We are WWOOFing

Today we picked sweet corn at dawn. 6am found us carting 32 crates of 25 cobs through rain sodden crops, the mist and sun rising over tree covered slopes. When it did eventually rise it revealed beautiful arborous mountains and neat rows of soya beans, red beans, carrots and onions.

We are on Takano Farm, a four hectare organic farm near Otaru on Hokkaido, Japan’s second largest island. This is our second stint of volunteering on this trip, staying put for a few days to try and get closer to the country we are visiting. WWOOFing (Willing Workers On Organic Farms) is an excellent way to see the more remote parts of a country. Accommodation and food is provided in exchange for six hours work a day, six days of the week.

The work is hard - picking and packing sweetcorn, moving and packing potatoes, clearing rocks from a field at the edge of bear infested woodland - but the food is delicious. Most is home grown or bartered with neighbours. Red beans, rice and miso soup for breakfast; soba noodles and salad for lunch; fish, potatoes and vegetables for dinner. Each meal being served with that day’s harvest of sweetcorn. Raw and milky in the morning, steamed and sweet at midday and in the evening. I have never eaten such fresh and delicious sweetcorn before, and probably never will again. Farmer’s perks. The work is also humbling. Hours of hand sorting spuds into ten kilogram boxes, for instance, makes you realise how much effort goes into getting food to the shops, especially of the organic kind.

Kenji and Miho, the newly weds we were staying with, kindly gave us a generous insight into a Japanese home: Shoes are left at the door; there are separate slippers for the bathroom (the first indoor compost loo I have ever witnessed); and decisions such as who does the washing up are decided by a game of paper, scissor, stone. Our sleeping quarters were separate. Outside. In a bus covered in hops and filled with insects. Tom sleeps on the backseat, I sleep in the aisle.

This is a very real contrast to the bright lights and sterile box buildings of Tokyo. We are now polishing potatoes for the organic food consumers of Japan’s big cities.