Harvesting Rice

One day my husband was in the elevator at work when he saw an advertisement for a rice harvesting event for people who live or work in Roppongi Hills.  He asked if I was interested and I jumped at the chance, even if I couldn't figure out where they might be growing rice in this downtown area.  I love gardening and learning about where my food comes from.  Since moving here 4 weeks ago, my son has lamented that he misses our garden a lot.  So, having the opportunity to harvest rice was very exciting to my son and me.

We gathered in the plaza this morning with lots of other families and headed up the elevator to a rooftop garden 10 stories up.  There were trees, hedges, stone walkways, a few flowers, and a rice patty.  It was quite lovely.  You'd never know you were on a roof except you had to get up there to be in the garden.  There was a small pond with fish and frogs in it.  Some of the frogs had leapt into the rice patty.  The children enjoyed getting super close and seeing the frog in it's "native" habitat.

We started the event with announcements and a visit from the Fukui (the prefecture where the rice was developed) mascot - a big yellow dinosaur looking creature wearing a red athletic jacket.  It seems that every city, group, or landmark needs it's own mascot here.  My son declared this one to be super soft and hugged it repeatedly while other kids whacked it in the head.  I always feel so bad for the human inside those costumes. 

It rained pretty hard yesterday and the rice patty was very muddy.  So, we weren't able to cut the rice stalks ourselves.  Instead, they had people (I assume employees) decked out in boots and wading pants cut the rice out of the patty.  The rice was grown in small bunches.  So, they grabbed a bunch, cut it with their curved knife and set it in a nice pile.

Someone grabbed the piles and moved them to another location where the children were able to take dry stalks of rice "grass" and tie two bunches of freshly harvested rice together.

They then hung the rice to dry on bamboo racks.  It was so beautiful hanging there to dry.

We then moved to another station where they had dry rice bundles and a thrasher.  The thrashing machine was a box with a wheel inside.  The wheel had spikes coming out of it.  A person was pressing a lever on the outside of the box which turned the wheel around and around.  Each child took a bundle of dried rice stalks and held it over the turning wheel.  The rice grains were removed from the stalks and tossed into a container below. 

We then cleaned ourselves up a bit and ate some of the previously harvested rice (along with nori/dried flattened seaweed, satoimo/taro, ume/sour plum paste, shredded kombu/seaweed).  It was quite tasty. 

That was it!  I now have to google how they remove the hull from the grains of rice because we never learned how they do that and that was my son's first question when we were done.  I did learn that they harvest approximately 30 kg (66 lbs) of rice from that small plot on the roof.  If one had the space, I would think it would be totally feasible to grow enough rice for their own family each year.

It was a nicely planned event and a well spent morning.  I'm so thankful my husband pays attention in the elevator and takes us to random places to do interesting things.