The sirens of two particularly noisy vehicles screamed into my neighborhood Monday night, but they didn’t pass on wailing into the night as one usually hopes the sirens of fire and police vehicles to do. They stayed. And stayed. I ignored them for the first ten minutes or so, suspecting that it was just some minor annoyance. My coworker Mariko was over to share a big mess of lentil curry I’d stewed up, and she didn’t think it was an especially distressing event either – not until somebody began yelping into a loudspeaker. Lights were flashing red and yellow and orange against my balcony window panes, which we cracked open in order to peer out and see what was happening.
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When I came to Shizuoka I knew that it was famous for green tea. That’s what everybody told me: Shizuoka has the best green tea in Japan. On the trip here, riding the bullet train from Nagoya, I saw field after field of manicured, perfectly rectangular green tea hedges. So much so that even on mountainsides, in places where the slopes aren’t perilously steep, people have often cleared plots of land and planted green tea fields. It really is everywhere. I certainly expected to drink some of the stuff upon arriving here. But I never thought I’d pick it myself.
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