Peeking a Gift Horse in the Mouth

There are families in the Tohoku region of Japan who for several generations have earned their livings making traditional doll clothing. They lost everything in the immediate aftermath of the March 11 earthquake. The tsunami washed all their supplies out to sea.

Hearing of their sad plight, my friend boxed up all her best obis and kimono. The boxes were crammed into a van and delivered to the doll company families near Fukushima.

She said she had many kimono and obis and scraps of kimono fabric that were not good enough to be included in her humanitarian shipment. She wondered if Fearless and I would be at all interested in taking them off her hands.

She didn't have to twist any arms.  But you already knew that, didn't you?

This morning we met for breakfast at Ble Dore. After we crammed as much fresh bread into our mouths as human beings can ingest in ninety minutes, we repaired to the parking lot to transfer the sixteen 30+ pound bags from her car to mine. But we could only squeeze ten of those gigantic bags into my trunk and back seat, so she followed us back to Yokosuka where Fearless fetched her van and we completed the transfer on a parking lot roof.

It was all a bit clandestine as she didn't want any elderly Japanese ladies to catch her passing her "smelly old kimono fabric" to foreigners.

Tomorrow night Fearless and I are going to sort through those sixteen bags and decide what to do with our plunder. Some of it will undoubtedly go to the spouse club thrift shop to raise money for local charities and we'll auction off something or other to the Seventh Fleet spouses to benefit the Relay for Life this weekend, but it sure would be swell if we could figure out a way to auction off some of it to directly benefit the earthquake/tsunami victims. The base regulations are rather rigid (ie, ridiculous) in that regard.

So far the Ancient Mariner and I have lugged four of those bags from the car to the house. I taken a quick peek for triage purposes: obis in the living room, fabric scraps in the family room, kimono in the dining room. Here is what I found at the top of one of those bags:

Smelly old kimono fabric indeed.