Japanese Vermillion – 柿

                 ("pizza" man from Seven Eleven. A sweet, soft dough filled with a (semi) quasi-pizza sauce  )

Here's a filler post. As was unanimously voted, in a crazy stampede to the ticket box, The Train Saga has been slotted for production and only awaits a little photo tweaking. Until then, I'll distract you with persimmons:



Persimmons, they are the fruit of the season. My first persimmon was eaten a few weeks ago in Hikari eki. Before that I had never really seen these strange, orange fruits. Note the unique purple grain work*. Somehow, at first sight of the inside, they reminded me of figs. If you've never had a persimmon let me encourage you to go try one and then come back and write about what it taste like. That's the hard part, describing its taste. The persimmon is made up of a fleshy center surrounded by aslightly woody outer fruit. The woody part has very little taste, and reminded me or a peach, or an uncooked sweet potato. The inside was actually sweet, but I didn't notice any hint of flavor there either. Really, I wouldn't trust my feelings too much on this one, they're kind of impressionistic when it come to taste. (I mean, uncooked sweet potato? Where did that come from?) Also, it's early in the season, as evidenced by the tree in "my" front yard, which has not yet reached the beautiful orange color of these babies.



Yup,that's Japanese vermilion** alright. I'm told by the owner of "my tree" that it produces sour persimmons. Persimmons, you see, appear to come in two varieties. The sweet, pluck-and-eat kind, and the sour, pluck-and-dry sort.Reportedly, drying sucks the sourness out of them. If I get to try this I will certainly tell you about it. Until then take care, and I'll see you at Train Schedule school.



Yours Truly,
Mrs. B.



* Somewhere between writing this post and posting it I've had the chance to eat riper persimmons and, though they certainly had more of that lack of flavor that I mentioned, and though they really certainly weren't as woody on the outer parts, the most remarkable difference was their lack of this purple grain. I must say, I was quite disappointed, as I think the purple is one of the persimmon's lovelier attributes.

** I grew up with a sister whose favorite past time was to sort her eighty Crayola crayons. The first time I visited a Japanese shrine I was with her, and we both kind of looked at each other askance when our guide told us the bright, carrot-red pillars were vermillion. Now, to be fair, there are a few different colors associated with vermillion, which you can read about at your leisure. Suffice it to say, my vermillion has always been closer to blood than carrots

(Grass  in one of  the many rusted objects at the Ube Church's new ministry center.)