As they say, if your only tool is a chainsaw hammer, every problem starts to look like a summer camp nail.



We decided to splurge and get some ingredients to make burritos ($9 for a pack of tortillas and a can of beans?!), but forgot that we didn't have a can opener. For the record, the hammer didn't work. Faced with the choice between burritos without beans and going out into the rain to get a can opener ― well, it wasn't much of a choice, really. I got wet, and we had beans.

Okay, there isn't actually a llama here. But there are ducks, and they always make me think of the song.

Just some gift beer we enjoyed last night. Yum! The brewery is in Morioka (about an hour train ride away).

We had some hot days in August, but summer here is short — occasional splashes of yellow and orange are already appearing in the foliage.

Kintaro is a hero of Japanese legend, a little boy riding a bear and wielding an axe. It's also the official nickname of the JR Freight EH500 locomotive. This one is northbound pulling a train of container flatcars.

I've remarked before on how close we feel to nature here. In Kitakami, you're never far from a river or park or rice paddy or other place that is just humming with non-human life, such as these black-winged dragonflies that have been decorating the riverside park all summer.



And yet, even with all this life, there's something missing. There are birds and insects and spiders and fish and even snakes — but no wild animals. In Maryland, our neighborhood was full of squirrels, and we saw plenty of rabbits plus the occasional opossum, fox, or deer. Mice, rats, and raccoons could appear as well. Here, the only mammals we've seen in our neighborhood are domesticated cats and dogs.

Okay, I actually have seen two wild animals here. Once, on the other side of the river, I saw a rabbit. The second animal we saw was probably a raccoon dog, but we only caught a glimpse as it dashed across the road ahead of us on our way back from Miyagi — and that doesn't really count because weren't in a town. Two in five months doesn't seem like much.

There are plenty of wild animals in Japan, and you can find a lot of evidence if you head for the mountains to go hiking. There just aren't any in town, and that seems odd with all the nature that is in town.

Here it is: the grass that forms the basis of the Japanese diet, and is so deeply ingrained in the culture that it serves as a metaphor for food, meals, and — even more generally — for resources and wealth.

Tase Dam (pronounced "tah say dah moo") creates Taseko ("Lake Tase"), a mountain lake where we have heard you can go windsurfing and even rent sailboards. So yesterday, we decided to take a brief road trip (it's only thirty minutes from Kitakami) to scout it out.

Along the way we took some wrong turns, almost ran out of gas, and otherwise made an adventure of it. We eventually ended up at the dam, where we could get an overview of the lake. After a brief stop, we crossed the dam and turned onto a dirt road.

At the entrance to the dirt road was a sign, "Be cautious of (something)", but I didn't recognize the character telling what to be cautious of. It looked familiar, but what was it?

Oh well, no matter. Japanese roads are full of caution signs. "Sudden curves", "construction", "merging traffic", "cross winds", and so on. And clearly this was a road that required caution: a steep drop into the lake on the right, trees and rocks on the left, and in between, a space just slightly larger than a 1997 Opel Astra station wagon. Yes, we will be cautious, thank you very much. So we drove onward.

It looked familiar, but what was it?

As Stefanie concentrated on keeping the Opel away from both lake and rocks, I racked my brain trying to remember that kanji. It looked familiar, but what was it?

"I wonder if it means 'bear'."
"What?!"
"That character. I think it means bear. Let me check the dictionary... yes, the sign said, 'beware of the bears'."
"Oh. Well, at least we don't have any food. And we can just keep moving."

In the end, we made it safely. Windsurfing is indeed something people do at Taseko, so we'll go back in a few weeks to rent boards.

Yesterday, we drove to Akita for some good eats: Inaniwa udon for lunch, and Yokote yakisoba for dinner. (Both are specialty noodle dishes of Akita.)

Anyway, Akita lies on the other side of the Ou Sanmyaku, the mountain ridge running through the middle of Tohoku, and crossing the mountains meant plenty of tunnels.

Before we moved here, our lives were full of noise. Of course there were always some sounds that stood out from the background noise. A passing train, the morning alarm clock, Aki woofing at the neighbor dogs. But behind it all there was a constant barrage of noise, all blended together into an indistinguishable wall of sound that we learned to ignore.

But here, somehow it's different. Life is full of sounds. This is a city, so there are still the sounds of traffic, but it doesn't drown everything else out. All the sounds are distinct, from the frogs of late spring to the distant pops of summer fireworks, from the honking of swans calling each other in the evening to the electric whine of a departing Yamabiko shinkansen train. Earthquakes, too, create a unique sound.

As I write this, I can hear an emergency vehicle's siren - something we only hear once every few weeks.

Tonight we took a short walk along the river towards the railroad tracks. We could hear the cicadas singing in the trees, whose leaves were rustling in the breeze along the babbling Waga river. The splashing of water over rocks echoed between the rail bridges, and the local train gave a toot on its whistle before rattling across, soon to be followed by the whoooooosh of a bullet train headed the other direction. The wind occasionally brought us sounds of distant traffic, crossing one of the bridges. We could hear the caws of ravens wheeling in the sky, and when they came close we could hear their wings beat the air for lift.

Here is the sunset we listened to tonight.