Mr. Haba? Mr. Haba? Huh? Mr. Haba?
While doing the rice harvest research at Miasa School, I saw a girl calling somebody’s
name. I was very curious who Mr. Haba was because there was nobody next to the rice
paddy whilst her classmates were doing the rice harvesting workshop.
The girl’s name was Eri . incidentally she had the same pronounce name as me -who looked like she was struggling to cut the strong stalk of rice with her skinny arms, having a hard time being stuck in the mud. When I was stumbling with my camera in the mud, she came to ask me, “Ellie-chan, are you OK?” Whilst her classmates carried the rice to the truck, I found little Eri looking at the rice paddy for a while, hugging a bunch of rice. It was as if she was asking the cut up rice and the purged ground whether they were okay.
I led the workshop for the 11 students in Eri’s year. They were 11 year-old students at Miasa School, who had been experiencing rice growing this year. Firstly, I let them count the number of grains of rice in a single mouthful. Then we played a game called “Find things smaller than a grain of rice”. After this I gave them each a piece of paper in order to let the students draw a grain of rice and write the sentence “A grain of rice is ( )”, filling in the blank with their thoughts. Interestingly, they drew a giant grain, filling the paper with the grain and they wrote sentences like the following: “A grain of rice is delicious”, “A grain of rice is precious food” and “A grain of rice is big”.
At the end, little Eri gave me a riddle to solve that she had written down next to her drawing.
She wrote, “A grain of rice isでんぶらこ” .the ‘でんぶらこ’ however, does not translate into English, not translate into Japanese either. I aim to solve this riddle through my film “Did you eat rice?” which explores the sensitive relationships between local farmers and nature, which can be seen in their ordinary lives during the rice harvest in Shinano-Omachi, Japan.