While it is still fresh in my mind, and my muscles are still a bit sore, I’ll start writing part two to the Sericulture farm visit. I’ve got a couple of hours before the public onsen opens across the street (hehe) and I mean to be there when it opens. (Cost:¥320 for three hours. There’s a restaurant, shop, a sand and salt bath, and massage chairs too.)

So, after the tour participants left, I still had a few sericulture tour business related items to do. One was to meet with the director of the Japan Silk Center in Tokyo. This was an interesting meeting with conversation about the future of silk and sericulture in Japan. I’ll probably do a post or a separate section on this later. It gave me a lot to think about.

The main item left on my list was to return to Annaka and Isobe specifically to participate in a one day workshop with Nobue and Wataru Higashi for the day long job of moving the completed 5th instar from the feeding beds to the upstairs cocooning room. There were seven participants not including Nobue and Wataru. There were 45,000 Silkworms to move. 

The group of women came by train and by car- some from surrounding areas and some from Yokohama, Tokyo, and beyond. A couple are in Nobue’s Zoom sericulture lecture series and recognized me from there. Myself and one other gal were probably the oldest (mid sixties) while the others may have ranged from early thirties to mid fifties. Hard for me to say but I add this because it’s good to see younger people interested in sericulture. Over lunch, I asked what motivated them to take this workshop and the reasons were varied. One had learned to reel silk on a zakuri, a couple were weavers, one was interested in traditional Japanese textile culture, another had dyed and done some shibori, and another (perhaps the youngest gal) was exploring “simple lifestyle”. By this I took to mean country living, organic choices, environmental sustainability, etc. this is something I’ve seen promoted here in some in- country tourism and younger people living in cities find it interesting. There are magazines devoted to this and it has a name which I can’t remember right now. All were interested in learning more about silkworms and a couple told me it would be their first time touching silkworms. So it was a varied and lively group who worked very hard all day!

We entered the feeding house and oh my! Since the tour group had visited the silkworms has grown so very big and fat! They have eaten a LOT of mulberry. In the last instar they had fed the kaiko (silkworms) 300kg of mulberry a day divided into three feedings.

Next, we started gathering silkworms by hand and putting them onto sheets, loading them into the back of the truck so they could be hoisted up into the second floor.

After lunch we still had 4/5 of the silkworms to move upstairs and place in the cocooning frames. I wondered how we would get it done!

Ok. Stopping here. Have to get this uploaded!