Konnichi Wa Haiku Series, Part 4

In a Market at a Station. 2016 29 10 Grocery store music is like Super Mario Kart. Great shopping experience is impossible not to have. Too afraid to buy bananas.

Shizuoka

Dew-wetted orange trees

drink the low-bent autumn light.

I brew tea for one.

1 November, 2016

Shizuoka

Shizuoka Prefecture is the tea capital of Japan. It sows the shadows of Mt Fuji into its magnificent gyokuro leaves. Out in Hamamatsu, the Sencha bushes are behind houses, at the end of a road, waking with the sound of low tide and slippers on tatami.

Shizuoka harvests 40% of Japan’s tea. This is a lot of tea. My time in Shizuoka was spent 70m from the sea at the Maeda family’s home. Masahiro is 41 and surfs his summers away while his wife, Junko, raises Momoka and Mako (13 and 7). Jesse Pegram’s adventures with me in the lantern streets of Kyoto are impossible to beat. But Shizuoka is close behind. The Maeda family treated me almost as well as the Blands of Maple Valley. The grandpa even had a picture taken with me. I ate breakfast with grandma. It was a huge success. They have accepted me as one of their own. I am deep uncover. Please send further intel asap.

I spent most of the week wandering the orange orchards of the Maeda’s 9 farm plots with my coworker, Bing-Li, whose English name is Billy. The inspiration for this haiku came from that landscape. I wrote it on a train to Nagoya. A good day.