Out of the blue... and into the green.

Well, the interview with the Nogyou inkai is over and done with. I get the impression that the district we're hoping to move into is about as strict as they come. I think I mentioned earlier that the chou had successfully resisted being swallowed up by their nearest city a couple of years back, and that as a result they were proud as hell about their new found independence.

The inkai was represented by the kai-cho and three senior members, and we had our notary (forgotten the Japanese word for it, a kind of lawyer) with us.

The interview was a fairly weird experience, the notary had told us to not go into any details that weren't brought up directly by the inkai, and so I spent most of my time biting my tongue. I wish he hadn't said that as it made me very self conscious.



To be fair to the inkai, the kaicho and one of the members seemed unfazed by my foreignness but keen to establish that we weren't religious nuts or dope fiends, a perfectly understandable stance imo. One of the other interviewers, probably the oldest, certainly the saltiest looking, was full of intelligent questions about permaculture, seed saving and how we intended to protect our crops against cross pollination with local non-heirloom/non-hybrid varieties. If he'd spoken with a less broad accent I would have understood a bunch more of what he was saying, but what I caught sounded very interesting. I'll have to look him out if we get our permission to move. Inevitably there was the obligatory a-hole too. Extremely defensive about his farm/the village's well being and skeptical if not downright hostile towards us and our ability to farm, I assigned him to the 'smile and ignore' pile and concentrated on the others.
One sweaty moment came about when the notary chimed in that we'd bought a Kominka in the neighboring village, which was total bullshit and I've no idea where he got that idea from, so we had to explain that that wasn't the case and what our actual residential situation was. Something we'd managed to avoid talking about up until then. It made us look foolish and cast unnecessary doubt on the whole proceedings. What a pratt!

Anyway, it turns out that the only real reason they can use to reject our application is that they fear we might be up to no good. Whether our notion of agriculture matches theirs or not is neither here nor there. So maybe we'll be ok.
The inkai reps we met yesterday will now take their findings to the whole inkai which convenes on Monday and they'll make a recommendation to the chou following that.
Blimey, what a palaver!