As we sped up the mountain, I couldn’t help thinking of New Castle and Gordon Town back home in Jamaica.

There were similar looking fir trees along the way and the same kind of impossibly steep lands — miraculously employed for farming. They even had the same kinds of winding roads, but without the potholes Caribbean drivers take for granted. We were in Japan, the land of technology, but here in Oda-cho, the scenery was decidedly rural.

With the small van lurching forward purposefully, we were making a twisting, sometimes dipping progress that fans of amusement-park roller-coaster rides or water slides would probably find cool. Another type of cool soon had me longing for a sweater though. While the valley we had just left was stiflingly hot, shuttling up the mountainside, it was getting chilly.

Ichiro Otsuka was speeding me up the hills to see his shitake farm. I marvelled at the excellent use of signage along the roadways. Even way out here in ‘the bush’ there were still some signs in ‘Romaji’ or ‘Western-style’ writing. Added to the arrows and other symbols painted on the road surfaces, it really made motoring a joy.

Even a ‘gaijin’ (foreigner) or someone from out-of-town would have little trouble telling which roads in Japan are one-way and which aren’t. Very different to Kingston’s maze where it’s easy to unintentionally go the wrong way up a street for lack of proper signs. It struck me that in Jamaica, most of us just ‘know’ which way to go out of habit, but how easy would it be for someone dropped on our streets for the first-time? Japanese roads seemed different.

Practicality and simplicity appear to be the norm there. For instance, many ‘blind-corners’ have carefully angled mirrors that let you see whether the road ahead is free. Mirrors are simple technology, yet even country roads will sometimes have the solar powered electronic signs spewing time, date, temperature and other information. These are further complemented by numerous reflectors on the sides and in the middle of the roads designed to make night or day driving safer. So it was strange to hear from a road-engineer, weeks later, that Japanese road fatalaties have actually been increasing in recent years!

Like us, they also drive on the left but I was actually more amazed by the widths, since some country roads narrow to tight, single lanes in spots. It was quite a contrast to the big cities of Tokyo and Osaka where multi-lane highways abound, buildings soar skywards and crowds, thousands thick, move like automatrons to the command of traffic crossing signals. In Oda, most people are farmers. And most of them are senior citizens including Ichiro’s parents.

It was really their farm we were going to. All of a sudden we darted off the road and onto an almost invisible dirt track that most people would have missed. Skipping along the bumpy 10-minute drive through green field and forest, felt a bit like driving up a secret path to some comic hero’s cave and mansion. We ended up at the Otsuka family farm. It’s high isolation provided fabulous views of the valley below. Ichiro’s parents greeted us with deep bows and welcoming smiles. In Japan they bow when meeting people as a mark of respect, but the bow is also a multi-purpose device. Used in some ways like how we use handshakes when meeting or leaving someone, the bow and how it’s used also seemed to be caught up in the status of who you’re meeting and other subtleties.

Something that’s amazing to see is the way in which Japanese people will automatically bow back to announcers they’re watching on TV, listening to on the radio or speaking to on the other end of a telephone.

Even some of the signs apologising for construction work have drawings of construction workers bowing!

I was invited into a small office area and offered ocha (green tea) and salty, crispy rice cakes. In return I proffered some small bags of banana chips from Jamaica as an ‘omiyage’ (gift) to his parents.

They had been eyed suspiciously by Japanese customs officers who apologised profusely for searching my backs while informing me that, “All Jamaicans use drugs!” When I told them the chips were omiyage the same guy said, “Omiyage desu? Ah!” and re-packed my bags even more neatly than I had done 23 hours earlier (Yes it takes that long to fly there from here.)

The gift-giving thing is a big part of Japanese culture. Whenever you meet someone new, it’s customary to present them with a small token. It could be a post card, key ring, food — anything really. There’s a booming ‘omiyage’ business there churning all sorts of quaint items for use as presents. If you visit somewhere new on the weekend, it’s also customary to bring back small gifts for your friends and collegues.

The ‘omiyage’ is a bit like a souvenir really. Of course the gifts needn’t be expensive, but usually it depends on the stature of the person you’re meeting.

So you might give your new boss something a little more special and your new co-workers smaller inexpensive things.

I’d earlier given Ichiro a bottle of ‘Tia Maria’, the famous Jamaican coffee liquer, which he immediately sampled and described as ‘Subarashi!’ or wonderful.

His parents meanwhile, seemed intrigued with the banana chips, in particular the saltiness of them. Banana chips in Japan, unlike ours which are salty, are usually sugar-coated! Another difference is that while we use green bananas to make ours in Jamaica, their’s seem to be made with ripe bananas!

The farm itself reminded me in many ways of the hillside peasant farms in the Caribbean, but with some interesting high and low-tech innovations. The Japanese penchant for practicality was very evident.

While driving up, I had noticed row upon row of miniature triangular or conical shaped plastic structures in several fields. They looked like small teepees and threw my mind back to the Westerns that thrilled me as a child. I saw some on the Otsuka farm and asked Ichiro what they were. He grappled a few times with the magic translator but came up looking more and more frustrated with each punch of the keys.

At first glance the machine could be mistaken for a calculator and Ichiro seemed to be having trouble figuring out a difficult sum. Eventually his face lit-up and he shouted, “Plant house wa !”

I took that to mean that each individual plant in that row had its own mini green house. I’d never seen that in the Caribbean before. At the edge of the plot there was a plastic Coke bottle stuck into a bent metal hangar.

Strips of the plastic had been sliced, pulled out and twisted. Stuck into the wire horizontally, the outstretched plastic arms caught the wind and spun the bottle like a propeller. Apparently that was being used as a makeshift scare-crow! It actually did a good job of scaring off the pesky, fearless black crows that seem to plague farmers everywhere. There wasn’t even one bird in this field.

Despite the hundreds of mini, individual, tepee-like ‘green houses,’ the Otsukas also had quite a few large traditional wire frame green houses, more like what I was accustomed to. They covered large plots of mostly tomatoes. These were giant-sized tomatoes, watered by an overhead irrigation system of small plastic hoses.

A visit to a Japanese supermarket can be quite an eye-opener for many reasons but one of the most amazing is how flawless most of the fruits and vegetables often are. I guessed that these green houses and irrigation systems might hold a partial answer. The fruit all looked like perfect candidates for advertising poster displays. I tried to ask Ichiro what happened to the bruised, undersized, not-so-flawless veggies, but it was too much for his translator.

Unlike the Caribbean where most of the farm work is done manually with forks, shovels and hoes, Japanese farmers have a number of clever labour-saving devices to use. In the same way that their electronics industry is constantly miniaturising products, the automobile and farm-vehicle manufacturers seem to do the same. There are giant sized tractors for ploughing fields, but there are also small ones that are little more than five feet long and are small enough to fit in the back of a small truck. There are also even smaller ‘tractors’ that farmers with smaller plots can walk behind. And if those aren’t small enough there are even smaller ones which seem to be remote controlled. Then there are still smaller ones again, which are similar to the ‘weed-whacker’ type lawn mowers which are slowly coming into vogue worldwide.

These are devices not much bigger than a broom to sweep the house, but Japanese farmers can get different attachments to put on the ends which will assist in either ploughing or planting as desired.

Just when I was wishing that some of these marvels would hit the Caribbean, Ichiro’s father walked past with a strange-looking chair. Instead of legs it had two wide steam-roller-looking tandem wheels on the bottom. I had never seen a chair like this before.

Sensing my curioisity, Ichiro immediately commandeered the unusual chair and gave me a quick demonstration of how it worked. It was a wheeled picking-chair. By sitting and propelling it backwards with the feet, a farmer could harvest a row of tomatoes or other produce quickly and comfortably in a sitting position.

Though they grow several crops, Ichiro was especially proud of their Shitake production. The Shitake is a special mushroom very popular in Asia on a whole and Japan in particular. Japanese consume more Shitake than any other nation, grow large amounts of it and also import huge quantities every year from China.

Despite this, Ichiro believes the market still isn’t saturated yet. A staple in Japanese restaurants, researchers there also use Shitake extracts successfully to help treat a number of ailments, including stomach cancers. Now European and American universities are beginning to study the medicinal effects of Shitake amid other mushrooms long used for healing in traditional Chinese and Asian medicines.

We walked through a shady forested area and soon came upon hundreds of logs seeded with Shitake. I asked Ichiro how easy they were to grow and he said it was a pretty simple process. Shitake is grown by ‘injecting’ the mushroom spores into logs about four feet long which are then left upright, either leaning on wire fences or arranged in threes, resting in against each other like a camera-tripod. When the mushrooms reach a certain size, Ichiro and his family harvest them and take them home to dry in a special humidifier. They are then packaged and sealed in cellophane bags before being distributed to supermarkets in large cardboard boxes.

Back at his home later Ichiro gave me a final omiyage (gift). It was a well-illustrated book on how to grow Shitakes. With the similarity in climates between Oda and certain parts of Jamaica, I wondered whether it could ever make a viable export crop for the island.

As I left his gracious family, Ichiro remarked with a smile, “You call me when ready to grow Shitake.”

I waved the book he’d given me and said, “Not if this book’s any good.”

He scrambled for his translator, but his wife beat the machine, quickly explaining what I’d said. We all laughed because the book’s in Japanese. With 10,000 characters in their writing system, it could be a long time before I figure it out.