Life In Japan: Persimmons

I confess.  I never saw, much less tasted, a persimmon until I came to Japan.  I must have heard the term before.  Maybe I read it in Walden Pond or some Emily Dickinson poem.  Persimmon trees definitely didn’t grow where I lived in Michigan during my formative years.  Actually nothing much grew at all in Detroit other than racial tensions and poverty.

You have to be here the right time to see persimmons.  Meaning, my first time in Japan, consisting of a month in July 2007, I certainly didn’t spot any.  The fruits come out in all of their orange majesty late October.  So it must have been 2008, when I was here for the entire year.

I find it very difficult to describe the flavor of a persimmon.  It’s completely unique.  Of course, as a fruit it tastes like a fruit, as opposed to pork ribs or licorice.  But even as a fruit, it’s different, delicious in its own special way, with a waxy skin and a crunchiness to the meat more like an apple than a banana.  Until they are very ripe, at that point turning to slime, they aren’t very sweet, which is probably why Japanese people like them so much.

What I truly love about persimmons is the way they decorate the landscape.  Every tree becomes sort of a Christmas tree but with only orange bulbs, and obviously no flashing lights, tinsel, or star on top.

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Hmm . . . usually I talk politics, philosophy, metaphysics.  And here I’m carrying on about a fruit.  Does that make me sound like a fruitcake?  

I like it here in Japan.  I pay attention to different things.  Most of the people around me are farmers.  They know things I didn’t even know I didn’t know.  All this is still quite new to me.  How many people at my age can say honestly that life is still full of surprises and wonder?

Three times a day, I hear the ringing of temple bells at a local Shinto shrine.  How do you set your watch?  I don’t even own one.  When I hear about some horrible incident going on in this chaotic, increasingly hostile world, I can honestly say:  That’ll never happen on my watch.  The worst thing that could happen to me at this point is, late in October, I might get hit on the head by a falling persimmon, as I ride my bicycle to town to buy groceries.