November 3rd was the fall harvest festival here in Yachiyo and despite the cold windy weather, there was a really good turnout.  The fall festival didn't have all of the extravagant dancing and events that you see at the summer festivals over here but there was still a lot for everyone to do. 

In typical country town fashion, there was a vegetable competition for people to enter their favourite daikon or persimmon into and compete with their neighbours for garden bragging rights.  The fire truck ride kept the kids entertained but I felt sorry for the firemen who had to drive around in a 10ft radius circle for hours on end to amuse the kids.

Another activity which is a pretty standard fall cultural event going on this time of year is making mochi.  Mochi is a type of Japanese sweet that is made from pounding the crap out of sweet rice.  Of course, nowadays most of the commercial mochi is made by a machine but at fall festivals there is usually an opportunity to take part in the process of making it by hand.  The process itself involves beating rice with a big mallet while some sucker avoids being clobbered by the mallet while they roll the rice up and prepare it for the next wallop.  Mochi is really good but it is very chewy.  Very chewy.  It seems to cause numerous choking casualties every year but that doesn't stop everyone from little kids to the old folks from wolfing their fare share of it down.

There was also a craft/culture display up in the town gymnasium.  The preschool had a cute display about their field trip to dig sweet potatoes (see picture).  There was a really cool bonsai display as well.  I got talking with this old guy who is really into the stuff and he told me that really big bonsai have usually been passed on within a family from generation to generation.  Kind of a cool family tradition if you think about it.  He figures the big bonsai on the left is at least 150 years old.  I got really into the bonsai thing and yesterday got a book on the stuff so I can start doing it on my own.  Due to agriculture regulations I will probably have to wait until I return to Canada before I can get too serious about it but I will try it out while I am here too.

Pottery was also on display.  I love Japanese pottery and Yuki and I are both pretty psyched about our pottery classes that started up last week.  Hopefully we will learn how to make all kinds of cool stuff.

Here's a couple more bonsai trees for you.  Oh, I should probably teach everyone about the word bonsai.  It is different from the word "banzai" which is the word that you hear the Japanese say in movies when they celebrate things like climbing a big mountain or sinking an enemy ship.