Sometimes I just like to step outside, pick a direction, and see what’s down the road. I don’t do it every day, but when the weather is good and there’s nothing else to do, it’s fun to explore. All too often, having lived in Japan for more than 13 years now, I forget that I’m living in a foreign country and haven’t seen a lot yet. I’ll stop where I am, look around, and realize that I’m in Japan. It sort of hits you that way sometimes.

This time I went to the edges of town, near where the railroad runs against the nearby cliffs and hills, and noticed more and more the little farms that traded off occupancy of the lots with suburban houses built on the less expensive real estate on the fringes of town. There are lots of little farms all over Tokyo, in fact, and you’ll find them in the darndest of places–an artifact of high property sales taxes and low property ownership taxes, subsidies to small farmers and so on–the farmers have been represented fairly well in government.

What I saw more and more were small orchards of trees kept at a low height, maybe 6 feet or so, and hanging from the trees were small paper bags. When I got to wondering what was in the bags, I asked a lady at a small fruit stand (they sell a lot from the mini-farms and -orchards at stalls), and she told me they were pears. Not grapes? They can be wrapped too, she replied, but they’re wrapped in different paper.

Too bad I’m not a big pear fan….