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I started the restaurant from the love. I loved the village, and desired to protect the water-mill.
From 30 years ago, people are using machine and aren’t using water-mill.
People can buy food to eat. Don’t have to cultivate food.
You are grown up eating fast food, aren’t you?
However, because this village is poor we cultivate “soba (buckwheat)” in farm.
Make it into flour by water-mill. I was grown up eating handmade noodles, which my grandmother and mother made.
Everything I ate was hand-made. I ate things that were grown up in farm and mountain.
Now, there are factory and flour mill to make “soba” into flour.
People don’t have to mix flour and collect stones in this cold place.
When people from outside see the water-mill and say “We want to keep and protect this”, they bring someone like professors of university.
Professors make system and mechanism to protect the mill, but leave the village in few years. They don’t think about us.
I wanted to make the situation that people have to use water-mill.
I started to hold events first. Hold the Water-mill Festival once in month, or few times in year.
Move water-mill. Make “soba” noodle from flour. Pitch tent to eat “mochi (rice cake)”, “tofu” and noodles with everyone in there.
We held the event with everyone in the village.
A self-government association did nothing, because it didn’t want to take responsibility.
Everyone have different kind of “love” to the village.
There were people who didn’t help us. Some of them bother us.
However, I couldn’t give up, so I talked to many people for many times.
It took 10 years to open this restaurant.
I called for all women in the village to start the restaurant.
I said to them. “Do you want to restart your life?” and
“Do you want to open the restaurant to make ‘soba’ noodle, not doing only farming?”
However, they answered that they can’t restart. What they can do is to live with their family.
Mow grasses and work in the farm every day. Don’t have anything fun.
But, I couldn’t give up. I persuade them, and they decided to work.
Next, I persuaded their husbands to open the restaurant.
“Please borrow your wife,” my husband and I pleased.
But their answer was “No”. In that time, wife has husband’s possession. We had to please husbands to give work to wives.
But, we couldn’t give up, so we pleased many times. The husbands finally said “yes”. And, we opened here.
I want to someone to help cultivating “soba”. I need help for threshing “soba”.
There are tons of “soba”. It is stupendous job.
If you help it, you can eat “soba” as much as you want that day.
Temperature of noon and night are very different in this village. That’s a good condition to make delicious “soba”.
We cultivate and flour “soba” by using water-mill. We make “soba” noodle by hands.
I want to challenge new things, but that will many energy and money.
Our customers don’t wish new things.
Therefore, we think that we just make delicious “soba” noodle every day. Make same “soba” as before.
Like “This is same as I ate 20 years ago”, “Nothing is changed, even the building”. Recently, I think being unchanged is good.
I take good care of things after the disaster. Also, I feel strongly about heart of “yui (relate)”.
Before the disaster, we wasted money because we could get everything by money.
We didn’t cooperate with others to accomplish something.
However, after the disaster, we cooperate with each other like before.
I feel happy that everyone rethinks the heart of “yui”.
There are many fallow and abandoned fields, so I wish to start farming in those fields.
Also, I wish that young people who do farming increase more. �