Door to Iron Gate
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Haga Fuji. It is a small mountain in the next town in the shape of Mt. Fuji
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Cemetary, but in the background you can see balloons. They are advertisment for the Pachinko parlor that is orange and black in the background
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This Hawk was flying over the river.
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Candle Stick Plants?
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Manhole covers are often pretty in Japan.
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Old Chinese Kanji on water basin.
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A ceremonial water fond in front of the neighborhood jinja. Never seems to have anything put cedar needles in it. Farmers probably bring ritual water in a jug.
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Our neighbor put this speed limit sign up in his garden. We live on a one lane road that is supposed to be a State hiway. People like to drive too fast on it.
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The path back to our neighborhood jinja. What I realized the other day, was if this jinja had an associated temple, it would be where our house is. Jinja/temple pairs are often connected by a straight road between them.
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Taiko making her way over to the little shrines.
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Top of the bamboo.
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New bamboo. You can tell by the sheaf and the color.
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A little pocket rice paddy.
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Powered hang glider flew over us during our picnic
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Trimming.
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Big Keiyaki.
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A big keiyaki tree. This is the dense wood kickwheels are made of.
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Sorry the kofun are so hard to see. Will take the camera next time & not just the cell phone camera.
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These are Kofun. Hanaiwa era burial mounds.
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Pretty wild cedar bark
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Jean peering into the Jinja.
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A shrine in our neighborhood I recently discovered. Has some pretty big cedar trees.
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This road goes down from my house toward the river.
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Harvested barley field beside the walled compound our house occupies.
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New road between the irrigation ditches. I've thought this would be good for bike drag races.
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This is the Honda Cub 50cc bike Rick and I were talking about. I snapped this from my phone camera while pedeling past.
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Looking down the river toward my house.
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Hey Rick. This is why my bike needs a trailer instead of a side car. Narrow bridge crossings!
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There are few wild looking rivers anywhere near civilization in Japan. This is wilder than most. The red fence marks a pumping station.
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An "Island" cemetary. The new fields and irrigation had the cemetary end up in the middle of the road.
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Cemetary, moutains in the background.
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Plastic greenhouses in my neighborhood.
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Potato Field
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Phallus Stone Shrine (sorry for the blur. This is off my cellphone camera.)
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Close up: Phallus in Stone Shrine.
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My bike ride took me through Nanai. Nanai used to a separate town, but Mashiko grew and engulfed it. Now, Nanai is a neighborhood of Mashiko. It is where I live. These are old acid jugs, glaze with kaki, used to make a wall. They remind me of Albany glazed jugs and pipe.
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This is a little hut that I, at first, mistook for an ATM machine. Actually, it is a coin operated booth where you can get your brown rice polished into white rice. Brown rice is more resistant to bugs, so it is best not to polish the rice if you are not going to use it (we found out the hard way.) I didn't know today's bike ride would have a theme. Rice!
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Where you put your money and (I think) choose the level of polishing you will do to the brown rice.
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This is where you put the brown rice to be polished.
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An old Oya stone rice warehouse. This one belongs to the local JA, the farmer's association.
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Back of the farm association ware house.
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One of the Oya stone buttrusses.
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A rice warehouse near the Nanai train station.
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These are bags of rice husks. Some have been here a while. It makes it easy to understand why they make a Nuka glaze here.
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This is another rice warehouse associated with a little neighborhood, probably made up of everyone related to the rice warehouse family. My mother's parents in Osaka were rice merchants. Their property was all destroyed durning WWII and parcelled out as part of land reform.
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Inside the storehouse. It was cool and dark inside the Oya stone walls.
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The house compound. I am guessing the family patriarch lives here.
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This is the storefront associated with the rice warehouse.
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This is one of our local trains. Ours don't run on electricity. They run on diesel. They are a lot like a big bus.
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