I was about to jump into the field next to this man's house to take some pictures when I noticed him sitting on his front porch. I held up my camera and asked him if he would mind me taking a few shots of the gourds he was growing. He obliged and Callan and I hopped down off the street into the field, which was four or five feet lower the roads surface, and took a few shots. The man, Mr. Ono then invited us to sit down with him and his friend for some nabe, a traditional Japanese soup filled with all kinds of vegetables, konyaku, mushrooms, gluten cakes, and often noodles, fish heads, other types of meat, and sprouts. We'd just come from eating dinner at a friends house and weren't hungry at all, but felt a bit obligated to try it, so Melissa and I accepted two bowls, some chop sticks, and a chair and crate to sit on. Nabe, literally means �epot�f because it is cooked in a large pot and consists of lots of odd looking Japanese ingredients, some which look like Styrofoam packing material (gluten cakes), some which looks like those pink and gray erasers I used in elementary school (konyaku), and some that doesn�ft look like much of anything recognizable at all.

There was also some meat in the nabe, which according to Mr. Ono, was Kamo. Kamo, I later discovered via my electronic dictionary, is one of the many words in Japanese for duck. Mr. Ono told me he shot the duck near one of the reservoirs by our home, which at first I didn�ft believe since guns are illegal in Japan, but later realized that he could have used any variety of the many different high powered pellet guns that are legal here (this fact would also incidentally explain why I was so confused to see a �eno gun hunting sign�f near the river to the east of our home). He also told me he does a lot of hunting in the winter for food, and judging from the indigent appearance of the ancient sagging home he was sitting in front of, I believe him.