the main canal with an adjustable gate that allows the farmers to control the distribution of water. Eventually the gates all over the system will be adjusted so that each rice farmer will be able to flood his paddies.

People who study this sort of thing suggest that one reason that rice growing countries tend to be socially to the left is that creating and maintaining the necessary water distribution system requires close cooperation between all concerned. This cooperation is thought to color all of the social interactions in the community. Personally I liked finding people whose first thought is cooperation rather than competition. It is one of the things that I love about living here.

 This little flat roofed building in front of a more tradition and larger building is part of  the fire department. I assume that there is a fire engine inside. The engine must be small so that it can navigate the extremely narrow roads that exist in some places. On the right in the foreground there is a stele.

 This is the stele from the front. It has a Shinto rope tied around it that hides the inscription. Notice the offerings that have been left on the base. One of them is simply a small stone. In most places in Asia, it is the act of giving  that is important, not the object that is exchanged.

I thought at first that this was the entrance to a temple but it turned out to be a private home. The family must be very rich. Maybe they owned a lot of the rice paddies that have been sold and turned into house lots. The garden is large and very well kept which must mean they spend a lot of money on professional gardeners.

Flea Market

 This was a "taco" that I bought from the karaage guy. It is a tortilla shell with a chicken sausage some cabbage and taco sauce. I bit different from anything I had ever had before, but it was very good.

 This booth was selling vegetables and fish products. The women that were in it gave us some pickles to eat.

 We bought a bag of these to eat as snacks. They look terrible but at actually quite good. They are a dried bean coated with brown sugar.

 To get home, we took a free bus to the town hall and waited for an hour for the next regular bus. I wandered around a bit to kill time. This old house is across the street from the town hall but on the other side of a rice paddy.

 In front of the town hall building, there is a large sign board containing maps of the town with suggested walking routes. Things of interest, temples, shrines, public buildings, archeological ruins, etc. are marked so that you can stop in at them. A few days later I found a paper version of the maps and will use it for walks around town.

 This was the bench at the bus stop. The flat surface is made from the ends of pieces of wood with the grain showing.

 At the flea market, I bought this drafting set. It was in perfect condition and had no wear on the individual instruments. Whenever I need something like this, I have been using the drafting set that I bought in 1958 as part of the requirement for my Northeastern U electrical engineering course.

At the Flea Market

 In one of the tents they were selling these dolls. They that writing on the back of the head under the hair that indicated they were at least 15 to 20 years old and had been owned by an American.

 In addition to all the dry goods, some of the booths were selling food, mostly vegetables and pickles  plus some dried fish.

 The man inside the booth has a karaage bento, fried chicken boxed lunch, stand near our apartment. They are extremely good. The woman is my wife who is buying our lunch from him. The man with the guitar is singing a song about Nakagawa Tacos. A group of the restaurants in our town are having a taco campaign. Each restaurant has added tacos to their menu but they are different, and not very Mexican, at each place. The song sounds like something from Mexico but the words are in Japanese singing the praise of the tacos in Nakagawa.

 While he was singing, this man dressed as a Mexican showed and danced.

 These are the food stands. Notice on the large sign that two of the things have fried eggs on top. Japanese boxed lunches often include an egg in some form or other.

At the stand with the large sign we bought this. It is a couple of large slices of pork with chopped green onions. The red is a kind of preserved ginger and under it all is a layer of rice. It was quite good but would have been better if it had been hot.