Friday, April 2, 2010

As I mentioned in another post I was Wwoofing close to Nara and that’s the place where I met this old man. I never understood what he talked about, he had the most incomprehensible dialect I’ve ever heard. It didn’t really help that he was also murmurring and speaking in a quite low voice.

He had been living in that village that I visited for all his life as I understood it. Now the village was but a shadow of its former self. Although the people I lived at moved there to become farmers, but that’s a rare thing. Most of Japan is urban, in fact 1/3 of all the people in Japan live in Tokyo and 78 % of all people live in urban areas.

Whenever you go to more rural areas you see these old people with stories to tell. Albeit in this case and in many other cases I wouldn’t be able to understand them because they speak too difficult. Which is really a shame. I bet they have some good stories to tell.