Have you ever seen an animated movie called Omoide Poroporo? おもひでぽろぽろ in slightly old-style kana usage.

You might enjoy it. It’s about an office worker from Tokyo who spends her summer vacation in Yamagata prefecture (if I recall correctly) working at the farm of a friend’s family.

A bit overly sweet at times, but a nice story.

DVD is from Studio Ghibli, but it’s not a Miyazaki film.

I haven’t seen it, but I will seek it out. I like the Studio Ghibli stuff, they are always lovely and make me all natsukashii even for places I’ve never been.

It’s one of my favorite anime, too. I bought it on laserdisc the last time I was in Japan. When the main character goes to spend her summer vacation on a farm she keeps flashing back to incidents of her life when she was 10. The flashback scenes are in a different style and capture Japan in the 1960s very well.

There is a translated screenplay online that has a lot of cultural notes that help those of us who didn’t live in Japan in the 1960s understand all the pop culture references. It is a beautiful, serene film. Your photos of your helping in the rice harvest also remind me very much of it. Having had that experience, I think you’ll like this film a lot.