La Japoneisa: Chores and Neighbours

Have been kusakari-ing (grass cutting) for the last two days. You can actually see the house now when walking towards it and the price for this luxury is blistered hands, cut arms and a rich mosquito experience. One gets used to all the other bugs, caterpillars, worms wandering around or enormous flies/bees/wosps buzzing over their head, but mosquitoes never (shinda ka was ii ka desu yo (dead mosquito good mosquito).
The grass was about 1 metre high and the thatch even more, but oh how satisfying it is to do this job. You sweat, you are dead tired, your arms and hands ache, but then you lift your head up and see. And the view is the reward.

It is interesting how much things here get done pro forma.
Well, they get done because they have to be done, of course, but the moving engine is often the neighbours's or community approval. OmoSan and IchiokaSan come every now and again for a cup of oocha and (sometimes constructively at other times not so constructively) contemplate on the work we have done.
Obon (a summer festival of the ancestors' souls returning home-somewhat similar to our All Saints' Day) takes place in mid August and to show respect to the ancestors everything has to be clean and tidy. And so we were kusakari-ing.
But then Omo and IchiokaSan come and they criticize how we do not pick up tomatoes often enough (every day-which we do) and how if Wayne (BoChan's boyfriend) doesn't get back soon enough everything (grasscutting, soya, soba planting, tomatoes, cucumbers, everything) is gonna go AWOL.
With Bo we supressed the feminist flames growing and bubbling inside us and decided to show them! Today, we do as much kusakari as possible and tomorrow we shall, from early morning, begin work at Mason's fields in order to get them ready for soba, which is being planted on the 15th August. However, the plan changed as Bo said that They (Omo, Ichioka, whole village really)'d rather see us finish one job than leave that and begin something else. Which is fair enough.
I guess, though, that we just have to struggle along, and us, four women, show them all how it's done and that it is done really well, even without a male present.

Another neighbour came by this afternoon, sat at the table in front of the huse when I finished kusakari and was getting ready to cook dinner. MitaniSan.
I've never met him before and we had a friendly (v. simple talk) when I came to sit down to have a cuppa. I assume I took on a role of a host as HanaChan got up and went off to continue working. Then MitaniSan started saying some words in English, one of them being wife, but I could not really understand anything else. I though then that he was perhaps asking me whether I was married, so confident in my Japanese, knowing that to marry is kekkon suru, I asked him to talk in Japanese to me. But he was even more confusing then as he started using a sign language as well and was giving me thumbs up with his left hand. I was rather confused and was trying to guess what he was trying to say to me. Than as he was showing me thumbs up with his left hand he started pointing his right hand towards his groin, mumbling something. HanaChan just went pass and so I asked her to help me understand what he was trying to say. At one point I even found myself wondering whether he was trying to ask me if I was a boy >__< He wasn't. He was just asking me whether I had a boyfriend. Fuuuh!

Apparantely, according to Bo's words, he is the most creepiest and at the same time the most helpful neighbour we have.
Also, he is an alcoholic. But he can take us fishing. Yay!