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.

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Farmhand or stuntman?

Stooping down to pick up the thousandth stone on the muddy slope, I once more admired the large bear prints embedded in the soft ground all around me.

Again I wondered what was it one does when faced with a fullgrown, aggressive brown bear. I’d read somewhere that you should shout and bang your pots and pans loudly but I somehow seemed to have mislaid my IKEA kitchenware.

As we gingerly made our way across the field we were working in we felt like children acting out an imaginary game: don’t go over there - that’s where the bears are.

Except they WERE there. Only two days earlier, Kenji (Farmer-San and our temporary WWOOF boss) had told us they had been spotted - a mother and two cubs, ambling across his pumpkin field.

An hour earlier he had casually dropped us off, in this remote corner of his farm, with nothing but a few sacks and a few rocks as protection. And now we found ourselves in a field covered in bear tracks and nervously scanning the forest edge for any movements.

I breathed deeply and looked up to admire the beautiful scenery, the rolling and forested slopes building up to an impressive mountain range.

And pondered our possible mauling by wild beasts. I couldn’t help wondering: what was my role here on our WWOOF project at Takano Farm: was I a farmhand or a stuntman?

Yesterday it was daredevil tree-cutting, wielding a ancient and rusty yet lethal-looking saw, balanced precariously in a tractor bucket hosited some 40 foot in the air.

The day before it was extreme grass-cutting, using a strimmer of a questionable temperament, complete with a enormous and deadly-looking circular blade - the type that Ninja’s might seek to embed in some unfortunate shogun.

And now it was bear baiting. Wonderful.

Needless to say our survival skills saw us through this terrifying ordeal and Gentle Ben chose to keep their distance, but it didn't stop me admonishing our host. 　

Kenji just grinned at this me, a guillible and game Englishman who would foolishlessly follow his directions, stretching his puny muscles to the limit of their keyboard-oriented existence.

After my tree-lopping antics I had returned to planet earth a quivering wreck, my knees knocking, my back soaked in sweat. He slapped me on the back and cackled, “Welcome to Japan, Super Salaryman”. I only learnt later, soon after our stay at Takano Farm, that Kenji was scared of heights...

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