For a while, I practiced reading it, till Cathy called: "Yoko, breakfast is ready!"  My breakfast was whatever I took out from a refrigerator-quite easy to prepare.  I chose sandwich, tea, and a banana.  She said, "We will castrate sheep."
"What does 'castrate' mean?" I asked.  She looked up the word in my English-Japanese dictionary and pointed her finger at it.  The family accepted Japanese people regularly, so they seemed to be quite used to treating them.  In my dictionary, "castrate" meant: "kyosei."  I was much interested but a little scared to look at sheep being castrated.  After breakfast, I got my camera well prepared and waited for the event.  The day was favored with such fine weather that I would rather call it "the Australian sky."

Their neighbors, though living quite far from them, daughters, spouses, and children came along one after another.  Mr. Koich Nishizawa, who was 75 years old and had come from Joetsu with me, showed up with his host family.

The house was surrounded by a huge one-hectare pasture. Since I could spot dung everywhere, I borrowed boots.  There were four or five hogs and some thirty piglets in a pigpen.  Two or three goats were at pasture, and white and brown hens were enjoying free-range, though fences were built around them.  I did not know the exact number of hens there, but I counted them up to 300.

Some 300 sheep and lambs were kept in a fold.  Mr. Trevor put on a white coat so soiled with dirt and blood that I could hardly call the color white.

Kelly was in charge of filling syringes with injections.  Each husband of their three daughters had their own jobs to mind--driving sheep, catching them, and binding to a table.  Sullivan said they would treat lambs seven weeks old or older.

Some twenty people, including me, were watching sheep castrated.  Sheep, running wildly and bleating loudly, were one after another bound to a round table which would accommodate up to six sheep at a time.  At first, women, including Kelly, gave them injections against infection.  Men cut tails short with a surgical knife with all their strength.  Long tails would soil wool around underparts with dirt and thus reduce its value.  Then they castrated them and finally carved ears with scissors.  Each owner had different shapes of ear carvings so that he could tell which sheep belonged to whom.

I watched all of it from a distance with my camera at hand.  After castrated, lambs bleated so sadly toward grown-up sheep, which sounded as if I myself gave such sad cries.  I was maybe too nervous because the first event at a new host family, which I did not yet settle into, was too much.

I felt it so sorry and piteous that sheep were treated to such a painful experience to meet our needs.  By noon, some one hundred tails were cut off and lying around on the ground, which also made me depressed.

No matter how I felt about castration, I, as well as other people, could enjoy lunch full of broiled meat and other delicacies.  I was amazed at myself.

After lunch, Kelly and other children in the neighborhood rode around the pasture a bike with a big carrier.  They enjoyed riding it with two children right before and behind the driver and also another three on the carrier.  I thought it dangerous, but no other person cared about it.  Tad, a first grader at junior high, said to me, "Hop on the bike."  I balked at his offer because, I was sure, he did not have a license to drive.  On the other hand, Koichi enjoyed riding, streaming his gray hair.

In the meantime, I saw even a one-year-old baby enjoying riding, shouting for joy, "yippee!"  He looked so happy that finally I made up my mind to give it a try.

It dawned on me that all the Sullivans accepted me as a member of the family and enjoyed my company from their heart.