Many Japanese still have rice for all three of their main meals, and while Japan's food miles are some of the highest - if not the highest - in the world, rice is one of the few foodstuffs in which it is completely self-sufficient. What this means is that almost every square metre of arable land is given over to rice farming, and it's fascinating to watch the process unfold, from ta-ué (planting / 田植え) in the spring to iné-kari (harvesting / 稲刈り) in the autumn.

There is a character (played by Harvey Keitel) in the Wayne Wang / Paul Auster film Smoke, who walks across the road from his shop, sets up his camera in exactly the same spot, and clicks the shutter at exactly the same time each morning. As well as being a metaphor for the the random and yet cyclical nature of life, the resulting photographs demonstrate how one can find beauty and significance in the seemingly inconsequential, and inspired me to do the same thing for rice farming in rural Ibaraki that Keitel's character does for pedestrians and passing cars on a New York street corner.

So, every weekday morning and afternoon from the beginning of May to the beginning of October this year, I stopped to take a photo of the tambo (田んぼ / rice fields) on my way to and from work. Sometimes the weather was beautiful, sometimes there was - quite literally - a typhoon passing through, and sometimes, for no apparent reason, the sky went a kind of purple-y colour. Whilst I would like to have created a proper video that can be viewed full-screen, for the moment you'll have to make do with this Weebly slideshow. As you'll see, it took me a couple of weeks to settle on the ideal spot from which to take my twice-daily photo, and there is a break of about a month during which the rice grows noticeably taller and yellower (I was on my jaunt to Sado Island at the time), but hopefully it will give you a pretty good idea of how the tambo go from mud to rice and back again, in the process providing the Japanese with a large proportion of their daily carbohydrate intake.

To view the slideshow, hover your pointer over the photograph below and click on the 'Play' icon. It's about three or four minutes long, and there is a special bonus prize of, er, a bag of rice for anyone who spots the microlight.

(Incidentally, for some proper 'rice field art', take a look at this post from Pink Tentacle.)

Back in the late nineties, I was lucky enough to get hold of that most prized of possessions, a Hotmail address with my christian name first, my surname second, and no dots, dashes, numbers or anything else extraneous in between. Purely for illustrative purposes, let's pretend that my real name is Billy Nugget, and that the address in question was billynugget@hotmail.com

Even then, there were already scores of other Billy Nuggets using Hotmail, but I just happened to sign up at the precise moment the original Billy Nugget either decided not to use Hotmail any more and cancelled his account, or died in a freak dog grooming accident. As I'm sure you can understand, I was very pleased about this fortuitous turn of events (fortuitous for me, that is, not necessarily for Mr Nugget). Partly for convenience sake, and partly because I couldn't bear the thought of giving up something so easy to remember, I kept hold of this holy grail of email addresses, and in the intervening years have become well acquainted with the idiosyncracies of Hotmail's service, of which there are many.

For example, allow me to introduce those of you who are not familiar with Hotmail to its 'Contacts' feature:

Like other free email accounts (and indeed mobile phones. And indeed, er, address books), Hotmail allows you to store your friends' / colleagues' / acquaintances' / stalkers' contact details alphabetically. Should you happen to email someone you have not emailed before, or should someone non-suspicious happen to email you, Hotmail will even ask if you would like to add that person's name and details to your contact list. So far so good, and after more than a decade with Hotmail, I now have getting on for two hundred contacts, some of whom I email regularly, some occasionally, and some I will probably never have reason to email again for the rest of my natural life.

Anyway, let's assume I want to send an email to one of those occasionals; one of the people whose email address - and this is a key point - I don't happen to know off the top of my head. As usual, I click on the 'New' option on my Hotmail page and a blank email appears. In the 'To:' box, I begin to type my friend's name - once again, and purely for illustrative purposes, let's call him Harry Pratt. Almost instantaneously, a drop-down menu appears listing everyone on my contacts list whose email address begins with an H: harold.bobbins@gmail.com, horatio-nelson@britishnavy.net, humbert_humbert@lolita.xxx, and so on and so forth. The trouble is, now that I come to think of it, Harry is a bit of a joker, so rather than harry.pratt@gmail.com or harry-pratt1971@yahoo.co.jp or even pratt_harry@dyno-rod.co.uk, his email address begins with crazyharry or bonkersharry or madcappratt or something similarly 'hilarious'.

Now you would think, wouldn't you, that the whole point of a contact list - particularly the contact list for an email account - would be to allow the user to quickly access his or her friends' email addresses merely via the use of their christian name or surname. As anyone with any sense will tell you, it's far easier to remember a couple of key words like, say, 'Harry' or 'Pratt' than it is to remember something far longer and more complicated, like xiekdgijdkaoed.23856308386.harold_h-pratt.jr_the-3rd@itsonthetipofmytongue.org, for example. The mind-bogglingly infuriating thing about the Hotmail contact list, however, is that even though Harry's email address is stored along with his name therein, it is not possible to access that name at the precise moment you need to do so. In other words, the drop-down menu that automatically appears when you begin to type in the 'To:' box is not a list of your friends' names that start with that letter, but merely a list of the email addresses on your contact list that start with that letter, which two things, as we've already discussed, have no intrinsic connection.

What I actually have to do in order to get Harry's email address into the 'To:' box of the aforementioned email is to:

1) Save a draft of the email
2) Go to my contact list
3) Go to the H section of my contact list
4) Find the name 'Harry Pratt' halfway down the page
5) Click on said name
6) When Harry's contact details appear, manually copy his email address [my italics]
7) Go back to my inbox
8) Go to my drafts folder
9) Click on the drafted email
10) Paste Harry's email address into the 'To:' box

Now if you'll just excuse me, I need to pause for a moment and use some punctuation:

#$&'%(")&='~}*<+{>?????!!!!!

Call me a remorseless pedant if you like, but surely, after well over a decade of running what is still one of the most utilised email services in the world, the good people at MSN might have figured out that this small but significant glitch in their system could do with being fixed. More to the point, they have probably received complaints numbering in the tens of millions from disgruntled and remorseless pedants like myself: enough complaints, in fact, to make them realise that perhaps the time may have come to sort things out.

One of the obituaries for the recently deceased Steve Jobs claimed that he had a reputation for prioritising 'form over function', but whoever wrote this had clearly never used a single Apple product. Sure, I have had my fair share of problems with the various Macs I have owned - malfunctioning CD drives, crashed hard drives, dodgy keyboards etc. - but that never stopped them from a) looking good and b) being easy to use. PCs, on the other hand, a) look ugly and b) are not easy to use, and for this, Mr Jobs deserves at least a modicum of retrospective credit.

So what does this all have to do with Japan, I hear you ask? Not much really, except to say that had Bill Gates been born Japanese, PC and Windows users might all be a lot more satisfied with their Microsoft product user experience, and I might more readily be able to access the email addresses of my contacts, thus allowing me to waste even more of my time on Facebook, Twitter and Badass of the Week.

It wasn't until we woke up on Monday morning - a bank holiday - that Mrs M remembered it was Otoh-san's birthday, so while she popped out to buy him something cake-like, I wished him many happy returns as we had our breakfast in front of the TV. 
'If you don't mind me asking,' I said, 'how old are you now?'
'67,' he replied, 'although I look about 57.'
Once Mrs M had arrived back from the cake shop, the five of us went for a day out in Hirakata, where Otoh-san's brother Yoshihiro lives with his family.

Hirakata lies just before the border with Fukushima Prefecture, so we wanted to do some disaster sightseeing on the way, and came off the Joban Expressway at Kita-Ibaraki to join the coast road. The journey - which took us through a series of tunnels in the mountains above Hitachi - would normally have cost about a thousand yen, but as a way of boosting the economy and encouraging tourists back to Tohoku, the government has made expressway travel free of charge for pretty much anyone who lives north of Tokyo, a special offer that runs until August next year.

After parking at a convenience store, we wandered over the road to the hotel where Yoshihiro oji-san and Hisako oba-san got married about thirty years ago. Okah-san reached into the cool bag she had brought with her and handed us each a slice of Swiss roll - Otoh-san's birthday cake - which we ate as we looked out at Futatsushima (二ツ島 / Two Islands). The name is a little misleading, as Futatsushima is more like one rocky outcrop, although Otoh-san insisted that a second, smaller 'island' had been washed away in the tsunami. A little further north at Ohtsu Bay there was nothing that you might call devastation - no boats stranded on the quayside and no wasteland where there used to be a town - but probably a quarter of the houses at sea level had been stripped back to their foundations, and just around the corner, a famous old building called Rokkaku-doh (六角堂 / literally 'hexagon hall') had been washed into the sea.

While the grounds of Rokkaku-doh (which I'll post about in more detail another time - it was built by a Meiji Era renaissance man called Tenshin Okakura) have been closed indefinitely, there is a pathway to one side that leads down some slippery concrete steps to the water's edge. From there you can just about see the headland where the Rokkaku-doh used to stand, and both Onii-san and I were soaked by incoming waves as we tried to get a look.

In Hirakata, Hisako oba-san runs the family restaurant - called Mori-moa - which is on the second floor of a small, burgundy-coloured building on the harbour front, and when Otoh-san tried to drive into the first-floor parking bay, there was a loud scraping noise from beneath the car.
'Ah, I should have realised!' he said. 'The car's heavier because there are five of us.'
'The road's probably lower than than it used to be as well,' said Onii-san.

As Hisako explained when we went upstairs, during the earthquake the whole town had sunk about 40 centimetres into the Pacific, although an old photograph on the wall showed how much Hirakata had already changed before 11th March: a large part of the harbour had been reclaimed to create a car park and provide better mooring for fishing boats, and a long concrete wharf had been constructed at the mouth of the bay - something that almost certainly saved the town from more serious damage.

'The tsunami came through there,' said Hisako, pointing to a road that led into the next bay between a row of houses and a rocky outcrop not dissimilar to Futatsushima.
'Did it break the windows downstairs?' I asked.
'The putty around the frames split and the window panes came loose, but thankfully they didn't break.'
'It must have been terrifying,' said Okah-san.
'I don't know, actually. We had already evacuated to the elementary school when the tsunami hit. When we came back later in the day there was water gushing from the broken pipes - the meter was whirring around at a rate of knots.'
'They didn't charge you, did they?'
'Yes, they did! Even though we blocked off the pipes the same day, the bill was really expensive. We stayed in the gym at the elementary school for twenty-five days, I think. There were some temporary baths, but people were coming from miles around to use them, so we were only allowed twenty minutes at a time, once every three days.'

This video shows what Hirakata looked like in the aftermath: Mori-moa is visible on the right as the camera pans round in the first few seconds, and the people interviewed about halfway through describe how the tsunami was almost seven metres high.

(NB. If you click on this link you may have to sit through a commercial before the video itself starts.)

Mori-moa - which didn't re-open until July - looked like an old-style coffee shop, with patterned tiles on the walls and wooden panelling on the ceiling, and on Hisako's recommendation I ordered the sashimi set meal, which consisted of rice, miso soup, Japanese-style pickled onions (in a mixture of soy sauce and vinegar), boiled squid and three varieties of raw fish I had never heard of before. As we were eating, a fleet of boats arrived in the harbour, and we had a grandstand view as several of their passengers - not professionals but tourists out for some deep-sea fishing on the bank holiday - immediately rushed to the edge of the car park to have a pee.

'I should think the tourist boats go out pretty early, don't they?' said Otoh-san.
'The men who work on them get up at 2am,' said Hisako. 'They come down to the harbour to prepare and set off at five, then they're back at about two in the afternoon.'
'I don't think they caught much today,' said Onii-san. 'Those cool boxes don't look very heavy at all.'

Despite Hisako saying the food was on the house and Mrs M saying it was our birthday treat, Otoh-san insisted on paying the bill himself, and as he did so I peeked into the kitchen to thank the chef, realising as I did so that she was in fact Hisako's mother, who is getting on for eighty years old.

The sashimi she prepared had come straight from Hirakata fish market, where Yoshihiro oji-san works with one of his sons, and when we popped in to say hello, Yoshihiro greeted us with a present of two large polystyrene boxes full of fish and seafood.
'These are aji (鯵 / horse mackerel),' he said, as a flurry of ash floated down from the cigarette balanced on his bottom lip. 'These are hoh-boh (gurnard). There are some prawns, some flat fish and some mé-hikari (literally 'shining eyes', and like a slightly larger variety of whitebait) - those are both really good deep fried.'
He handed me a tuna so that I could pose for a photograph, and asked if we wanted to take that with us as well, although Okah-san politely declined, saying there wouldn't be enough room in the freezer.

'During the earthquake,' said Yoshihiro, 'you could barely stand up straight, and there was this huge crashing sound when part of the cliff behind the market collapsed. The tunnel through the headland has a big crack above it now, so that'll come down before long, I should think.'
The headland on this side of the harbour was probably half as long as in the old photograph, although the market building itself - which had been torn down and rebuilt in a different position a few years before - was comparatively undamaged.
'How long was the market closed after the tsunami?' I asked Yoshihiro's son (Otoh-san and Okah-san have so many nephews that when I asked them later, they couldn't remember his name).
'Not very long,' he said. 'Only about a month.'
'And I suppose you have to use a Geiger counter now.'
'Of course. Since last month the readings have been quite high off the coast of Ibaraki, so the boats are going further south towards Chiba.'
(Even this close to Fukushima Dai-ichi, to all intents and purposes the threat from radiation has passed, but Yoshihiro and Hisako don't want to take any chances, so they haven't had a visit from their grandchildren - who live on the other side of Tokyo -  since the earthquake.)

I assumed they had to get up ridiculously early in the morning for work, but in fact the market doesn't open until the fishing boats are unloaded at about midday. As well as going direct to restaurants and shops, some of the fish goes to bigger markets like Tsukiji in Tokyo, and rather than a standard auction with coded hand signals and motor-mouthed auctioneers, they hold what are known as nyuu-satsu (入札), paper auctions of the kind an estate agent uses for a property with multiple prospective buyers - ie. everyone writes their price on a piece of paper and the highest bidder wins.

Otoh-san is never one to hang around, so after barely ten minutes of chatting and taking photos of the market, we were in the car and heading home again.

'I didn't realise your dad was 67,' I said to Mrs M when we arrived back at our apartment later in the evening.
'67?' she said.
'Yes - well, that's what he told me.'
'But he was 40 when I was born, so today was his 68th.'
Which means that in actual fact, Otoh-san looks about 58, which isn't bad going for a 67 year old.