by Lynn Ng

In December 2022, I wrote a post on the struggles of my first week back in the field – the countryside with shivering winds and empty phone signals in Fukushima. I worried gravely what returning to the field would be like and how ill-prepared I had been. To come full-circle, I want to share the last week of my field work in Fukushima here. During this week I had a starkly different experience in a different but deeply similar site (countryside, mountainous, cold). In January, I participated in a farm-stay in another part of rural Fukushima. Given that it was mid-winter and taking place just after Japan’s worst snowstorm in a decade, I worried that this farm experience would be cancelled, or worse, unfruitful.

The snow-covered vegetables, from which we freely picked out our vegetables.
Copyright © Lynn Ng 2023

Luck would have it that the days immediately after the storm were sunny and bright. While still cold enough for the snow to stay, I was immensely glad to see blue skies. Regular farm work aside, my research participant was also hosting a community hotpot party in the evening and our task for this day in particular was simple: salvage and harvest whatever vegetables we could get from the snowy fields. Booted and gloved up, I walked hesitantly towards the row of lettuces, wondering what could actually have survived the snowstorm. I knelt down at a bundle of lettuce, poked its frozen leaves, sighed, and prepared to get up and abandon this section. At that moment, an old lady from the neighborhood trudged over and squatted beside me, telling me in slurred Japanese to pluck them out. I was confused but tried nevertheless, but alas the soil itself was frozen and the lettuces would not budge without me completely ripping the ball apart.

My little lettuce baby and our delicious yield
Copyright © Lynn Ng 2023

The old lady muttered impatiently, conjured a knife from out of nowhere, and started stabbing the frozen soil to dislodge the lettuces. She showed me then how to gently peel apart the frozen outer leaves to reveal fresh lettuce cores. I was in awe. I had fully planned for the dinner party to be of scraps, since it was mid-winter. Yet, now I knelt on frozen soil cradling a palm-sized lettuce core so fresh I wanted to bite on it there and then. Midway through our farm efforts, a middle-aged man drove up along the driveway and, with some distance from us, started poking his knife at the tree roots. What could it be now? I was curious and excused myself from the group and walked over to the man, all the while hoping he would not turn around and stab me with his knife. “Ah, look, Daikon,” he said. I crouched cautiously and saw what he was poking at– the frozen soil around a tiny sprout of what appeared to be radish leaves. He told me that tiny leaves meant larger radishes, and so together we plucked at the tiny sprout and heaved and dug. Our strenuous efforts were rewarded with a stick of thin, palm-sized radish. “Maybe this can just be grated,” he comforted himself. After hours of harvesting, we were pleased with our yield – a healthy mix of lettuces, cabbages, onions, and other greens I could not identify. We wheeled our finds to the car and set off to prepare for the hotpot.

Food somehow tastes best when made with self-sourced ingredients.
Copyright © Lynn Ng 2023

Now back in Berlin, I reflect upon those three months in Japan and how things have come full circle. I look back at those pictures of lettuces and hotpots, and wonder how little I thought about radiation at all during the whole farm-to-table process, even though I spent hours harvesting vegetables grown in the soil of the former exclusion zones. I wondered again if that’s what the newcomers here experienced too: the forgotten radiation displaced by the warm hotpot parties and cheeriness of the rural wide blue skies.