Brown's Field: Japanese Traditional Natural Farming & Macrobiotic Living ~ May & June 2013 ~ Chiba, Japan

View Chiba Prefecture, Isumi, Misakichokuwada ライステラスカフェ in a larger map

Six weeks at Brown’s Field, my farm friends and I daily roll up our sleeves: we plunge stirring arms into tubs of our brewing soysauce and plum juice, we wade into the watery rice fields to “massage” the growing mud to eliminate weeds, and we aim our chopsticks at amazing meals of countless fresh light flavorful veggie dishes from our farm kitchen. Extraordinary!

Brown’s Field (http://www.brownsfield-jp.com/)is a macriobiotic community based on the concept of the traditions that connect the people, the land, and the food of Japan. About 10-15 people live here, including the large and eccentric family that started Brown’s Field, interns who run the show while living here for a few years, and wwoofers passing through to experience the unique lifestyle and offer labor of planting, growing, harvesting, and preserving for the household. We live in an ooooooold farm house on a 5-6 acre property tucked away in rural Chiba, about 2 hours from Tokyo by train.

Farm and garden plots are scattered all over, beans and wheat and tomatoes and rice all in patchworks. A cozy country café, farmstay (incluing a guest house and two tree houses!), and a beautifully renovated country inn are all part of the Brown’s Field community, growing by the year. When I walk our old farm dog, Kerobe, I pass an old temple, endless patches of soft green rice fields, and many quiet old country houses that each have large veggie plots tended carefully in rows with enough produce to feed the household for most of a year. Brown’s Field is a living embodiment of what these rural communities and lifestyles were for hundreds of years. Now our young farmers and chefs communicate with their elderly neighbors about traditional techniques. Folk live communally here, producing most of what we need right here, and using little money.

For the most part I am the only non-Japanese here, in a large and traditional household, learning and growing through charades, smiles, patience on all sides , and willingness to be clueless. My Japanese vocabulary is growing. I’m a sponge for the culture and traditions we are so lucky to experience here.

Nozomi, the dear friend I met in Australia, lived here at Brown’s Field for a year previously, running the kitchen and café – she is so delighted to be home. “I’m home!” she says, and plans to come back here for another year starting this August (!).

Work ~ Traditional Japanese Farming, Preserving, Homesteading

For me, the very best thing about Brown’s Field is the huge variety of traditional Japanese farm/kitchen/homestead arts that we practice every single day. Here are just some that we have been making:
* soy sauce (shoyu) from scratch, mixing the ingredients day after day according to moon cycles
* fermented plum juice (kosu juice), picking plums, cutting & processing, stirring juice, enjoying it after hot days of work in the field
* salted plums (ume bochi), picking & processing & munching
* planting and weeding the rice fields, wading in the knee-deep mud & warm water, caring for the bright green sprigs of straight rice
* harvesting wheat from the field, cutting & bundling wheat, making & covering bales & stacks of hay, grinding & unloading the grain, stacking the straw
* cleaning an old old old Japanese house with traditional methods, scattering tea leaves, scrubbing tatami and floorboards with specific rags and techniques for each, washing and airing bedding, cleaning the corners with a rag and a chopstick
* planting, tending, and harvesting a variety of beans, pumpkins, tomatoes, cucumbers, sweet potatoes, eggplant, onions, garlic, and herbs

Each of the steps involved in these processes have been fascinating, new, and old .

Food ~ Japanese Soul Food & Macriobiotic Tradition

I am amazed at every meal here. Nozomi says, “this is my soul food!” Macriobiotics, as far as I understand it, is about eating fresh, local, seasonal, largely vegan food to maintain good balance in health. It mirrors the traditional Japanese diet, which was heavy in vegetables and brown rice. Simple ingredients are creatively used in a huge variety of ways. The dishes are light, fresh, absolutely delicious, and leaves me feeling satisfied and healthy.
Some of my favorites include:
* tempura carrot top fritters,
* shaved daikon & shoestring zucchini & seasonal veg salad with ginger miso dressing
* adzuki bean & pumpkin pie with citrus soy dressing
* soy bean & minced spring veg salad with persimmon vinagarette dressing
* soy sauce chocolate chip brownies (!)
* sweet potato & chive stir fry with coriander flowers
* pickled minced seasonal wild greens (i.e. edible weeds!), or minced with sesame oil and sesame seeds
* miso soup prepared 50 different ways, including with transparent shoestring seasonal vegetables, or pureed with a touch of soy milk into heavenly veggie creaminess

Brown rice is a religion here. The T-shirts we sell say “No Rice, No Life”. The Japanese word for “cooked rice” (distinct from the 10 other words for rice in different stages of its life and varieties), gohan, is the same as the word for “meal”. Each person here eats about 4-8 bowls of brown rice a day – high scores typically by the tiniest women! This rice is amazingly delicious – cooked on a traditional outdoor fireplace by a loving member of the kitchen staff who tends each pot for 1.5 hours! I don’t and can’t eat this much rice (I’m working on about 3 tablespoons a day…), and I realize that idea of “energy” and “health” here are completely different from a Western conception (and my own), but I thoroughly enjoy the few bites of gorgeous rice that I do eat every day.

My eyes are opened to a type of kitchen that’s new to me: the Japanese farm kitchen. Only a few condiments live here, nearly all of which are homemade with organic ingredients grown here and traditional processing: soysauce, miso, fermented plum juice, persimmon vinegar, plum vinegar, rape seed oil, sesame oil, olive oil, seaweed. Fermentation is an essential part of Japanese home food – many many food items are fermeted, from soy sauce to miso to juice to beans, and I’m sure it’s part of what makes the food taste and feel so healthy, in the mouth, in the body, and in the spirit. The ladies in the kitchen here really know how to chop – they use a grip called the “cat’s paw” that they explain they learned from their Moms to slice transparent moon and quarter slivers, create thread-like shoestrings of vegetable, mince itsy bitsy cubes, or coarsely chop fresh ingredients. I’ve also learned not to be afraid of fried food – fritters of greens, or bean puree, or veggie pancake fried in local rape seed oil are light and fresh – a scoop of pureed daikon drizzled with soy sauce on top of the fried delicacy will soak up extra oil in the belly.


All the cooks here emphasize that this is NOT FANCY Japanese cooking – this is Japanese soul food – traditional simple home cooking. Those of us Westerners interested in this kind of cooking & eating are in luck, because there’s a new book out about just this! Japanese Farm Food by Nancy Singleton is a readable and photographically mouth-watering encyclopedia of Japanese soul food, written by Nancy, an American ex-pat who married into a Japanese culinary farm 30 years ago and has been experimenting, transcribing, sharing ever since. Nozomi and I plan to visit her and stay at her farm for a few days next week!



People ~ Communal Living, Charismatic Characters


Interesting people hover around Brown’s Field like lightning bugs. Brown’s Field was started by an interesting couple.

Deco Nakajima is one of Japan’s top macriobiotic chefs, and a lovely mature woman. She teaches regularly in Tokyo and at conferences and events all over the world; she has published more than 10 books about macriobiotic cooking and health; she’s a mother of 5; and she’s like an auntie to my dear friend Nozomi. Two of Deco’s daughters are also accomplished chefs, and one, Cinema, now married with a wonderful husband and two cute squirts, has helped run the café and farm for years, and is now collaborating with Deco to write a recipe book of 80 easy macriobiotic sweets for young & busy moms, in between her own teaching stints in Hawaii, Tokyo, and New York.

Everett Kennedy Brown, Deco’s husband, is an American ex-pat who has lived in Japan for 30 years. He’s one of Japan’s top photo journalists for many years, now retired and working intensively and prominently on promoting Japanese culture at home and abroad. Everett chants and meditates every morning, blowing a traditional Japanese horn, reading and writing Japanese fluently, networking on Facebook like it’s his job these days. He’s cultivating a hippie persona with great flair, and he was just awarded the Japanese Minister of Culture award, a rare & selective distinction.

Brown’s Field is developing a business of sharing its traditional Japanese macriobiotic farm/kitchen/homestead lifestyle with a wider community. It’s home to a well-known macriobiotic farm café that draws urbanites from Tokyo, with the chance to munch their tempura carrot tops and tofu cheesecake overlooking our rice fields and goats. There is also a farmstay, including a guest house and two tree hourses (!) and a 10-room inn in a beautifully renovated old farm house – guests eat a banquet meal with the family and staff for dinner and breakfast. The inn also includes a demonstration kitchen where Deco holds cooking classes regularly. For potluck “event” days & festivals, families come from the area and as far as Tokyo to help plant rice, “massage” the rice fields, and harvest the rice. Before planting, the soil is tilled during a huge community soccer game held on the rice field! It’s impressive to see many generations enjoying the countryside, having fun doing the simple work that produces the foods that are central to this culture.

Some neighbor characters add kindness and entertainment to our peaceful lives and the BF community
– a mysterious policeman and pure boyish soul who builds biodiesel cars and has taken me and Nozomi on driving adventures around the area, then proposed marriage to Nozomi!

-- a jolly grandmother with half moon smiling eyes who feeds the BF grandchildren too much chocolate

-- a mystic & healer with a halo around her curly head, who feels like a sister and an auntie to me & Nozomi.  Straight off Haruki Murikami’s pages.


Wonderful new wwoofing friends have also danced through, some of whom I will travel and visit later in Japan, Berlin, etc. as this trip unfolds.

Nozomi and I are also connecting to some of the most interesting people related to good food in Japan, thanks to Everett’s excellent connections. Last week, we had a wonderful overnight with the famous Nakage and his young family. Young and fresh as he is, Nakage is a gentle strong man with a vibrant variety of experiences & skills, hungry for more. His current project is a top sake brewer at Terada Honke, Japan’s most recognized traditional sake brewery (using traditional ingredients they make and grow themselves with pure & organic practices… including growing and harvesting the rice, inoculating the rice with three types of naturally made bacteria, fermentation, and singing while working to relieve stress and bring positive vibration to the living fermentation in the sake!). Nakage is also an extraordinary chef who has published several cookbooks about cooking with “sake kasu” and “kogi”, the creamy & cheesy fermented rice by-products of sake brewing. Nakage is also a traditional Japanese drummer and musician, and a world traveler who is voraciously curious about the tastes & sounds & traditions & people all over the world. He gave us a tour of the sake brewery, took us to a traditional bath in town, stopped at the local shop for dinner ingredients, and welcomed us to his home with his lovely wife and young daughter. Their home is gorgeous, simple, smooth, clean, warm, polished wood and natural fibers, a kitchen with shining copper and soft light. Over an exquisite dinner of fresh ingredients cooked in sake kasu magic, we all shared ideas and excitement about good food all over the world, creative writing and art projects, and the joy of learning language and exploring the world through travel.

Nozomi is one of the most interesting characters here. She has fallen in love with Japan again – with her “soul food”, with her original home in Fukushima, and with the Brown’s Field community where she feels so happy with the lifestyle and able to be herself. Nozomi’s good food journey is fascinating to me. As a young girl and young woman, Nozomi suffered terribly from excima and various other skin ailments. Scores of doctors could not help her, but when she found macriobiotic food and Deco’s guidance at Brown’s field, she gradually began to heal. She started wwoofing here at Brown’s Field five years ago, and went to Australia and New Zealand to continue living on organic farms as a wwoofer, getting steadily better along the way. In Australia, she often expressed that she was not especially excited to return to Japan, with particular concern about her home after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. Back here in Japan, however, she says she feels healthier than ever – eating her soul food and surrounded by her own culture, being herself. She is very excited to stay here at Brown’s Field – she says, “I feel so alive here, so healthy; I can be myself!” She still loves her travel bug – she’s energized to visit macriobiotic communiites in Spain and travel though Europe and northern Africa some day in the not too distant future. But for the moment she loves being home.

And I am an interesting character! I am learning and absorbing so much here, about the work, food & people as well as the way of life. I have settled into the peaceful, full rythms and enjoy them now. I feel the beauty in the ritual, which is a vessel for subtle variety, changing seasons of work, personalities, temperature and tension of life. I feel more Japanese.
At the same time, I feel less Japanese. Some aspects of life have been challenging for me here, but have not diminished my happiness about experiencing this unique culture. I feel immersed in but not part of a culture that prefers collective following and expectation of duty over individuality, questioning, self-direction, or gratitude for free choice. Brown’s Field’s regimented and full work schedule tolerates a limited conception of “health” that does not really align with mine – I love the veggie dishes & homesteading project, but I feel the absence of time to pursue the many, many interests and curiosities and skills I enjoy in my life, or the idea that individuals should have time to cultivate their own unique selves. Fresh from Australia with experience and vision of living my own self-directed life with many parts, here I’m on a different cultural program. Also, I feel the inward-looking aspects of Japanese culture here – before I arrived there was significant controversy about having a “foreigner” wwoof in the community, and I feel the tension towards an outsider – diversity is not a big celebration here, but it’s not personal. I do certainly appreciate this community for its own beautiful internal harmony, and feel so fascinated and fortunate to be part of it for a short time. I am learning and growing here, happily enjoying my days.