I asked a question to Mr. Yamamoto,
“While I was watching you look after your 11 rice paddies and giving each of them a name, I wondered whether you have something that you would want to say to them, since they are like your children.Do you have something to say to your rice that seems like your children?”
He answered,
“I would say to the rice, thank you very much for this year. And again, thank you. I look forward to working with you next year again (来年もよろしくお願いします). By the way, you said the rice are like my children, but I do not think of them like that. Instead, I feel that they are more like my parents or seniors or teachers whom I look up to. So I am grateful to the rice”.
He started talking to himself,
“How pretty… I would like to stay healthy and fit enough to keep farming rice for the rest of my life”.
I asked another question,
“Do you get excited when it is time to harvest the rice?” He said, “Well, I feel two contrasting feelings at the same time…”
I watched his hands touching each stalk of rice carefully. His hands looked so soft as if they belonged to someone who does not use them for manual labor. Interestingly enough, he never wore gloves while farming rice. His hands, clean and soft in the morning, adopted the color of the soil and wore scratches from sharp stalks and leaves of rice as the sun went down in the evening. If the rice stalks felt some kind of pain, I like to think that they would understand and feel better being cut by his gentle, apologetic and thankful touch with his bare hands.