We just wandered into a post apocalyptic landscape…
Mongrels with droopy teets scatter with puppies and stacks of metal, car tyres, timber.  There is a melting bus packed with boxes stuck next to the wooden frame of an unfinished house. The head of a wild boar hangs on hook over a 1” thick sheet of wet iron and further in, three old men are slicing up its body on a wooden table. Quietly flaying the quartered carcass, it begins to snow gently. A fire burns in a steel drum and the dogs are restless, hungry.

The old man in charge hunts wild boar with dogs, no guns. His dogs have tracking devices attached to their collars so after they have disappeared into the forests he can chase them. He said recently they had found some huge pigs in the woods and his dogs wouldn’t attack, they got spooked. Looking at his animals, all except one looked far too small to take on big game. The largest dog, impassive, grinding down on a wild boar skull had barely moved since we arrived. With large open gashes on its face and hind leg and a solemn, merciless gaze; the hairs on the back of my neck bristled as I walked past it. I think it could take down a giraffe fairly easily, maybe.

I’ve never skinned a boar but watching the old dudes move at this glacial rate, slicing, snapping, hacking I was itching to get my hands bloody. I had a go at skinning the head and it was a suprisingly easy process. Preparing food like this feels quite instinctive. Perhaps it was my inner primitive resurfacing: the need to feed. They told me to take the tongue out and I did. I started cutting out the nice meat from cheeks and jaw but everyone was finished already and I found out no-one else wanted this meat – this was for me! I’m not a tongue sort of guy but i’ll find a use for it. The boss put the skull on a chopping block and axed it to chunks for the dogs. It was pretty intense.

The blood-soaked cotton gloves numbed my fingers. Kindly they invited us to lunch with a delicious soba based wild boar stew and rice balls and another mini nabe with konyaku, leeks, boar and daikon. We sat in a newly built wooden extension that the boss had constructed himself. The wood cladding joined unevenly and it appeared to have been cut with a handsaw. He had built the roof out of transparent corrugated plastic and the room was beautifully bright. No insulation however, and it was very cold. We sat at a low table fashioned from a huge L-shaped slice of wood propped up with yellow plastic crates. Out of the window I could see the mountains fading into the snow. I could hear the dogs crunching bones outside and the obaachan hacking phlegm in the kitchen. The boss is looking for a couple to take care of him and his wife until they die. In return these people can have everything they own and live in the bright new house (the boss is actually physically building a new, larger house for himself – he’s now 80-odd!). It could be a beautiful arrangement for the right people.

Such is the situation facing a lot of old people in rural Japan. They get old and their family die or move away, they get ill and can’t drive a car anymore. In the middle of nowhere life is almost impossible without a car. Old people have to rely on younger people (or people with cars) to help them survive. This sort of relationship should benefit both parties: the younger people can learn something from them in return. The knowledge of old people must be passed on, otherwise each new generation has to start again with nothing…