the harvest

The last couple of weeks have been harvest time for most of our neighbors. So here are some pictures. I took these while we were out on a bike ride on our day off so they aren't that good, sorry.
Here is a cute little tractor, it is a little bit smaller than a lawnmower that you ride, but the farmers that ride them are usually very small and bent from decades of farming that they don't seem as small.



This is the rice just before they harvest it. It is pretty tall but all of the fields are lower than the street so they don't seem as tall as they actually are. If you look at some earlier pictures you would see that when the rice plants are young they keep them really well irrigated so that it looks a bit like a swamp. By the time the rice gets to this point it is solid mud, which is convenient I guess since they have to use the little tractors to harvest it.

















Rob and I love the way that this looks. This is how they dry the rice plants, we assume. It is funny to see the really big modern houses next to rice fields and temples.
This intersection is on a fairly big road just a few blocks from our house.









One thing that drives us nuts about Japan is how much they love to burn. The missionaries told us taht this is nothing that the spring is much worse. Rob asked if there was a certain time of the day or day of the week that they are allowed to burn. The reply was that any day and any time is a good time to burn stuff in Japan. It is a little eerie and toxic when the whole valley is filled with smoke that sticks to the back of your throat. It looks kinda cool though with the rows of stubble on the charred ground.