As some of you may know, one of things I wanted to do in Japan was to get into drifting in some way. So I bought the car - I then wanted to check out some drifting.
The closet main racing circuit to us is Honjo Circuit which, as I mentioned in the last post, is about 1.5 hours drive from Ashikaga. To get off topic for a moment, you might think 1.5 hours is
a fair drive...well, in Australia, yes. It's a little different here. Unless you take the tollways (which cost money and don't always go past your destination) it can take a long time to get anywhere. The actual distance between us and Honjo is only about 40kms. Within that 40kms, we drove through about 4 cities and about 8 smaller 'towns'.
Drifting is pretty popular in Japan and there are usually two or more events at Honjo every week. The event we went to watch was just an invitational drift day put on by the owners of a couple of mechanics workshops in the area - so nothing major I guess.
We invited Tom and Ana, and Andrew to come with us. We picked up Tom and Ana in Ota and Andrew at a train station just near Honjo.
We weren't sure where to park or whatever once we got there, but it was free entry and we just parked where all the cars were - in the pits. My car didn't look too out of place but we did get a few looks.
We spent the next few hours checking out different vantage points and watching the action.
Along with the drifting there was another set of cars doing their own 'grip racing' thing. So basically just normal racing / time attacks. This cool little Speed Racer car was doing battle with a red Evo 9.
There was some really good drifting on the day, we got a couple of pics from this corner - we were sitting on top of the dirt wall, literally 20 metres from the cars.
I also got a fair bit of footage of the day with our new video camera. I've roughly edited out the really bad bits and thrown it all together onto Youtube - VIDEO HERE.
Oh, there was one small crash...nothing too exciting though.
--Drift coverage over--
Jumping back to school-related stuff, a week or two after Honjo, my smallest school, Kuno, asked me if I wanted to join in on their Taue (sounds just like it reads - "ta-oo-eh"). I was keen as to piss around in the mud so it was an easy "YES!". Taue is rice planting. Some smaller schools in the sticks (which is Kuno to a T) often have their very own vege gardens and rice field. The students all work on these in one way or another throughout the year (actually, my biggest school, Mikuriya, also has a big vege garden which is right outside my English room - so when I get bored I often sit at the window and watch the 7 year olds toil haha). The rainy season (June - mid July) is a good time to plant rice, so that's what we did. Later in the year when the rice is ready, the kids will harvest it and then make meals from it.
Anyway, it was a pretty typical rainy season day and I only planted for about 10 minutes (thankfully, it's pretty uncomfortable work) but it was pretty cool. Here are some pictures.
YEhh!!! PICK THAT RICE WYATT!
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