adams guild™
January 27. I’ve finally got the OK to move ahead with the Garten Pond Project I’ve been wanting to do for years, so continuing with my silly policy of not writing about anything until after I’ve done it, I’ll be gone for a few days. In the meantime, here’s a video of Chris Martenson on why Peak Oil isn’t getting solved. We’re headed off a cliff.
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January 26. Here’s a great post from Gomu, Bureaucracy: Jumping through hoops for the Nouhou. Also, JohnRobb recently shared a Tip on how to “sell” resilience to the people around you (in your family or your community). I’ve been trying this for years, but it’s really hard, especially because food prices and nuclear electric and oil have stayed ridiculously cheap.
January 25. Here’s another great one with David Attenborough, Time traveler {vid}. In the news I see that Nuclear electric here is making moves while everyone else is doing what, exactly?, Iran will sell oil in exchange for gold, the EU is suiciding itself while the US Military–industrial complex continues the drumming, and I found a neighborhood across the river from me that’s several years ahead in the ongoing collapse. They’ve got shared garden plots in between shrines and next to a railroad yard, keep chickens, and do some major composting, all – within Nagoya city proper. That link goes to google maps.
Also, here’s a great piece called Heavy near, Light far that delves into the ongoing collapse. The idea is that meaningful activity and stuff are getting heavy, or more important, while global technologies and ideas are being radically re-ordered.
January 22. {A Picture story from adams guild™ – est. 2008 japan} Once upon a time there was a tool shed in a small garten, and in that tool shed was a small seed vault, and in that small seed vault were hundreds upon thousands of various seeds, most – the usual friends. And just underneath the usual friends, into the depths of the vault, lied some foreign friends*, gifts from a spirit that can only be seen if you’re paying close attention:
* garlicmustard ・ ramsons ・ serviceberry ・ angelica ・ rampion ・ goodkinghenry ・ scarify ・ pennyroyal ・ newzealandflax ・ elderberry ・ redberriedelder ・ wildthyme ・ sweetviolet ・ salsify
January 21. I took a good picture that says a lot about me (below), and I won’t say any more than that. In the garten chokeberries are ready to eat. Wild garlic and leek, too. Lately I eat lots of sweet potatoes right out of the woodstove, Irish potato and cabbage soup, bread (thanks to my wife) and rice (thanks to my J-mom). 
January 20. Shikigami recently did a post on Winter Allies, Inaka Life wrote about a Winter Cache and Purelandmountain covered Winter Gold, so continuing on the same theme, here you see Winter Candy. It was a slow, patient and hands-on process to get these. It required hand-peeling, rack stringing, and massaging every 3 to 5 days for several weeks. They’re called hoshigaki (hand-dried persimmons). hoshi means dried and gaki is from kaki, the Japanese word for persimmon. I made 200 of them.
January 19. It hasn’t snowed here in weeks, and I believe the only precipitation we’ve got has been in the form of frost. I wonder if people aren’t dehydrated, because today when I asked a student who he thought the healthiest person is, he said Steve Jobs, because Steve eats sushi. Anyway, back at the garten, vegetables thrive in the raised keyhole bed.
Purple bombastic garlic doing what it does best: being purple; Cabbage and broccoli at hand; Celery spreads; Vainy purple cabbage:
January 17. So the Terdfarts Police said I can’t park my Rear Cars {pic} on the side of the road, because they’re in the way or some such, unlike and different from the “auto”-mobiles that use the same space to park.
This goes back to a question I’ve been asking for years: Will the system allow us to be more sustainable than the status quo of sustainable if we wanted to? In my location, it seems, time and time again the answer is proving to be a NO. Grr! So I put together a garten-dock; import/export hub. Below you see it:
To date adams guild™ Vs. State:
January 16. Acorns! In 2009, Inaka Life wrote a detailed piece on harvesting and preparing them, and that link goes to it, and just thereafter I back-filled a small Stone Oak, or マテバシイ in Japanese, in the garten here. Since then I’ve been scouting old Oak trees around my general area, and then waiting, watching and, at times, harvesting. Here you see a fraction of my keep:
January 15. Brodoland breaks it down about the source code of the Matrix:
What the video (I think) was saying is that, at the fundamental level of the basic building blocks of the universe, we are all made up of the same thing, which is pure consciousness or pure potentiality. And not just people, but trees and rocks, and cars and oil rigs, and the moon and sun and stars, all are “potentially” connected.
That doesn’t mean that you and I are the same person. Individuality exists in the “classical” Newtonian world of our experience, but what string theory seems to say is that spirit exists as well, and that “pure conciousness,” “pure potentiality,” “the unified field” is the One Taste of the Buddhist, the Face of God of western religion.
I thought the very same thing about the video and the science. Really cool, and inspirational. But my last point about consciousness, or the “Source Code” being over-rated, was a follow-up to my realization just after watching the video, which, by the way, had me assuming that this theory is being explored and shared for the greater good of it all; a way to a better life:
“Even if we all figured out that consciousness is everything and we* are all one, I still don’t think it’ll create paradise, because we all have different visions of paradise, and the strongest reality-creators would create their own paradises at the expense of others. Like they do now! And anyone whose power exceeded their perception, even if they meant well, would tend to create heaven inside their perception while creating hell outside it, like they do now!
Maybe you can see where I’m going with this. The illusion isn’t reality, it’s consciousness. And enlightenment is not realizing that YOU are the universe, and the universe is you, but that consciousness is as much dangerous as it is not. Like Nature!
*Waves of vibration = You, me, and everything in the universe(s).“
January 14. I have nothing to say about the ongoing war that isn’t completely obvious. If anyone is just now tuning in, over the past few days (inspired by Brodoland) I’ve been writing about the Matrix, so let’s go back into it for a second, because somewhere in here, in some dimension, at some space and time and interval and axis, there are apparently:
January 13. A loose end from the other day on my idea about the Matrix. I think it’s a mistake to put consciousness at the center and trust it absolutely, and brush off reality as just illusion or hologram. Saying we are all connected at the most fundamental level is designed more to be inspirational than helpful, like it is now! And in practice people and the Matrix make exceptions, like they do now! I like the idea that there is something deeper, forever and always, and there is no end to change or trouble or opportunity.
In his latest post, The Blood of the Earth, or Pulp Nonfiction, JMG divulges on his latest realization that the world as we now know it has become a pulp fantasy novel. I think he’s on to something.
January 12. It’s warm enough here at noon to work in the garten wearing a thin fleece sweater, and cold enough at night to skateboard freely on the car-less roads without breaking a sweat.
January 11. Enter the Matrix! Brodoland posts a video that blows my mind and raises some questions for me at the same time. Even if we all figured out that consciousness is everything and we* are all one, I still don’t think it’ll create paradise, because we all have different visions of paradise, and the strongest reality-creators would create their own paradises at the expense of others. 
Like they do now! And anyone whose power exceeded their perception, even if they meant well, would tend to create heaven inside their perception while creating hell outside it, like they do now!
Maybe you can see where I’m going with this. The illusion isn’t reality, it’s consciousness. And enlightenment is not realizing that YOU are the universe, and the universe is you, but that consciousness is as much dangerous as it is not. Like Nature!
*Waves of vibration
January 10. Today, this from 2009 on California’s compost wizard, Tim Dundon. And here’s a great discussion over the phone between Richard Heinberg, James Howard Kunstler, Nicole Foss, Dmitri Orlov and Noam Chomsky. The discussion begins after the news bulletin and lead-in music (about 7:00 into the audio).
January 9. Peace, brothers and sisters, is what we need just now. The only way I can make sense of the coming attack on Iran is to see it as a giant cult suicide. I think US and gang will be clobbered, but not before sparking a war that will be fought in a few regions, taking the world as we know it down a notch or two. What will happen here in Japan is anybody’s guess.
January 8. Farmish is a great little website showing what land rental prices (for growing food) landlords can get away with in the city. It’s also a look into the urban future: Farmish was started by a parking lot management company, 不動産工房.
January 7. More prudence from JMG in his latest, Waiting for the Great Pumpkin. Basically, everything a-going on the world over is simply moving us all a few spaces forward in the long, slow crash that’s been going on for years. In short, modern civilization is grinding down rather than screeching to a halt.
January 6. Internal housekeeping. I’ve split this main, lo-ng page into two halves: the one you are looking at being that of 2011 and now (only 22,200 words), and the other half being that of 2010 and before. The other half is here. I’ve also moved most of the older comments over there as well, so if you want to read something you said to me a few years ago you’ll have to go over there.
Next, brodoland writes,
I’m with T on the Fellowship as you know. http://i.imgur.com/J8jfJ.jpg
(Does that make me the Southern Extreme or does Kyushu Ranger have that distinction?)
Yes!, when climate change boomerangs into the Ice Age I’ll be headed down to KR’s place. (^o^)/ Glad to hear that you’re *in*, too, B. Fellowship’s roots, spread.
January 5. JHK sticks up his new 2012 Forecast: Bang and Whimper, which is draconian yet eloquent. On Japan, he says:
That sore beset kingdom is suffering all the blowback of modern times at once: the Godzilla syndrome up in Fukushima; a demographic collapse; an imminent bond crisis; the collapse of export market partners; and a long, agonizing death spiral of its banks. I stick by a prediction I tendered back in March, after the deadly tsunami: Japan will decisively opt for a return to pre-industrial civilization. Why not? The rest of the world will be dragged kicking and screaming to the same place. Let Japan get there first and enjoy the advantage of the early adapter – back to an economy of local, hand-made stuff, rigid social hierarchy, folkloric hijinks in whispering bamboo groves, silk robes, and frequent time outs for the tea ceremony.
Keep in mind that JHK whole-hardheartedly believes, as I tend to, that nations have already begun to shrink back into their corners – and that according to Jeff Brown’s Export Land Theory, which basically says that oil exports will decline at a far faster rate than the decline in oil production alone – the nations with the least amount of oil will become pre-industrialized first. And factor in War (Think current situation in the Strait of Hormuz) and the pace of decline quickens.
I also tend to think that JHK gets that ordinary people in Japan are competent and decent, and that nothing yet has led to a movement from industrial to local organic agriculture, but will – because commercial fertilizer(oil) is a luxury, not a necessity. When it gets too expensive, we won’t go berzerk — we’ll remember the soil.
January 3. Calling all Permaculturists and/or Transitioners in Japan who are looking for mountain land and have an interest in the greater Ena area {map}. There’s enough for-sale-property up there to go around.
Click the Map below to find out more about the Ena Land and its’ greater area that I’m interested in.
January 1, 2012. I’m back from the mountain land, that is – the mountain land that I want to buy. It’s in Ena, Gifu, and I’ve already been there once and written about it over at adams guild™ Mountain Land Trust. This time I took my kids, and below you see what we discovered today. Top to bottom, right to left:
1. The land – South facing, receiving winter’s sun. 2. There’s only one road in to the land, and it runs directly through an 18 hole golf course. Looking Northeast the Alps stand tallest, an unmistakable white ridgeline thrusting into the heavens. 3. At the land my kids survey the grade. Steep at parts, they conclude. 4. 100 paces up from the land affords a 360 degree view of Ena Plateau, plus a most refreshing look of Kiso River at the bottom of Ena Gorge. 5. Down river on the opposite side: Civilization (for kids). 6. Down the road, a village park opens up. 7. Ena Plateau drapped in Chestnut trees, a post-carbon world Shangri la?
January 1, 2012. Happy New Year! I’ll start the year off with:
1. Cultural Inertia.
Very few people living in Japan want to transition from all-you-can-eat nuclear electricity, to stairs and hand-held fans and woodstoves. You might think that the ongoing collapse of the oil/growth economy will take care of this, but remember the Vikings in Greenland in Jared Diamond’s Collapse? They chose to die of starvation rather than eat fish. You might think the big obstacle to ridding ourselves of Nuclear electric is politicians or corporate greed or finding the alternative, but it’s really just Cultural Inertia.
2. Return Drift (to the country).
This theme is stolen from Kirinclassic via g-pot in 2009, but I do think it will be reoccurring this year, especially for men.
…with the failing economy and more job cuts to come, I feel a lot of country peeps who went to try their luck in the cities will have no option to return to the safety of the family home, if only to have a roof over their head. Whether that will significantly impinge on The Great Die-off is debatable, but better to have food in your stomach and a roof over your head than rough it in A Big Smoke, non?
3. The System is Not Fragile.
Many of us would have predicted that the triple-whammy of Earthquake/Tsunami/Nuclear disaster that destroyed the North and crippled factory lines and transportation routes and central electric, plus some refineries, would have sparked economic Armageddon, or totally collapsed Japan. But really, all it did was move us a few spaces forward in the long, slow crash that’s been going on for years.
4. Ron Paul in the News.
The big question is whether or not he’ll become the new U.S. President, but at least he’ll finally be featured in the news in Japan. I’m guessing he’ll get marginalized, and nobody here will ever know that he actually represents the values of mainstream America, and that despite this mainstream America won’t actually be able to back Ron Paul – It’ll be a collection of interests and habits that has become so bulky and rigid and cannot stand any deep change.
5. Get Your Ass in Gear.
This is not just something I’m advising myself to do, but something I’m observing. Half the people I know are already in the middle of big changes, aggressively paying debts off and stuffing more money under their futons, increasing the number of bodies under one roof to save housing costs, choosing a long-term landbase, planting fruit trees, making local connections, obtaining tools…
December 29. This will be my last post for this year, 2011, and I want to wrap everything up here with a BOOM! So for those of you who’ve already joined, { knuckle punch }, and for anybody else who’s interested:
About: ~ Fellowship ~ is assembling inner circle immediately, because no man is a brotherhood unto himself, especially in Japan. Think of this less as a club concerned with secret handshakes and more as a group in support of living the good life. And all are welcome to join. The Fellowship also boasts organic Amish insurance*, in case member(s) are temporarily down and out.
*Amish Insurance = Example 1 (of millions): If
your barn burns down, the fellowship helps to
rebuild it.
December 24. I’ll be busy for the holiday and maybe not posting again until next week some time, but since it’s Christmas eve, I’d like to write to anyone reading “Hope you have a wonderful holiday season.” If you get an hour and a half of free time over the holidays, check out this great documentary {vid} about a village in Siberia. Among other stuff, those guys fish, trap and grow vegetables.
December 23. My ongoing Satoyama Installment Project at adams guild™ takes on our fourth Ginkgo tree. This one, nothing short of a TALL order. You see it below. The effect and the basic ideas for the installment of a Ginkgo tree landscape are: 1. A local and natural long-term solution to the problem of disturbed food and tree balance* to all animals, including humans, 2. Ginkgo are pretty much the most epic looking trees you’ll ever see (especially in the Fall!), and 3. They can contribute to peace-building, placemaking and greenspacing. * 1. Where I live there is a low ratio between local food and people/the fury and feathered, and 2. Where I live there is a low ratio between trees and people.
December 22. I’ve uploaded a new video to my YouTube account.
“Here you see Muscovy ducks, Grey and Marilyn. Originally from the mountains of Hyogo prefecture, they’ve lived here in the garten since March of 2011. They’re huge, at least twice as big as an aigamo or a mallard, and the male is an alpha-territorialist: not letting crows into the garten, and sometimes me!“
Also, there was this recent article on #Occupy Portland about how they outsmarted the police there. The idea is, instead of staying in one place where the police can corral and pepper spray you, you move around town in circles. Tactically, this makes a bunch of sense, but intellectually, this would make even more sense if people were to make circles outside of the city center, maybe on dirt or grass, and do tangible change by themselves.
Next, I was recently reminded of Atony F.F. Boy`s In Food and Energy in Japan – How will Japan feed itself in the 21st Century? {pdf}, written back in 2000. I think the stuff said from the middle of page 58 to page 63 sums up the future of Japan rather well: it’ll be a steady series of changes in the background of our daily lives, with occasional local catastrophes. And for the duration of all this, the “what can we do to save the entire planet?” rhetoric will probably devolve into “what can we do to survive here, to help others survive here, to minimize suffering and prepare for recovery here?” and the economy will shift gears into something we can’t imagine yet.
December 21. Happy Solstice! The day after tomorrow, TALL change cometh to the garten here. ZING!
December 20. Still on the subject of permaculture and doing stuff, fuck it, I’m starting my very own national permaculture-gardening competition {in Japan} that recognizes and rewards people(s) using stable* permaculture techniques to produce good food for the benefit of everything and the wider human community. adams guild™ is calling on everyone to become drivers of food security in their communities by entering the 2012 adams guild™ permaculture-gardening competition. 10,000 yen, 3 aigamo ducklings, a pat on the back and a bag full of Purple Bombastic Garlic seed goes to the winner(s)!
Entry forms and more information about the competition is available from the project coordinators, Grey and Marilyn Muscovy (left). Send them mail at kenelwood, and then hotmail, and the (co.jp) thing, or follow the adams guild™ blog. Entries can also just be sent to the above e-mail address. Entries close on, never.
ENDS
Official sponsors: Earth, adams guild™, other?
December 19. This post is not meant to be a joke, and is to show the reality of where I live in Japan. The wife took the picture you see below. I held a permaculture workshop today at adams guild™, but nobody came… Except for what’s already here, like the garlic or the trees or Cress, an aigamo duck that lives here. The biggest weakness of the land here is that it’s neither remote nor urban enough.
It would be totally cool if the road in to the garten was just a trail leading through a few hundred feet of dense woods, or if I was surrounded by the subway system and tree-lined streets with actual sidewalks. That would certainly attract permaculturists, and probably the organic people too:
But I can’t do that! I’m somewhere in the middle and on the fringe, that is – in between urban and rural, a backwater with few trees and no town planning.
So I workshop like an independent crow in a suburban Japanese desert.
December 18. Holy crap! I remember a few years ago (maybe 3) seeing grainy Australian Milkwood Permaculture videos on YouTube, when they had just started living in the country and sharing their learnings… At present they have world-famous Permaculture designers over to their land and charge students $650 dollars for a 3 day permaculture course.
This is cool, but I much rather like reading about people living well in hard times with no talent or money, just relaxed persistence — Free grainy videos on YouTube teach me more.
December 17. Ten years ago this would have taken me to the four corners of Japan. Today, however, it’ll just carry stuff around town here. For any Toyota Hi-ace fans out there, it’s a 1998 – Hiace Wagon Super Custom Living Saloon EX. Mint condition. Only 30,000 km. 2400 cc. Curtains. 4 sunroofs. Goes 100km on 10-11L (24 miles per gallon). Seats 8, sleeps 2 adults w/ some kids, and inversely, can hold a cord of firewood or saplings or tools:
December 16. Four years ago today, I was in the heart of Nagoya city sitting at a desk. I recall myself along with my co-office fauna not really doing anything productive, and having to make up stupid job related projects just to kill time. I knew then, as I do now, that that sort of life ain’t gonna make it. I’ve had visions of the salaried worker, one by one, dropping out of the system, or being pushed out, but the salary man in Japan persists like mosquitoes in late summer. He’s resilient; rather good at making silly jobs up!
In John Michael Greer’s latest, The Future Can’t Pay Its Bills, he talks about what may become of these men, as the immense superstructure held up by cheap oil continues to unravel:
Over the long run, the mismatch is a problem that will solve itself; once the unraveling of the industrial economy goes far enough, the superstructure will come apart, leaving a great many human resource managers, corporate image consultants, strategic marketing specialists, and the like with about as much chance of finding jobs in their fields as they would have had 17th-century Osaka or 14th-century Milan.
Ah yes, but where will these men go, then? I’ll explore that in a later post.
December 15. Loose ends from yesterday. John Robb at Global Guerrillas has been on a roll, with posts that really hit home for me. His latest is Personal Brands and Resilience. The idea is, your own personal brand can help make YOU more resilient, and you probably can’t get that way through a middle man.
Steaming ahead with the idea, I’ll say that my own Personal Brand is KenElwood and adams guild™, and what it does is give me leeway to buy and plant trees, work less, study and investigate, and engineer a dream into a reality. That said, though, I’m more interested in helping the bit of EARTH where I live be more resilient.
So I backfill trees – BIG and small, and of all descriptions.
December 14. I’ve been totally neglecting to post on my everliving Satoyama Installation project because I’ve had so many other things going on. Today I finally got around to buying a 15 year(ish) old Ginkgo tree. It’s more than 10 meters in height, and a female one of course… NUTS! Price tag: 50,000 yen. How is it that in a mere 5 days of teaching English I can buy this tree? Food bearing trees are ridiculously undervalued. Below you see the one I bought (still at the nursery):
December 13. Except for the parts about Pluto and Ron Paul, Chris Hedges {vid} sounds a lot like my father of 68. I’ll go further and say that the entire game is a distraction from yourself and principle(s) and a way forward. If you can step out of the box □ for even two seconds, you can see this.
Right now the World of Right Wing Fascists or the Death of the Liberal Class or the One Percent, benefits the larger world of industrial civilization, partly by creating jobs in the industry, but mostly by giving people a world where they can consume at will. But the subworld has an optimal size, or an optimal proportion of our attention. Instead of focusing our binoculars on those who are doing the suckering, let’s put down the binoculars and spend time and energy not being suckered.
December 11. In this great interview from 2007, Namaiki’s Green Grafitti, David Duval Smith shares how he got into guerrilla gardening in Japan, and what it means.
December 9. 
Over the years I’ve noted a few atypical ways to split kindling, some downright dangerous, and others unique and clever. Last year I saw this guy on YouTube splitting sugi butts with an old hatchet, backwards, or, upside down.
The most common way to make little sticks (kindling) out of big sticks (chunks of firewood) is to hold the firewood chunk upright on a chopping block in one hand and take a good swing at it with a hatchet. But I think that approach is just plain dangerous. What I do is – and this might fall into the “odd way of splitting category” – with a wooden-mallet, drive the iron blade of a Japanese Nata into a chunk of wood. Torque is applied using the wooden handle of the Nata to complete the split. You see this action in the picture up above. Next, a discovery and a question:
Japan’s current campaign to sell roof-top solar systems to the masses, proclaims “売る時代“, or the time has come to Sell your homemade electricity. But after digging deep and crunching a few numbers, I find it hard to believe the average residential solar system is injecting a large amount of current back into the grid. More than likely the panels are just reducing the load on the grid and not contributing at all, just freeing up more centralized nuclear electric to be bought and paid for by everyone else. And the money these solar homes are getting isn’t actually for what energy they make and distribute, but just a small cut of the continual profits nuclear electric is making. So my question is, does this not mean that our roof tops are merely pawns in the energy game?
I think what we need just now are our own neighborhood or villagewide ‘inter-grids’, linking up our rooftop solar panels, that benefit our community by not needing nuclear electric, increasing energy security and breaking free from our reliance on finite fossil fuels. Power to the People. So long as solar electricity feeds into the centralized national grid, we’ll just get renewable energy projects that benefit the energy giants by making them money and providing them jobs.
December 8. I’ve been meaning to upload videos to YouTube for years, but I’ve been really busy seeing about a girl and a garten. Now that I’ve got some free time, I expect to be posting a few random videos at my new account. That link goes to it. My first video is up, and it’s a sort of thank you video to the guys at Original Skateboards in the mountains of New Jersey, U.S.A..
December 7. Here’s Patrick Whitefield, British permaculture fellow, being interviewed by Rebecca Hosking for her BBC documentary A Farm for the Future:
Whitefield: “You know, people often think that there are two ways of doing things: one is by drudgery, and the other is by chucking fossil fuel at it. Now permaculture is about the third way of doing things, and that is by design. By conscious design.“
Hosking: “So you’re designing the labor out, or are you designing the need for that energy out?“
Whitefield: “Both.“
The interview is at 29:15, but the whole video is worth watching. At least skip ahead to 37:00 and catch the part on forest gardening.
December 6. In case anyone was wondering, the little ™ next to adams guild stands for Transition Movement, and not trade mark. I’m doing a lot of little things here: trading stuff, cleaning organic food off the floor, burning candles and keeping ducks, and here’s a list in no particular order of three things that I like to keynote my outfit with:
The last one, longboarding, is something I’m getting into sort of as a lark, and of course it’s for some downhill, free ride and commuting, but it’s also a tangible symbol of my ongoing Transition Movement. For me it says that if you’re paying attention, you can make a good society out of anything from ponzi scheme to anarchy. So politics is secondary, and the important thing is for more and more of us to practice constant awareness of our own mental states. “Be the change – go Longboarding“, or something like that.
And without further ado, here you see my new 40 inch pintail ‘Original’ longboard. It’s a One Board Quiver, and that link goes to the guys who made it. It’s 7 ply of Canadian Maple, sitting low on wide trucks, with a wheel base well-suited for Japanese roads:
December 5. JohnE writes,
I like the solar golf cart link. That would pull your 力車。 If that can be grandfathered into the electric granny cart/wheelchair category or even the 50cc category it would be perfect for village use. About half the price of the “Gorilla ATV” http://www.doranev.com/e-ATV-from-Doran-Electric-Vehicles-EV.htm
Yeah: Fabricate solar top stickers like these guys did, and stick them atop used golf carts. As the world economic crash deepens, and local golf clubs close their doors, there’s gonnna be a lot of used golf carts come online. A quick look at Jetro reveled lots of them being sold to abroad.
December 4. Celente, of Trend A\ert, got screwed big time by the Loan Sharks. Listen to his passionate spontaneous rebuke { here }. The world of money really is all imaginary, and fascism is real.
December 2. If nobody’s thought of this yet, then I want to mention it here:
The catch is that the maximum speed is 25mph (40 km/h). We could have solar driving right now, at a speed that would have seemed miraculous 150 years ago, and instead we’re wasting the last of the oil to maintain our ridiculous driving speeds, because we’re in so much of a hurry.
Apply to the countryside, GO !
December 1. So here you see my new 45 inch pintail longboard. Scratch that. Apart from it having undesirable trucks and wheels, and apart from it having a different design from which I specifically requested, the 45 inch Pintail Longboard I bought on the interent just wasn’t the board for my location, and for me. The board itself lacked flex and was unresponsive, the all important prerequisite for any board, and to be honest, I think it’s tough to swing a 45 inch board around a Japanese street corner.
So I traded it in for a 40 inch higher performance board.
November 30.
An inspiring tipi project from Inaka Life. My first thought was OK, this guy gets the Father of the Year award, and I only wish I could be that cool. My second thought was Nah, he’s just prototyping for when he gets that bugout location just up the mountain. Anyway, my kids are 5 and 3, and in need of some bugout space of their own, so I copied IL with this indoor version. You see it at the left.
November 29. Warning back-to-the-land geeks! Below is a link to the absolute biggest nationwide on-line database { thousands upon thousands } of free to cheap country ag-land and homes. Caution – Click at your own risk.
Also, David Holmgren discusses the difference between popular revolution and practical reform { audio }; how demanding system-change can’t shake a stick at the permainsurance that comes with modeling the world that we actually want to be.
November 28. I found a good 45″ Longboard, but I’m not posting pictures of it until I break it in. I’m cruising around with Vetiver {music} in my head, and the real point of having a longboard is not to do epic mountain runs, but to drive less for the rest of my life.
From the New York Times, A Quiet Push to Grow Crops Under Cover of Trees.
November 27. So I wanted a new car, and a small one since I’ll only be hauling stuff around the neighborhood, and one without mandatory motor-vehicle inspection that requires payment every two years, because in a serious crash I won’t have any money to pay for it. But here’s the problem: in more than six months of looking, I have yet to see a single one for sale used. Until today! Below you see them. They are: Two Rear Cars and a heavy duty 2-tire handcart, all – for 1,500 yen, or 500 yen a piece. Refurbishment work begins now.
November 26. The Archdruid in Bringing it Down to Earth (23 Nov):
No amount of protesting is going to refill the once vast and now mostly depleted reserves of cheap oil and other resources that gave America its age of extravagance, nor is protest going to do anything to stop the decline of America as a world power or the rise of competing powers.
And instead, the big idea is to become the change you want to see by doing something.
November 26. Back to my place: Here you see a recent potato harvest, some new Damson Plum/ Bartlett Pear/ Pawpaw saplings (In Japan the Damsons are sold as シュガープルーン, or Sugar Prune, and the Bartletts as バットレット.), Marigolds in bloom and a Blueberry bush in splendid fall colors:
November 25. Talking about the 99.9%, Max Keiser says it out loud: { video }
It’s not going to stop until the peasants realize that they’re peasants. America is a nation of 329 million peasants and they need a proper peasant revolt, but they don’t want to think of themselves as peasants…They’re delaying [deferring] the inevitable.
Also, Brodoland discusses why nuclear power equals state failure, and why solar farms feasibly can’t right the wrong.
This is exactly what I was thinking. From purely a self-sufficient and less-scary energy perspective, obviously the very idea of using solar panels to make electricity is a good one (maybe not for those who live where key minerals are mined*), but need it be in mega-arrays on top of arable land?
The de-centralized model of “distributed energy” (solar panels on rooftops or in parking lots) is being further ignored for vast central solar parks on land where we can grow stuff. Why? I think because distributed energy is less efficient for the big companies and technically challenging (amongst other things) for everyone.
Right now, could you partner with your neighbors, say 4 or 5 of them who have solar systems, and sell excess energy to the neighborhood ?
But some future system of locally networked energies could be robust, if decison-making is distributed (You and Me), manufacturing is local and autonomous, and you can re-charge your devices over a fire.
Related:
In this old Archdruid post, Profligacies of Scale, he talks about homescale windpower, made by hand from scrap and charging your battery, and how it’s more realistic and sustainable than giant turbines, manufactured from fresh resources and powering a centralized grid.
November 24. Sorry if yesterday’s post was explicit. I’m going through Otosan withdrawal.
November 23. (permalink) I’m not satisfied with my writing about time as a □ box, and not a ○ circle or a ー line. So I want to take a stab at what box □ actually looks like:
Imagine you’re on a bus; on your way home from work or whatever. Imagine the bus doesn’t stop and you can’t get off. This is Earth. And the other passengers, along with you, make up the inhabitants.
Over time groups form at each corner of the bus, but not at the front, because that’s where the bus driver sits, and we’ll come back to him in a minute. Now, you might not wonder why the inhabitants form groups, because after all that’s what people naturally tend to do, but you might wonder why each group has different visions of paradise.
In one corner, there’s the Imperialists. They send out scouts on reconnaissance, followed by retrieval units and assassins. On a good day they conquer water condensation from the North side window of the bus. And on an even better day they compel a Peasant to join their ranks, not by letting them enjoy all the riches, but by providing water drops and entertainment.
In one corner, there’s the Peasants. They toil and keep to themselves, but sometimes they write in code speaking openly against Imperialistic rulers, and other times in protest they might cut off a few heads.
In one corner, there’s the Permaculturists. They study the interior of the bus, and figure out a way to build a good mass-consciousness to manifest not needing the Imperialists, and work toward a whole group where everyone has their needs met unconditionally forever so no one has leverage to command.
In one corner there’s YOU, watching it all from a certain vantage point. As it turns out, the groups formed various visions of paradise because they all wondered where they were going. Some spread rumors about the bus driver, saying he was God, and that he was taking them to a better place. Some reckoned they would create their own paradises at the expense of others. Some thought they could make it all better by working with the bus and not against it.
Then, suddenly, in an instant, the bus crashes into a brick wall and bursts into flames !
November 22.
It’s great because otherwise people couldn’t get something, but it’s silly because you can just barely squeeze a smallish persimmon into it, and it quadruples as our advert flyer, food menu, entrance ticket and carrier. It’s a brown paper bag. I don’t want to makes lots of money and deplete the landbase, I want to grow both forest and alliances with my neighbors, casually and slowly… So these bags will be distributed with care. It reads:
“果樹、ハーブ、ナッツ、ベリー、野菜狩りの森農園。
For 500yen, you can enter the forest garten and fill up this brown paper bag with miscellaneous things. The limit is one bag per person per day. There are scores of things to be harvested throughout the seasons – everything from herbage to fruiting trees and bushes, to vegetables. adams guild™ bares no signage, so see the reverse side of this bag for information on in-season things and a map of our location.“
Spring of 2012 -> ※
November 21. FreeB writes again, this time about my circle, line and box metaphor:
About this idea of time as a box. If I’m following what you’re saying, life isn’t a repetitive circle but maybe just a concept right? A box that is sort of moving as we move. Past and Present don’t exist. Am I interpreting you right? Anyway, I like what you said about civilization seeing time as a line. Couldn’t agree more. Everybody is racing to reach the next point down the line. Trouble is that the point doesn’t actually exist.
On the idea of time as a box:
Where ○ Permaculture (reincarnating state of life and death) draws from nature, and ー dominant culture (steady state civilization) draws from progression, the □ box draws from a reality that in the strictest sense, nothing is sustainable — even the sun will burn out, and then we’ll all be gone ! So I guess my point is that what we live in is a box □, neither moving forward nor backwards, or even in complete circles, and instead of dividing everything into “sustainable/not sustainable,” we should ask, “How long will it last?” and “What role does it play in your world?”
When you can answer those two questions, a sort of “stability” within □ box can be achieved.
November 20. I’ve added Mario Anton [blog] to my Japan Peoples links.
Changing the subject, 5 years ago I remember reading this well-written article called Finding Flow, about this guy homesteading, longboarding and potting deep in the woods of the North Eastern United States. I thought, “I wanna be just like this guy, but in Japan.”
I’m not even close ! Still dreaming [vid].
Next, here are some internet comments from 2010: Japanese on why Japanese ought not move to the countryside, because we understand that it just doesn’t work. For example, a large majority of us are in debt or we need cars to survive or the Japanese countryside and “slow life” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be or we’ve become so used to our sterile city environs that we wouldn’t make it in the country.
Lastly, at the CLJ forum mhi posts an important link to new “solar farmers” in Niigata. I maintain that it won’t work in Japan because it’s enemy #1 to centrally controlled Nuclear electric, not to mention that Nuclear electric owns the grid ! I think this is why Tetsunari Iida [vid] suggests that we take back the grid, and re-distribute it to less-scary energy companies.
November 20. Kyushu Ranger writes,
I’d easily ‘invest’ a couple of tsubo and leave you to plant it up…lets face it I’m not going to be up there all seasons extracting the fruits of your labors from where I am located but people like to help out with good projects (like the Afan). Fellowsip and all that.
Very cool, KR. I think this is more of the direction I want to go in. I don’t even really want to ‘own’ the land, but because the system offers no middle ground, I have to give a bunch of money to somebody to grow food there or watch the stars there or have friends come there. So again, if there are any other Permaculturists and/or Transitioners in Japan who are looking for mountain land, and have an interest in Ena Gorge, let’s work something out. Maybe I can’t buy the land, but maybe you can? I haven’t mentioned this yet, but there’s a home for sale there, and there are woodlots for sale on either side of the one that I want to buy. Actually, there’re a whole bunch of woodlots for sale.
November 19. So the idea was to trade in our 2005 station wagon and 1993 kei-van, for one used fourth generation diesel-powered Hiace van, with a plan to eventually run it on home-brewed bio-diesel. But because the town where we live has outlawed the ownership of diesel-powered vehicles made before 2004, we were stuck with the option of either buying a post 2004 model, which we couldn’t afford (in monies), or the older petrol-powered equivalent, which we could afford because it was basically free.
Here you see it. It’s a 1998 – Hiace Wagon Super Custom Living Saloon EX. 30,000 km. 2400 cc. 3 sunroofs. Goes 100km on 10-11L (24 miles per gallon). Seats 8, and inversely, can hold a cord of firewood or saplings or tools:
Next order of business: A road trip to Julian’s place in Fukushima.
November 18. 恵那峡遊覧船 (1) [vid], shows Ena Gorge from the bottom. If you look up long enough you can just see the Land I want to buy. If there are any other Permaculturists and/or Transitioners in Japan who are looking for mountain land, and have an interest in Ena Gorge, do let me know. There’s enough for-sale-property to go around. We could be the bottom panel in this picture.
With the power of the internet, you can get a huge amount of information and investigate properties in ways that even the best agents don’t have time for. They have automated systems that can send you listings based on things like square meters and price and grade, but they can’t sort them for anything qualitative or complex, like soil content or trees or deindustrial future value.
On Permaculture, I think Taro Tamai [vid] said it best: “We are not trying to race down the hill; to see who can go the fastest. We are trying to make the most of the terrain. There are so many approaches to the same line, and how you decide to express yourself on a slope reflects your style and personality.“
November 17. I can’t go this time, but maybe you can? Kai, of Living Permaculture, is putting together a permaculture group in Tokyo, and they’re having their first ever meetup on the weekend of December 3-4.
Also, How To Get Planning Permission on Non-Development Land in the United Kingdom, written by and for permaculturists and transitioners. In Japan, the man to speak to is Jacob Reiner, founder of Earth Embassy. And then there’s this book from 1992 called Inaka no kaikata, kurashikata, or How to Buy and Live in the Countryside.
November 16. The future is here: permablitzing, where a bunch of volunteers gather to transform someone’s yard into a garden on permaculture principles. It’s happening in Australia. Japan, take note !
Also, some inspiration to keep moving: “Longboard Pintails” [vid].
November 15.
Ena Plateau Map circa Edo period (by 岩村在阿木橋場)
FreeB writes,
“Ena Gorge looks to be a nice find. If something like that was to be found in Yamaguchi I’d probably jump on it.“
A lot of Ena,Gifu reminds me of John Michael Greer’s Betting on the Rust Belt, where he talks about why America’s Rust Belt might be a good place to live in the deindustrial future:
“Among the likely beneficiaries of these changes are the towns that thrived best in an earlier, more regional economy — those that are well served by rail and water transport, surrounded by farming regions that don’t depend on irrigation, not too far from major markets, and provided with ample and inexpensive real estate for the factories and warehouses of a downscaled and relocalizing industrial economy.“
At The Land (see map above) I plan to spend time looking up at the stars, build a lean-to or a small hut, convince friends to visit there, plant fruit trees and raise ducks. It’s going to take a few years to get it all together, and I’ll still spend time in Lowland Aichi as long as we have cities or climate change doesn’t boomerang into global cooling. You never know!
Greater Ena is a mountain plateau, and is more or less what JMG describes above, not to mention that Ena Gorge is this BIG fresh water hole, surrounded by an even bigger and untouchable bread basket. I’m talking about whole stands of Chestnut trees, or “the bread trees”. The trees themselves are climatically versatile, tolerating both heat and chill – from the 16th to the 19th century, Japanese inhabitants encouraged the growth of chestnut trees as an important food source during cold-induced famines of the Little Ice Age.
November 14. Some nice images of a cool bug-out cabin in the woods.
November 13. I’ve been researching Mountain Land prices on the internet for years, and have even visited a few properties. It’s tedious work, usually wishing yourself into a bad deal or a disaster. There’re so many variables; so many steps – Both, in dealing with the human “owners” and then the landbase itself, i.e., soil composition, elevation, trees, et al. “Don’t fall in love with a piece of land you’ve seen”, I keep telling myself, “There’s more to it than you know.”
Below you see a piece of land I scouted yesterday. It’s 245 tsubo for 200 man yen (surrounded by hundreds of thousands of tsubo of wild land), top of the water shed, 360 meters above sea level, at the end of the road, onsen, south facing, mixed wood (chestnut, oak, pine, dogwood, wild persimmon, cedar, etc.), Leptosol soil, 10% steep, 50% sloping and 40% flat (more details here) – I think it’s exactly what I have been looking for.
Then the catch: You have to drive through a golf course to get there ! [PIC]
But does it really matter ? Perchance it’s a good thing ?
November 10.
Kyushu Ranger writes in response to my drying of Persimmons,
Why don’t you start a fund/trust for this? Donators get a few mixed nuts/hoshigaki for New Years? I’d gladly start the ball rolling, as it’s a good cause.
Do you mean to say that I ought to include this as part of the 3 year Fundraising Plan for my Mountain Land Trust ? Sounds like a good idea. At the left you can see that there’re lots of dried persimmons to come.
November 9. Kurashi shares some good ideas on Japanese agriculture protesters against Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), and says, “They realize that “free” trade is nothing but a massive assault that will force impossible conditions on their livelihoods. What is so “free” about that?”
Then he explains how it would hallow out rural Japan and further lower Japanese food self-sufficiency. I’m not sure I buy this. I mean, I totally understand the part about the majority of farmers and Farm Management Companies losing their subsidy money every year, and the part about JA losing out, but I think this is A distraction from the heart of the event – Let’s not forgot what system the protesters are protecting.
Intellectually, I think the (TPP) is a systematical face to the concept of agricultural death, as the Grim Reaper is a human face to the concept of human death. Which makes me think that: Instead of merely protesting TTP, I will advocate a class of agriculture that is able to orient a house’s foundation for appropriate solar gain, lead the construction of a compost bin, propose methods of integrated pest management, and make effective arguments against false dichotomies to people who seem committed to them.
November 8. My oldest daughter is 5 years old today, and peeling persimmons for hoshigaki (hand-dried persimmons) has begun. hoshi means dried and gaki is from kaki, the Japanese word for persimmon. They’re great because otherwise people couldn’t get something to eat, but it’s silly because to make good hoshigaki each persimmon has to be hand-peeled, strung onto a rack, and massaged every 3 to 5 days for several weeks.
It’s a slow, patient, hands-on process. This is my second time to make them, and if you see them over at Trad’er in a few months from now, that means I did it right:
November 7. Continuing with my silly policy of not writing about anything until after I’ve done it, I won’t say what I’m going to do with all these (234) Hachiya Persimmons. This is Otosan’s tree, and seeing how he’s not here to do this work anymore, I pick up the tools and take over from here. I left a few orange orbs hanging up high in the tree just in case he wants to come pick some:
November 5. HE was great. He wasn’t perfect, but he was great. He sometimes played with my kids while I was away. He told me secrets about the family, secrets about his daughter, and made countless old-man jokes in horrible English. He told me that I could be anything I wanted to, and often parted from indoor conversation to his garden “Nicotine time”, as he called it.
Of course there is way more to the man than just that, but he was my J-father, and I loved him. He is now dead. His heart failed…
Rest in Peace, Otosan.
November 4. PureLandMountain posts an important video ON FUKUSHIMA AND JAPAN NUCLEAR POWER TODAY. And here’s a link to three possible futures of my neighborhood, the bottom panel is the permaculture one.
November 3. I’ve been casually looking for mountain land for 7 ! years, but it’s really hard. You have to have lots of money and time to drive all over looking at places and asking around. And since moving onto the land where I live now, in lowland Aichi, I’ve been sidetracked with projects here.
But I’m getting serious again about finding and buying mountain land, so I’ve set up a 3 Year Fundraising Plan (2011-2014) for adams guild™ Mountain Land Trust, where I will document the strategic direction I want to go in with the land, money stuff, and the particulars of land I am scouting. The link above goes to it all.
November 2. Because I am a wannabe Nurseryman, under a big butterfly bush I pot up cuttings of rosemary, lavender, lemon balm and lemon grass; My empire of olives, grows; A gravebed, for Halloween, of elephant and purple bombastic garlic; Eight (8) ginyose chestnut saplings being sized up for Trad’er:
November 1. Bill Mollison had a book out on p-culture in the late 70′s (see Temperate Permaculture Strategies { Pt 1 }, { Pt 2 }, Pt 3 }, { pt 4 } [vids]), did a bunch of stuff after that, plus more books, and then permaculture became cult classic, but never mainstream, and here we are 30 years later and I just found out about it five years ago, on the internet.
These guys in Vermont (lat – 44°) have taught me a lot. Not about permaculture per se, (the more I learn about permaculture the less I feel like I know !), but that the operation they’ve got going on up there is what hip people in upland Japan, too, ought to be doing right now. Sepp Holzer [vid] and Masanobu Fukuoka [vid] are both keynote pioneers, but they’re also both mythical, and not here on the ground in the flesh.
In Japan – with already existing terraced hillsides, and infrastructure – permaculture is ripe for involvement and investment, we just need more people going on book tours and re-purposing farms.
ZING !
October 31. Happy Halloween. Evil spirits and ghosts, GO away ! Last year I tried growing orange pumpkins on someone elses plot on dead soil with no oil (commercial fertilizers), and most of the plants didn’t set pumpkins, and grew into spindly vines. This year I scratched growing them altogether, and waited until yesterday to buy them at a ridiculous discount. Their seeds are over at Trad’er, and here you see them on the watch:
October 30. (permalink) Over the past couple of weeks in a couple different posts I wrote that as the ongoing collapse continues we are going back full circle to peasants – and as such, more self-sufficient and furthermore, nicer to the planet – and that one of the big factors is that common people are more adaptable than the outgoing system(s). That wasn’t quite right, because if you look at history, and draw lines between peasantry and system in Japan, you see that most of us have been peasants living within system, and not changing it, all along.
Let me explain; The downward trend in the rural peasant population, or farmers, is basically a continuation of a trend beginning as early as the late Edo period, right on through to industrial development in the Meiji (1868-1912) and Taisho (1912-1926) periods, to today. The cities have taken needed labor from the farms, transforming peasant cultivators into low-paid peasant workers employed in factories, office buildings, the construction industry and the services.
And that explains it: Paradoxically, one of the cultural factors that changes the face of rural peasantry is economic security in a city, which can be created by abundant jobs. And it all happened not as a sudden mass upheaval, but organically from the actions of like-minded rural peasant individuals working together in small groups to create urban communities that in time made the Feudalistic State System irrelevant.
Holy shit.
I thought I saw time as a circle ○, and that civilization sees it as a line ー, but maybe it’s really just a box □ that within you choose peasantry. I’ll talk about which type of peasantry I choose, next time.
October 29. Is this a great metaphor [vid] or what? Here’s an explanation from 2008, and a summary from Elfael, Danger for Family Farmers in Japan.
Also, Welcome to Trad’er, I’ve added new mason bee blocks. I basically copied this guy in Oregon [vid], and he explains how to use them and why they’re important.
October 28. So I found an island for sale in Wakayama - a WHOLE island just off the coast. And mhi said it first here, so I’m going to run with the idea:
What we need is something like the Sharecar, or time-share condos, but with small farms and primitive cabins. We don’t necessarily need to go “back to the land” alone or in small groups, in fixed locations, full time…But the fact remains that there is a healthy dose of nature for each of us, and our society blocks it, forcing us to either have too much or not enough.
The first link above goes to the Island in question, and second link goes to mhi’s idea on what we could do there.
October 27. I’ve added Notes from the ‘Nog [blog] to my Japan Peoples links.
Also, I am now ping pong writing with Brodoland, and in his latest, A Quiet Revolution, he absolutely nails it: The next revolution won’t be televised, but something as mundane as billions of people deciding things for themselves. It reminds me of the Rise of the Bourgeois. In medieval Europe a new niche appeared, in which you could become powerful by manufacturing luxuries and managing commerce and finance. And this niche was filled, not by the most adaptable nobles, but by the most adaptable peasants! The nobles could not see the opportunity because they were too invested in the old system.
Now, of course, today’s system too is dying.
So, what new niche is opening up? As I mentioned a few weeks ago, one is: we’re going full circle back to peasants. Soon, someone who has converted their whole yard to food production will be better off than someone with billions of yen in stocks. There are many other niches too, take your pick. History is broken, GO !
October 26. Welcome to Trad’er, I’ve added Bay Nuts.
Also, Johne writes,
So, how does one join the fellowship?
To be honest, I don’t know. I wanted to mention the idea to you fellas at the Moot, but most of us have only ever met in person a few times, and some of us for the first time. And the idea is so like seventeenth century or something, perhaps too formal for a collection of informal guys. But when you think about it, it would be nice to say out loud that you are a-part of something with a sort of meaning that we just can’t find anywhere else in Japan.
I guess if you say that you’re “in”, then that will be that, and I will be willing to help you if need be.
I guess it’s that simple.
October 25. I am reminded of Brodoland’s Just Occupy Yourself, with this new Michael Albert post about Occupy to Self Manage, that explains in detail exactly why peaceful street protesting is unsustainable at best, and a waste of time at worst. Among protesters there’s a myth of “We can change the system by taking over the Streets, peacefully.“, typically seen as urban protests of all forms, one being #Occupy Wall Street. But if you look at history, when Change is brought about it is either by A. Big revolt, where protesters storm city centers, cut off a few heads, and raid tax offices and burn paperwork! Or B. Use the very system we oppose to build a new system.
Related: Living Permaculture really gets around, this time to the Northwest Permaculture Convergence near Portland, Oregon. He recently wrote at his blog about some things he learned and discussed there, chiefly: “町と郊外の変身“, or Transforming Cities & Suburbia.
I love this stuff… This is “B”, mentioned above.
So I walk in the garten and think about the Township where I live:
October 24. More thoughts on this video interview here with Derrick Jensen. First, it reminds me to continue growing food and forest, because it ought to make sense for everything to do so. Second, it pains me to hear more of the same about how dominant culture destroys everything, but it’s refreshing to hear it said in black and white terms. How I see it in Japan, by and large, is a human culture of ecological friendliness geared towards neo-automobiles, robots, and florescent light bulbs, all – mixed with nuclear fission, sunset fuels and over consumption. Not a culture of advanced gardeners, consciously tending the land to increase fertility and food production.
October 23.
Here’s a photo of my keyhole raised bed. Down this page on September 6 and 8 I explained why and how I built it. The design and concept have raised many brows, not to mention questions, most of which I can’t answer in Japanese with any articulation, and like Bastish says a lot in his writings from Nagano, I think some of the growers here think I am simply playing; hobbying. But I’m not. There’s more shit going on in this circle of life than any bag of commercial fertilizer could shake a stick at. I’ll spare you all the details today (see September 6 and 8 for that), and just leave this picture here:
October 22. /Bay Nuts, more-better stimulation than Caffeine; had long been consumed on a regular basis by California Tribal groups. And there just so happens to be a few Bay Laurel trees growing in the garten here, and they just so happen to have grown nuts this season, so I will retreat to The Hammock and leave these pictures here:
October 21. Brodoland is coming to Japan in two weeks, and he recently posted something important that I want to run with:
Like my Dad always said… “Motion breeds luck.” If you know what you really want, move toward it and luck will find you along the way.
It reminds me of a study on lucky and unlucky people, which found that lucky people are open to unexpected opportunities, while “unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else.”
I’m unlucky with keeping ducks. When I notice that cats or civets are hunting them, and have an intuitive sense of what to do about it, it’s usually about a day too late. At the same time I’m lucky with help. It’s almost like I run away from it and it chases me. Most recently, thanks Hirano-san for the cord of firewood. Despite my rather hermit-like existence here in Japan, I do like group, because group helps, and therefore I ought leave this here again for anyone who wants to join:
About: ~ Fellowship ~ is assembling inner circle immediately, because no man is a brotherhood unto himself, especially in Japan. Think of this less as a club concerned with secret handshakes and more as a group in support of living the good life. And all are welcome to join. The Fellowship also boasts organic Amish insurance*, in case member(s) are temporarily down and out.
*Amish Insurance = Example 1 (of millions): If
your barn burns down, the fellowship helps to
rebuild it
October 20. John e writes,
So how’d you clean your chimney, from within or out?
From inside the house. It’s such a simple affair that I usually do it half asleep and in my pajamas. No really; the flue is a simple straight up, straight down type, so I just detach the lower section of it and run a traditional chimney brush straight up the upper section. I attach a plastic bag to the flue as a soot catchment. Here you see some pictures:
October 19. Here’s my new big idea:
How it works is I will offer an item or two, totally for free. Then, whoever takes the package that I have offered is to offer a package of their own, of similar value or whatever; use your judgment. Then we keep on going on down the line… Trad’er Forward ! { in Japan }
Example of Trad’er Forward:
I offer:
・High-bush, self seeding, non-thorny Black Berry plant.
・Biwa seedling (1 year old).
・Potted Rosemary cuttings.
Next person:
I’ll take this one. For anyone next: I will give:
・Newly Rooted purple velvet clone.
・Strawberry ‘Guava’ plant.
・Handful of nitrogen enriching clover.
・Extra surprise gift!
Anything goes. I’m talking seeds, seedlings, live plants, cuttings, dried herb, spores, growing supplies, horomones, fertilizers, you name it.
October 18. Busy. I can’t sit down and write about any one thing because too much is going on. Let me explain; rice and olives and persimmons harvested, woodstove flue cleaned, cuttings taken from Rosemary and Lemongrass and Lemon Balm and Lavender, seedlings transplanted to Winter-beds, garlic sown and firewood scored. Here you see one cord and a half of firewood:
October 17.
I’ve done nothing at the Mountain Land since mid-August, so I set out this morning bright and early to go there. I didn’t make it. On the way, still in the Lowlands of Aichi prefecture, I spotted this majestic green-yellow Ginkgo dell that whispered “Mother ship“. In the photo on the left you see it. The idea was to stop, stroll in, and look for seedlings sprouting from the floor. I found many, and plucked them and put them in a wet paper bag. Seedlings just two times this size being sold at nurseries run anywhere from 500 to 700 yen. When I got home I put them all back into the ground.
October 16. From Doraku Lifestyle in 2006, here’s a well-written story about an ex-salaryman growing and selling vegetables and chestnuts in the city. Basically the guy got stressed out from over-working himself at a big company, quit working, and started growing food and selling surplus to his neighborhood.
I’ll eventually be selling produce in this way: (see permalink), and as of today I’ve made a stand, where I’m selling chic Olive trees. That link goes to the best internet page I’ve ever seen on Olive trees.
UPDATE: Well slap me sideways ! My neighbors came over and bought all the olive trees, so I’ve tripled my stock. On one stump sits the Olive oil varieties at 1,100 yen per tree; on the other stump sits the Table fruit varieties at 1,300 yen per tree:
October 15. Here’s a video of Bill Mollison planting seeds to Rap music. That is all.
October 18. Back to the Amish. Because the more I read about them the more lines I discover between us. They reject Hochmut (pride, arrogance, haughtiness) and value Demut (humility) and Gelassenheit (calmness, composure, placidity).
So do I.
They left the Continent to escape religious wars, poverty, and religious persecution.
So did I.
They tread lightly, dress plainly, and are reluctant to adopt many conveniences of modern technology.
So do I. (Although I am not a Purist.)
Furthermore, they:
– “Lock down resources” - Landbase
- Seed
- Livestock
– “Invest in personal and group self-sufficiency” - Skills
- Home economy
- fellowship
– “Hoard objects with high use value” - Homestead
- Tools
- Knowledge
– “Decouple from the global economy” - Neighborhood economy
- Buy less, trade more
- Drive less
October 14. More prudence from Brodoland: Just Occupy Yourself. Basically, the establishment can not be fixed or saved, because the fixers and savers are on a doomed quest to nail the problem down, by drawing our attention to a narrow sub-world of repeatable numbers and reasons where we all see things the same — We’ve been duped by { insert group here } — but few people have stepped back far enough to see the deep unsolvability at the heart of the event.
Keep the conversation going with yourself, keep your own thoughts alive.
October 13.
Coming soon:
– Apricot
2 years old, pink flower. (2 available)
– Persimmon, Fuuyu
2 years old. (1 available)
– Almond, Hall’s Hardy
2 years old, cold hardy, pink flower. (12 available)
– Pomegranate, Favorite
1 year old, cold hardy, sweet red fruit. (2 available)
– Olive
1 year old, 4 varieties: (Picual [table], Nevado Blanco [oil], Leccino [oil], Frantoio [oil].)
– Ginkgo
1 year old, 2 varieties: （Kyuujyuu, Toukurou.)
October 12. (permalink) I want to run with yesterday’s paragraph. The Arab Spring and American Autumn give me a better appreciation of permaculture. The way I live here at this land, the difference between good and bad management is not that great. Even if I do everything wrong, bushes and trees will eventually grow, seeds can be sown and life anewed. I’m not a utopian dictator, and I don’t think this is a solution for everybody, but in protest on the street, the difference is orders of magnitude. They have air to breath all year and places still to source energy, but because of where and how they take stand, the majority of the energy goes into pitching tents, messaging and sign painting.
Just voluntarily parting from the establishment takes nothing more than a brain and a body (THIS is the biggest freedom we have that lots of people are taking for granted – the Freedom to say No Thank you), and in doing so you could build a new life somewhere safer while forcing the bankers to loot you no further. And yet, the normal practice is to Protest in large groups all in the same place, usually on pavement in a city, looking directly down the barrel of a gun.
October 11. Here’s a new piece from Brodoland about the Ongoing Collapse. He thinks that it’s a waste of time to protest in the streets, as do I, and he also thinks that protesters in the street are playing directly into the hands of the establishment. I agree here too, because really a protest that is against the very system from which it feeds does not serve the cause — it serves Protest. If it were up to me, I would distill the protests down to a few million really good meetings, maybe at my place or at yours, get a true random number generator, and begin doing stuff that makes sense where you live. So like Brodoland says,
Do it like the Amish!
[strokes Amish beard] Let’s do it ! Cheers, I.B., Cheers.
October 10. Welcome to Trad’er, below you see what’s COMING SOON: Seven dwarf Hall’s Hardy Almond trees Whip and Tongue grafted to an Almond rootstock, two Pomegranate seedlings, and a – ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls… – Pawpaw(Asimina) tree !
October 9. No surprise here: The Amish largely untouched by U.S. financial crisis.
Also, an old trick: How to tell the freshness of a duck/chicken egg ?
Put it in a bucket of water. If it sinks all the way to the bottom, it’s good to eat. If it floats at the top, it’s rotten. If it floats somewhere in the middle, it’s good for a-hard boiling.
October 8. Here’s an image of a polycrop, the seven levels of a forest garden, from the tops of trees down to the roots. And each vertical level has horizontal variety, many plants with different functions. And here you see a-levels 4,5 and 6, an old self-seeding chive bed that grows amongst moss and clover:
October 7. Related to yesterday’s subject, Forest Journalist spots an article from Asahi News Web Ronza, “林業で食っていける日本にしよう。“, or in English, “Edible Woodlands for a Future Japan.” The big idea is that 70% of Japan is Woodland, and at present a waste of space as merely a timber-for-industry sink, so we ought go there to live and grow food instead.
Further related, in 2010 one of Japan’s leading trend gurus, Yoshida Narahiko, put an article online about the importance Forestry will have in a future Japan. That link goes to it. The best I can summarize it is that Forestry is something that the Japanese have got going for them, in terms of sustainable independent energy and home-parts, jobs, and a bunch of other cultural related stuff.
YES! This is where I plug My own favorite vision of the future: Japangarten. – Written in 2008
October 6. A re-post from exactly one year ago: Here’s an important and refreshing article from Forest Journalist, which says something about the satoyama that I’ve always thought about but never written: The satoyama at present isn’t nearly all it’s being cracked up to be in the news and by corporations and NPOs and government, but in truth, a now fragile mono-cultured place. Think sugi trees, landslides, monkeys and bears, plus what’s not – whole families, holistic land stewardship, et al. The re-establishing of a real satoyama will take serious amounts of time.
里山という地域は、自然だけで定義するものではない。そして人の営みを加える必要がある。さらに、時間を通して里山という地域を捉えることが重要だ。さもないと、結局誤解と失望を生むだろう。
Japan, get on it already.
October 5. Inaka B writes,
Ken – Re: Stimulus Bubble. Great Documentary. Totally with you on that one… Love Cellente and Schiff in this one, I’ve followed them for years. On economics they are usually spot on…
I think Celente said it best back in February of this year, that what we are a-seeing is about money, not democracy. People are content with, or lead to believe in a phony democracy until the money runs out, then we scream bloody hell, yet the system really has no incentive to change, because it has a monopoly on our lives.
We can’t buy houses or go to college without bank loans; we can’t drive without oil companies; we can’t eat without agribusiness; we can’t see at night without nuclear electric. The whole reason we’re protesting is that we can’t get what we need without going through corrupt systems; but until we have other ways of getting what we need, we have no leverage to do anything but shout into the wind, or directly down the barrel of a gun.
October 4. This forty-four minute video on YouTube, The Stimulus Bubble, mirrors that of my collective thoughts over the past ten years, and in particular reminded me of 2009, when Japan’s parliament passed legislation to give us a cash hand-out in an attempt to boost the recession-hit economy.
“The world of money is all imaginary.” Go!
}
October 3. Welcome to Trad’er, I’ve added Sesame seed. Below you see some before and after pictures. The plant grows on par with weeds, and extracting the seed can be done easily enough in a big trash bag:
October 2. Yamauto, the annual hippie festival in the mountains close to Lake Biwa, has apparently got some good song going on. I’ve been meaning to go for six years running, but am always outta money in late summer. Music videos from this years shindig { here }, { here } and { here }.
October 2. All along the North side of the garten, between the property line and the sidewalk, there’s a 20 centimeter wide slither of unclaimed Earth and, today, I took it. The idea is that because it’s partly shady part of the year, and quite narrow, I can { espalier } four super astringent Hachiya Persimmon trees. Apparently they grow finely anywhere, even at roads side, and passersby won’t pick the fruit because it tastes like shit straight off the tree. Here you see the beginnings of my landgrab with said trees and frame construction:
October 1. Lately I spend most of what little money I have on young trees, and the rest I donate to Moot. This makes [￥]$ense to me, just like college debt-trap didn’t back in 1999.
Furthermore, look at Japan on YouTube: we’re going full circle back to peasants. Soon, someone who has converted their whole yard to food production will be better off than someone with billions of yen in stocks. It reminds me of Paradise, a soft porno movie filmed in the Japanese countryside. Here’s the cool movie trailer [wmp].
On the surface the movie makers are selling sex, and on a slightly deeper level they’re selling sex in an exotic location. And they’re pandering to the male audience by showing Erika losing, and men defeating women. But if you look beyond that, I think you see a window into the Japanese collective unconscious: We’re all stranded on an island, with lots of really sexy [Misako - NSFW] and strong women. And If you want to roll the dice on global cooling and international economic collapse, you could hardly find a better combination of medium temperatures and empty countryside with low land prices.
So I remain optimistic, and plant trees. Here you see the latest (16), Rakanmaki, or Fern Pine, and they’ll go to the edge as a living hedge:
October 1. Below you see that the garten here grows wild garlic, and I plant fifth generation Purple Bombastic garlic, and here’s a link to my favorite year round garlic growing calender. There’s something primeval about garlic, perchance because it’s among the oldest known horticultural crops, or because it tastes so good, or because people still make garlic liquor. That link goes to KGJ.
October 1. Fall is here ! A large rally is organized in Tokyo, where people come as groups and clusters and carry tate-flags chanting Farewell to Nuclear Power Plants [VID]. Michael Pilarski shows off a three year old food forest with a focus on polyculture — A how-to “chop & drop” [VID]. These kids in Vermont looking to terrace their hillside for rice growing [VID], reminds me of how fortunate we are here in Japan to have so much already-terraced terrain.
September 30. So I never post pictures of myself, family or friends, and KenElwood is not my real name. I go by an alias because I value privacy and discretion – there’s not enough left of it in the world today. If you’re curious about me, just ask… there are plenty of famous names out there who will vouch for me, and a handful of Yakuza who won’t. If you are the Television People and curious about me, stay away ! I am an Amish convert and, as such, a pacifist, and you will know this by my beard with no mustache:
September 29. Two more new faces in the garten: First, A Yeddo Spruce, or Touhi – grows fast, is hardy, and can double as both an X-mas tree and Blueberry bush mulch (acidic). Next, a Date-plum, or Caucasian Persimmon ( Mamegaki in Japanese ) – copious fruit producer, is hardy, and a common old world tree that is now more-or-less an unusual(z):
September 28. Go BIG ! In keeping with my Satoyama Installation theme, I’m back-filling food bearing trees alongside big conifers. This one grows taller than Hinoki, and has got more Fall pizazz than Sugi — it’s a Metasequoia, or Dawn Redwood, and is now growing at the North end of the garten:
September 23. I just remembered that in March of last year, 2010, I started a small takeaway business called Kei-Movers, but completely forgot to do it ! If anybody likes the idea and wants to steal it, I’ll give you the homepage I made. That link above goes to it.
September 22. Just got back from spending two days and a night close to but not directly in a flood(ed) zone, and I’m exhausted from running back-and-forth between our Jikka and the garten here, to stake young trees, re-dig potato furrows and constantly check up on resident ducks, Cress, Marilyn and Grey, so they wouldn’t fly away:
September 20. A flood looks imminent, so we’ve evacuated to the Jikka. Also, I’ve added Shikigami [blog] to my Japan Peoples links.
September 20. So my general idea for surviving Japanese nuclear culture (permalinked) and growing permaculture through its cracks, has evolved into beta form, with a basic plan and a few core foundations of tenets.
It reads as follows:
*Amish Insurance = Example 1 (of millions): If
your barn burns down, the fellowship helps to
rebuild it.
September 19. Zonk ! History Repeats.
…..the men of the West were scattered, and few, and beset by many dangers…
This is us {me & you} in JAPAN, today:
{ Born of Hope } [Video tailor]
September 15. So here you see four separate snapshots from the garten, including a mellow Cress sporting blue feathers; A Loquat behind a Linden, stretching for the sky; Translucent green persimmon orbs, hanging amongst leathery green foliage just South of the big Cinnamon tree; The five-fingers of a young Fig tree:
September 13. Autumn leave trading season is upon us, and apparently the market still runs the whole range from people throwing the leaves away to people a-burning them. Maybe in a few years, when more people are growing their own food and needing to build topsoil, they will remember those leaves. Something else I find, literally, that people have yet to need for, are woodchips. Here you see a recent score:
September 12. A reader writes,
So where is the free land ?
I can point you in the general direction with these “abandoned land” { PDF } links:
（全国（PDF：332KB）、北海道（PDF：163KB）、東北（PDF：186KB）、関東（PDF：244KB）、北陸（PDF：152KB）、東海（PDF：151KB）、近畿（PDF：187KB）、中国四国（PDF：213KB）、九州（PDF：178KB）、沖縄（PDF：107KB））
September 8. Look at September 6. Now back to me. Now back to September 6. Now back to me. I don’t know what I’m called yet, but I am a mix of African and European ingenuity – a plateau of soft soil and rotting wood with a central feeding system:
September 7. Welcome to Trad’er, I’ve added Sweet Basil seed.
September 6. Uganda Keyhole Garden [vid] + Hugelkultur = An IDEA. Currently pondering the appropriate name for it, and my policy is to not write about any project until after I’ve done it, but it’s becoming obvious that the mysterious circle you see below is the foundation for the IDEA:
September 5. From Kai, Tokyo Permaculture Activation, a new video interview here with Derrick Jensen, and here’s loads of food being grown by kitchengardenjapan and JohnE, and here’s insightful commentary from HR on how the Pacific Northwest might have been more contaminated with cesium 137 than Western Japan.
September 4. Tactically, I think everyone ranging from North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il [natural gas pipeline] to Softb*nk’s Son [solar parks] to Transition Japan’s Hide Enomoto [transition towns] to ISEP’s Tetsunari IIda [taking back the grid, and re-distributing it to new energy companies] to renewable energy lobbyists [trying to link the "setsuden" mood of thousands of street mourners to protesting and banning nuclear energy], see a way to stop or change the present system. I think everyone thinks a post 3/11 Japan is ripe for change, and BIG moves are being made by big players, but what is everyone else doing ?
I don’t think the present crisis can be solved by mass action in the streets. Will millions of people stop using nuclear electric at home and work, and occupy golf courses and abandoned land so they can grow food and become independent of the economy ? Personally, I see room for epic failure, but I also see weeds growing through the cracks of these failures, and I’ve permalinked my best general idea yet for surviving Japanese nuclear culture and growing permaculture through its cracks.
The basic idea is that it starts with YOU and ME, and an: .
September 2. Julian writes:
Hiya K,
Been away for a while, but just had the chance to catch up here.
You are the MAN. Welcome back ! Post 3/11 at some point, here or in the threads, you joked about living in the shed here. Remember ? And with that you gave me the meaningful strength to gut it, strip it and rebuild into what it is now. You don’t have to live in it of course, but somebody could !
September 2. So a typhoon is coming and my neighbors’ stuff is already raddling in the wind. Get it in order already, would ya ?! Here’s a link to the predicted streamlines. Hope everyone makes it through OK. Around here everything has been batten down, put away or put up. And as the winds pick up speed, I split and stack firewood:
September 1. From OurWorld2.0, Fukushima gives renewable energy a chance, presents more vaporware on how renewable energy lobbyists in Japan are tactically trying to get rid of central nuclear electric: by trying to link the “setsuden” mood of thousands of street mourners to protesting and banning nuclear energy.
To push renewable and safe energy to the national forefront and reduce Japan’s reliance on nuclear energy, it is important to sustain the current public setsuden mood. I am worried that the public support could be temporary. – Kazuko Sato
Wrong move…
Because their course of physical action is to say “Toy makers, invent some cool less-scary energy and we’ll buy it“, not “Off with the Nuclear Heads ! We’ll walk to work, cook over a fire and go to bed when it gets dark” instead.
Perchance the right way to bring down Nuclear electric is to turn off anything that runs on nuclear electricity, whilst organizing a large number of people, picking a target, boycotting it hard, and making specific demands. When the demands are met, the boycott ends.
The reality is that anti-nuke energy people can’t actually live nuke-free right now, so we will remain in an infinite series of incompetent nuclear control systems and collapses.
August 29. I don’t have any non-obvious predictions or advice in regards to the ongoing collapse, but here’re links to two items of interest that nobody will see if I don’t share: Foreclosures and Skateborders in Fresno [VID], and Rural Greece Falls Back on Self-Reliance. The big idea (below) continues at my place:
}
So the garden shed gets a window, an eave, a door and a kitchen with running water. Here you see them:
August 21. Last time mhi was here, we discussed tree canopy to full-sun vegetable bed ratio, and he said something like “Go for a forest, you can always grow veg on the edges or in a field down the road.” I’m tending to think he’s right, so I’ve been planting a few different varieties of tree that grow big and have many uses, and continuing with my policy of not writing about anything until after I’ve done it, I’m not going to say what I’m going to do with these young False Acacia trees (pictured below) here in the middle of the garten.
They grow fast (50 feet in ten years), they fix nitrogen in the soil, they stop erosion, they’re great for firewood, they have incredible wood, harder than hickory and more rot-resistant than cedar, and best of all, bees love them ! Here’s a { great video } on them.
August 20. A benefit to burning trees to stay warm is that if you do it right you’ll get a bunch of left over energy that can go back to the soil to grow more trees/vegetable/fruit, et cetera. Where to store that energy has been the big question for me, as I don’t have much storage apparatus, but here you see my new ash-keep:
August 18. I’m back from the mountain land. When I found the land last year, I had a dream that it was covered with fruiting trees and berry bushes, but then later learned, after planting fruit saplings there, that it wasn’t possible. So now I mostly just collect rocks there.
August 16. Great new blog from YK, Holistic Radioprotection:
Empowering Information for Health in the Post-Fukushima World
Also, I was away to Nagano for 48 hours for what I can’t say. Here you see Utsukushigahara at high noon:
August 13. F*ck the yaks, that’s why. And because I ought to STOP using Nuclear electric on my own initiative, not those of politicians or circle jerks or eco-techno-utopianists. Furthermore, look at the world on YouTube: we’re going full circle back to peasants. Soon, someone who has converted their whole yard to food production will be better off than someone with billions of yen in stocks.
Here you see summer project number “Who’s counting anymore?”, a seed cellar under the garten hut (40% is my goal – that is, keeping the relative humidity below about 40 percent):
August 12. Inaka B writes,
You sir, have established a remarkable community of fellows. Some day soon I hope to take part, but until then I’ll keep reading as long as you and the other GP/CL bloggers keep writing. — Cheers.
And apparently he’s making the BIG move to Japan for a good life. That link goes to what he said about it. You can do it!, Inaka B. See you when you get here.
August 11. I think the ongoing collapse is seeing bigger drops and smaller recoveries. Seems like the best thing to do just now is to continue building both resilience and Satoyama:
}
In breaking my silly policy of not talking about projects until after I finish them, here you see the now almost complete exterior extension to the garden shed, boasting a stained wooden frame and clear polycarbonate roofing:
August 10. Ay ! Here you see flowering Sesame plants:
August 9. Here’s a good essay on why, unfortunately, Nuclear Electric is here to stay in Japan.
August 4. Keeping with my silly policy of not talking about projects until after I finish them, here’s a scan of a sketch to show you how the garten bungalow (3.o tsubo footprint) might look when I’m finished with it:
August 1. I’ve added this ludicrous volume of great woodworking project plans to my epic links page.
July 30. Here you see bio-intense section 2 summer vegetable garten. This includes cucumber (climbing and sprawling), bitter gourd, black corn, okra, tomatoes and egg plant:
July 24. { TURN ON MUSIC } — up to 40 guests, and a night full of fright. You are INVITED – together with our friends – to adams guild Halloween Potluck Party and Kids Haunted Houese + pumpkin carving and trick-or-treating, on Saturday, October the 29th, at our place. Come one, come all – if ye dare !
July 15. { permalinked } How do we ditch industrial nuclear electric culture here in Japan ? You might think the big obstacle is politicians or corporate greed or finding the alternative. I think the big obstacle is cultural inertia: very few people living in Japan want to transition from all-you-can-eat nuclear electricity, to stairs and hand-held fans and woodstoves. You might think that the ongoing collapse of the oil/growth economy will take care of this, but remember the Vikings in Greenland in Jared Diamond’s Collapse: they chose to die of starvation rather than eat fish.
Since March 11th and all that we’ve seen come of the Daiichi Nuke power plant, I’m tending to think that many industrialized people living in Japan would rather die by the loaded gun than learn a whole new way of living. So I think the best strategy is to stay out of the way of the stubborn people, and try to organize the adaptable people and an Ark of a Landbase.
July 14. Hot! Over at Kitchengardenjapan, Inaka B requested some pictures of the summer garten, so here you see them –> it :
July 13. Watch your back ! My in-laws’ place was recently broken into, and a few weeks ago KenElwood was hacked and taken down. So in connection with all these evil goings-on, here you see my latest woodworking project, an Edo-era Yashiki window security screen :
Anyway..
A belated Happy solstice!, and now that Summer is officially here, let’s do it:
< Water gun, cocked and loaded. >
June 16. I recently was told I could grow stuff on a now weedless field of about 40 tsubo. I’ve got trenches dug and beds raised, and I’m gonna do black, white and yellow corn, JAP-squash, cotton, carrots, peanuts, sesame, peppergrass and rocket – all, in non-linear blocks:
June 11. Welcome to Trad’er, and a BIG arigatou to Kitchengardenjapan for the Tree-Hammock trade:
…the final piece of your parcel is not too far off. You should be setting up the hammock before the end of the month. Time to start eyeing trees to hang it on (from memory, just over 3 meters to play with, including strings).
Here you see it, hung; ‘Tis my only piece of fərniCHər:
June 10: The Wife says the Muscovy ducks can stay, for now, and on one condition: That when I’m away from the garden for any length of time, the ducks must be kept…
here:
June 9: Just a quick reminder to get my own ass in gear. “Hear me roar, I am [ Satoyama Installer ].” Now, get on it:
}
June 8. In the latest Archdruid post, In The World After Abundance, he argues that the present household energy system is unsustainable, and in the future, instead of running everything off of electrical outlets connected to a giant centralized grid, we’ll have a more robust patchwork system including solar, wood, and pedal power.
June 7. I’ll be busy doing nothing for the next few days and probably not posting anything, but here’s a Swiss Yamagishi community link [VID], and some pictures of Gooseberry, flowering Loganberry, ｗhite Strawberry and green Tomatoes:
June 4. Figs – well on their way. Lizard – catching a tan. Potatoes – harvest of Danshaku, Kita-akari and Mei-queen. Red and white onions, and Purple Bombastic Garlic {unofficial theme music} – strung up:
June 3. Ask yourself this: Will the system allow us to be independently poor and sustainable if we wanted to ?
“Would the owner of the big white duck please come out ? Please come out.”
Heard from the loudspeaker of a police car.
“Taihen, taihen, your duck has been found, please come out.”
Yesterday, Grey was discovered pooping gigantic turds on the 3rd floor stairwell of a neighborhood apartment building. Local police were subsequently called into SWAT-style action, which meant, since I wasn’t home at the time, the wife had to lead the police team in herding.
My duck keeping days are numbered… { Feck !! }
June 2. Grey took off again. #@%$ !
June 1. Backfilled four more Quince saplings, two more Nanking Cherries, a-nother Fig and a-nother Pomegranate. Zero money until the 23rd of this month, GO!
May 30. Grey is back. Hallelujah ! Where did he go ? And why overnight in the middle of a weather storm ? He’s not saying. Bakachin ! The Juneberries are up for grabs, in May!, (an) artichoke ready to be harvested (thanks to Kitchengardenjapan and logistics engineer, Julian), Loquats ripening up, kids in good health…and not a single tree downed in last night’s storm. Counting lucky stars, now:
May 29. Totally bummed. Resident duck, Grey, flew away this morning and hasn’t come back yet. Wait…
Does he know something about the inbound typhoon that I don’t ?
May 28. For the weekend, some before & now pictures of my ongoing home exterior re-walling project:
May 25. Alarmistic as ever, but worth a listen: Mike Ruppert‘s new speech, Petroleum-man vs. post-petroleum man {audio}.
May 24. In breaking my policy of not talking about projects until after I’m finished doing them, below you see project #2,479hm-xsw (classified). Basically I’m battening down Japanese made fire-charred cedar planks, vertically, over unsightly fiber-cement siding. This time-honored look will wrap around the house. Apparently fire-charred cedar planks make for good fall-out walls – I won’t be snuffed out by nuclear electric !
May 21. Don’t ask why, I translated my Riverbend as a Transition Town – An Energy Descent Townscaping Overview into Russian. Here’s the { link } and a snippet:
Это не так, хотя я отдельностоящий зрителя во всем этом. Почти три года назад, мой собственный yashiki / леса сада была запущена здесь, в Ривербенд, по большей части, чтобы предложить альтернативу себя и, возможно, некоторых птиц и насекомых в нашей текущей среде обитания.
May 20. Back to the David Pollard piece linked to below, from there I found some interesting thoughts from Mythodrome on a uselessness of the Transition Initiative, that being of course the simple fact that a bunch of people changing their life-way(s) and writing about changing their life-way(s) isn’t doing squat for her right now. She’s correct, because to live the fruitful dream that the Transition Movement portrays a chance at, you’ve first got to either a.) already have something well-established to work with, i.e. land, room, tools, tribe, or b.) spend years being a steward of something, making it much more alive and in synergy with the region and the biosphere, than it would have been without you. For everything else, there’s just a-nother way.
May 19. A quick picture update on Marilyn, a Muscovy duck that lives here:
May 15. High-impact summer weather, incredible gasoline prices, possible electrical blackouts and, according to the Iranian guy who works down the street at a recycle shop and knows some low-level yakuza, a spike in home invasion, has prompted me to do this:
{ update }
May 14. A quick picture update on Grey, a Muscovy duck that lives here:
Julian writes:
Those ducks are looking positively prehistoric! Send them my regards…..cautiously!
Will do, thumbs up.
May 13. Something I’ve been meaning to do for years is to make a good name for the land here. After much consideration, I finally decided to not give it a name and just call it “Garten” instead. But the other day while studying permaculture stuff, a good name finally came to mind: adams guild. And thanks WikiCommons for providing the “AG” typography for it. That’s it at the top right. Truth be told, unabridged, I’m controlling of this land perchance even more than I can get away with, particularly since I don’t technically “own” it and even more so because everything I’m up to here, from the “grand vision” to “at present plantings”, is not and has not been made transparent to all, although as the days wear on I think both Human and non- are catching on; and to now bestow a name upon it, well, I am afraid I’m going off in the deepest of ends. But if it works – and I am most certain it will – this time come 2030, and ahead, things will be OK for some of us here.
May 12. A very detailed End-of-the-World-as-we-know-it Scenario from David Pollard, including his suggestions on preparing strategies. Next, Tetsunari Iida suggests that we take back the grid from centralized nuclear electric, and re-distribute it to less-scary energy companies [VID]. And more sense-making from John Michael Greer in his latest essay, Hair Shirts, Hypocrisy, and Wilkins Micawber, on why shifting down need not be about saving the planet or punishing something you despise, but rather about setting yourself (and your kin) up for the middle future: (paragraph 5)
The payoff is that you get the extra money you need to learn the skills that will make sense in a deindustrial economy, and can save up a down payment for a fixer-upper house with good solar exposure, a backyard well suited for an organic garden, and a basement where you can get to work learning to brew good beer. For people in that position, using less now has nothing to do with hair shirts or hypocrisy; rather, it’s the entrance ticket to a better future.
May 10. My father writes again this year:
How’s the garden ?
{ BIG } picture.
Basically the garten is a guild, with around 90 trees (44 species), dozens of herbs and vegetables at any given time, various species of insect, bird and amphibian, and Ay! many a-living topsoil. Here’s half of it; the picture at the left being when I first got here (winter ’08); the picture in the middle being one year and eight months since I got here (summer ’10); and the picture at the right being two years and six months since I got here (spring ’11): 
May 8. On Small Farms, Hoof Power Returns. That link goes to some ink on small farmers in the U.S.A. who are returning to animal labor to help with farming. Changing the topic, yesterday I got stuck in that BBC Gardeners website, and here you see my version of their bug box: 
May 7. I will see OurWorld 2.o’s new video documentary on Yoshino Forestry Roads, and raise them this from Forest Journalist: Early logging — Gods and Horses. Basically, sliding out timber down the mountain is so much cheaper and more adaptable that it makes the use of skidders and mountain roads look like an extravagant fad. Of course that’s easier said than done, especially without any young-man-power to send into the mountains. Next, I spent a good part of to-day in the garten doing stuff, one thing of which was building bumblebee nests. I basically copied this guy at BBC Gardeners’ World, by stuffing a clay pot with hay, pipe and chicken wire, and flipping said pot over like this: 
May 5. Yesterday in The Downside of Dependence, John Michael Greer argued that the decline-consumption antagonists are on a doomed quest to forget our problems, by drawing our attention to a narrow sub-world of reasons why we don’t necessarily need to care. I agree with Greer — I think the best thing anyone can do right now is to invest in their children, home-crafting skills and Nature. Also, in its latest attempt to persuade somebody, anybody… OurWorld 2.o publishes this: Japan should Look to Satoyama and Satoumi For Inspiration.
May 2. Birds chirp and bugs buzz. Lizards crawl and, South of the Lucca Olive tree… lavender blooms emerge: 
April 28. I’ve checked “55 Gallon Metal Barrel” at my Wish List. If someone is giving away a free 55 gallon barrel, it usually has a sealed lid and some kind of mystery toxin inside, so I finally decided to just buy the cheapest new one I could find.
April 27. Two links: Sunflowers to clean up radioactive soil [yomiuri] { IMAGE }, and The Nuclear Forest Recovery Zone Myco-remediation of the Japanese Landscape (source: yk).
April 26. Tangential to the Transition Town subject, a reader sends an insightful link to an Energy Decent town in Iwate. Somewhat paradoxically, it requires state funding to even be an “energy decent town”.
April 21. The time has come… GO ! { Publish } (Permalink)
Below I will not discuss in any length as to “why” we ought to invest in town resilience through townscaping, for that should be completely obvious by now. What I will do is share townscaping ideas that we can get started on implementing today, to prepare for the energy descent of tomorrow. Some of the ideas include: Equally allocated land, agriculture reorganization, waterway usage, homefronts as small shops, patches and strips of land for food bearing woodlots, yards and road medians as edible landscapes, ex-pachinko parlors and strip-malls as manufacturing hubs, train track installment, alternative energy production, ecetera .
Waterway
Riverbend is located on three rivers and, in the case of the Shin and Shonai Rivers, there is much potential there for not only an immediate water source, but a transportation/commuting route, a riverside food bearing forest, and energy production (1).
A. Transporter
B. River Longorchards・Wildlife
C. Riverside Energy Farming
Neo-Agriculture
Riverbend has good weather for growing foods, and is still dotted by farmfields that remain substantially intact. If local agriculture can be reorganized and revived, the inhabitants (people and animals) of Riverbend have reasonable prospects of feeding themselves, and finding useful vocations geared to local activities (2).
A. Land Husbandry・Environmentalism
B. Living Residences
C. Myself
Heartland
The downtown and residential neighborhoods are laid out along the lines of pre-cheap oil urbanism, compact, dense, and walkable. There is much potential here for small redevelopment — one building lot or one tree-lined street or one handcar rail track, ecetera, at a time (3).
A. Road Longorchards
B. Energy Efficiency・Productivity
C. Human-Powered Handcars
D. Placemaking
(1) Waterway 
Transporter
Riverbend’s two main waterways, the Shin and Shonai River, are probably the most forgotten and neglected elements in our local bio-region and transportation system. Who, living in the year 1918, would ever have believed that the entire water front would be devoid of commercial docks and or even wildlife at the end of the twentieth century? After all, these two rivers are somewhat big, and flow directly into the mouth of the Ise Bay. If Riverbend wants to conduct trade further along in the twenty-first century, whatever our commerce consists of, it will probably have to rely much more on water transport. It will be slow, but it will be doable, and surely dependable. It could be integrated with small-scale rail systems that of which softly slope down from the river levees into the neighborhoods of Riverbend (See Human-powered Handcars below). Both rail and waterway as transport could make up revenue for the town – in terms of jobs and business.
River Longorchards・Wildlife
Open public space for planting trees in Riverbend is limited, so the riversides should not be forgotten. On either side of each levee that lines both the Shin and Shonai rivers, there’s ample space to plant an edible woodlot, forthwith creating a place for wildlife to flourish. Types of trees to be planted are in the many and, to name a few food-bearers, trees such as Fig and Mulberry and Persimmon and Chestnut and Quince and Gingko are very prolific, hardy, and low-maintenance. The sides of the Shonai offer the most space, because for the most part the levee isn’t entombed in cement, but even along the sides of the Shin River, whose sides are cemented, holes could be opened up just big enough to plant trees. These riverside food forests could be deemed the “orchards of Riverbend”, or whatever phrase is of the day, and could make up both diet and revenue for the town – in terms of jobs and business and food and orchard by-products, including leaves and wood.
Riverside Energy Farming
We all know that one day centralized nuclear electric will fail, and if in the future we expect to use even a fraction of the amounts of electricity we do at present, it’s important that we set up an alternative to nuclear electric — preferably something less scary. This could be a number of local and decentralized things ranging from wind to biomass to hydro to solar. All four of these, theoretically, could be done mainly alongside the Shonai river, especially at its flood banks. Stable energy could be produced through the growing of quick-cycling biomass crops and wind turbines and solar panels and micro-hydro turbines. This could represent an entirely new economy: Riverside Energy Farming.
(2) Neo-agriculture 
Land Husbandry・Environmentalism
At present, Riverbend’s agri-culture consists of communication, or a lack thereof, between a few farming families that maintain what little arable land they still have the time and energy to manage – other previously-owned land has since been sold off. And the farming style at present is, to make a point, mostly done by growing mono-crops with oil on dead soil. Because fossil fuel-based fertilizers will become increasingly expensive and carry a high carbon cost, and because agricultural land will be needed to feed people, we ought to develop an agri-culture that needs the hands and eyes of internally motivated skilled workers, and with that kind of attention, we can get much better yields with a variety of plants and animals in symbiosis. If we are to get anywhere from here , there has to be a shift in the “zoning” of land, the allocation of land, and in the style of which we farm upon it. I won’t dabble in the issue of land collectivization and the distribution of it, for history talks much about that, but what I will speak on is what we can do once the land is stewarded by many people. There are many ways to grow food, even in the absence of machinery, fossil-fuels and pesticides, and all of these ways – for the sake of us and our habitat — should be explored. The most obvious ways include things such as growing organically, building topsoil, and encouraging wildlife, such as native bees or bats or birds, etcetera. There are other ways, too. Agriculture in Riverbend could actually employ quite a lot of people. For every grower there would be a buyer and a seller and a consumer and all the other jobs that go in between them. And then there’s the evolution of agricultural ideas, including those of animal husbandry, seed saving etcetera, and the whole systems that get set up around those.
Living Residences
No home is really complete without its greenspaces. Without soil to grow plants and trees, without water to nourish them, and without the wildlife attracted by the sustenance thus provided, a house or apartment has not the fully rounded completeness of a true home. And so too this can be said for a Riverbend whose inhabitants lack private greenspaces. One idea is the re-development of the Yashiki, or small Japanese style homesteads designed for basic self-sufficiency. Our modern Yashikis wouldn’t necessarily have to look the same as those of yesteryear, but the basic tenants of them could be similar, with practices such as building up small farm animal stocks, like chickens or ducks, making bio-fuels at home, using appropriate technologies (water wells, rain catchers, woodstoves, food storage), and growing gardens and food bearing shade trees that grow up and over the road’s side, etc. Looking around at old Riverbend homes, with their surrounding fruit trees, gardens and infrastructure, it’s quite easy to see their agriculture set-up of a century ago, and it’s also quite easy to visualize what our places could look like a century from now. Of course the big question is how do we get there from here?
Myself
It’s not as though I am a detached spectator in all of this. Almost three years ago, my very own yashiki/forest garden was launched here in Riverbend, in large part, to offer an alternative to myself and maybe some birds and insects in our current habitat. I’ve explored ways to produce at least some of our own food in our own garden, using hand tools and readily available organic soil amendments in place of the extravagantly energy-wasting methods of food production indulged in by the majority of farmers and gardeners today. I’ve learned much; one thing being that gardens are not servants or exploits, but allies and friends, and the only way you can benefit from them is to spend years being a steward of them, making them much more alive and in synergy with the region and the biosphere, than it would have been without you.
(3) Heartland 
Road Longorchards
At present, Riverbend has but one municipal tree lined street, and a rather pathetic looking 100 meter long one at that. The basic idea behind roadside orcharding is the same as that of riverside orcharding: You plant up either side of each and every road with food bearing trees, manage, and harvest accordingly. Not only is this a commonsense town beatification practice, but it could also make up both diet and revenue for the town – in terms of jobs and business and food and orchard by-products, including leaves and wood. Plus, as our roadways are used less by automobiles and more by pedestrians, the trees will provide for a much needed canopy of shade.
Energy Efficiency・Productivity
A stable Riverbend needs a stable source of energy — one that we can harness close to home. By virtue of the space involved (Riverbend total land area = 6.58 km²), the cost in both energy and money of maintaining Riverbend’s infrastructure—roads, electricity grids, orchards, farm fields, and water supplies, etc. – could theoretically be low, especially if we were to wean ourselves from expensive fuels such as petrol and natural gas. And with this infrastructure — including that of the internet –open-source knowledge networks can be abounding, creating our ability to “produce” at home, from gardens to garments and services to tools. Old structures such as ex-pachinko parlors or strip-mall sites, too, can be re-purposed to match that of a new re-localized production system.
Human-powered Handcars
Maybe you’ve done it: pushing a shopping cart as far as you can and then riding on it. It’s fairly easy, because once you get going, the momentum carries you further afield. The same concept applies to the Human-Powered Handcar. In the early 20th century, before the advent of electricity and the steam engine, Human-powered Handcars were a common sight in Japan, possibly even around Riverbend. The idea here is that Riverbend could re-install a human-powered handcar railway grid along the sides of selected roads or canals, and use said grid as a means for passenger/freight transport. This new economy could make up revenue for the town – in terms of jobs and business, whilst being independent of expensive fossil fuels.
Placemaking
Geographically, Riverbend lies wedged in between Central Japan’s largest city, Nagoya, and the great Nobi Plain. Its borders to both the East and West are defined by rivers, and its neighborhoods with names that describe what this place used to be – names such as Three Trees and Persimmon Orchard and Northern Island. Riverbend is in a great position to use and enjoy the handiwork of our ancestors going back hundreds of years into history; the generations of those who had done field leveling and dug irrigation ditches, etcetera. The people of Riverbend could use tools that serve autonomy and diversity, independent windmills and biomass and solar instead of central nuclear electric, more bicycles, rickshaws, water-vessels, railways, and livestock instead of cars and trucks — arranging themselves in small, reasonably independent neighborhoods surrounded by small, reasonably independent orchards, vegetable patches and grain fields – all, living within their means, practically, and sensibly. ### End
April 16. Kitchengardenjapan writes:
Why does the coop pic remind me of “Jurrasic Park”, Ken? Good going on the trees, too. ‘Bout how many have you got in, now?
Ha ! On the trees, there’s a total of 88 here. 43 species. Half of them are a decade old; a third half that; and just over a dozen but a few years. If you are interested, there’s a list of them logged below on October 1.
April 15. So I finally found a grafted walnut sapling. Here you see it, along with an almond, a plum (紅スモモ) and a Nanking cherry (ユスラウメ): 
April 14. When people talk about keeping ducks, they talk almost exclusively about duck-looking ducks, like mallards or pekin or khaki Campbell or aigamo. This is because Muscovy ducks are more complex than the duck-looking ducks, there are more ways they can leave you, the consequences of them leaving you are worse, and it’s damn hard to make them like you. For a week and a half now I’ve been wrangling two adult Muscovy ducks basically throughout my neighborhood, because – and it’s all my own fault – they haven’t had a coop to stay in at night. So here you see the new under-wooddeck (4 tsubo) Muscovy coop:
JohnE writes:
Nice looking coop setup, that’ll keep em in till they adjust, good work.
Thanks. Hoping they can get a good nights sleep.
April 10.
1. Ordinary people are competent and decent.
2. A key to survival is knowing history or having mobility. Tsunami-hit towns forgot warnings from ancestors. Along the Japanese coastline are hundreds of stone markers, hundreds of years old, warning about the dangers of tsunamis. The people who made them understood that carving in stone is a great way to send a message into the future. But they could not have guessed that their descendants would be so overwhelmed with information that they would see the warnings and ignore them.
3.The system is not fragile. Many of us would have predicted that the triple-whammy of Earthquake/Tsunami/Nuclear disaster that destroyed the North and crippled factory lines and transportation routes and central electric, plus some refineries, would have sparked economic armageddon, or totally collapsed Japan. But really, all it did was move us a few spaces forward in the long, slow crash that’s been going on for years.
4. Truth(s) lie in numbers and markings and things we don’t hear, not hearsay.
April 8. Two practical and useful links: Here’s a guy taking readings from his Tokyo balcony with a geigercounter. And TIL that the coast of Japan is dotted with ancient stone markers, some more than 600 years old, reading “Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.”
April 5. On Sunday I imported two adult Muscovy ducks from Hyogo prefecture. A big thanks goes out to Johne and J&T. Today I released the ducks from their cage. Are you kidding !? These are Mexican Turkeys, not ducks: 
Grey is the alpha male; Marilyn is just very mellow; and Ken is hiding behind the camera.
April 4. I’ve checked “Hammock” at my Wish List. A big thanks goes out to the provider, kitchengardenjapan, and the delivery guy, Julian.
April 2. I’ve checked “Classroom Globe” at my Wish List. It’s to show my kids, in a spin, the world and the constellations, and here you see the one I scored for free: 
April 1. I will not sell ideas in the wake of disaster. What I will do, is give them away. So here’s one for everybody who will continue to consume electricity the same as pre-daiichi: 
I haven’t done the engineering leg-work yet, but the basic idea is rigorous wheel turning on the underbelly of moving train-cars, and electricity generation. There’s thousands of kilometers of railway in Japan, with most trains grid-connected, using essentially the same technology as a modern hybrid car, and since they don’t have to make sudden starts and stops, whip around sharp turns, or climb steep grades, the energy content of their diesel fuel goes a very long ways; as a rule of thumb, a train can pull a ton of goods or passengers for not much less than sixteen-hundred kilometers on 4 liters of diesel. Centralized nuclear electric is broken, GO !
March 29. Short new post on Shareland.
March 28. Thoughts and 50 kilograms of white rice are currently on their way up North. Hope they both make it. Around here, I’ve been in the garten honing my fruit tree pruning skills. Most everything I’ve done so far – from apples to quince – have been basically by the book, or on the recommendations of neighbors, or by some natural orcharding book you’ve never heard of. But for two of the young olive trees (lucca & manzanilla varieties), I’ve veered from general written insights and am literally adjusting the trees to the specific climatic and soil conditions of this area, in the hopes of increasing the productivity of olives and setting up a nice spherical shape as the foundation for the trees. We’ve got good soil and plenty of sunny days, which is great for big olive harvests, but we also get lots of rain and wind, too, and when you combine these elements we get fast growing olive trees that are susceptible to being blown over in the wind(s). Of course, everything written above is one giant excuse to show this: * Cringe * 
Variety: Lucca Height: 2 meters Trunk: 4 of your thumbs Pruning method: Topped Note my method here, because I’ll be back at the end of summer with more written word on this.
March 22. Interesting guest post on OurWorld2.0: Japan’s horror reveals how thin is the edge we live on . The author, Bill McKibben, speaks to focusing on resilience and safety, and not growth.
We might decide that the human enterprise (at least in the west) has got big enough, that our appetites need not to grow, but to shrink a little, in order to provide us more margin. What would that mean? Buses and bikes and trains, not SUVs. Local food, with more people on the farm so that muscles replace some of the oil. Having learned that banks are “too big to fail”, we might guess that our food and energy systems fall into that same category.
March 20. While I worry about the people up North that lost everything, and more, life goes on here, as it does everywhere. Here you see a recently back-filled Biwa tree (茂木): 
March 17. On the Nuclear conundrum, and all the text-book babel that’s coming from the guy in the blue jumpsuit live on NHK all the time: I think things are about to get really bad. Everyone is comparing it to Chernobyl, and saying it won’t be as bad, because Chernobyl was constructed with different materials, and burned for a month sending plums of smoke up 30,000 feet, and then everyone ate radioactive food for months after. But screw all that… There’s literally no precedent for what is happening right now. This has never happened before. There’s literally four reactors in various stages of full-blown meltdown – the guy in the blue jumpsuit is saying this on TV everyday, rather calmly. I see this as being as bad as Chernobyl, but in a different way: There are population issues to deal with here. We’re not talking about being out in the middle of nowhere with Pripyat being the closest town and not much else. We’re talking about one of the most population-dense nations on the planet, that is currently crippled by earthquakes and tsunamis and snow and fear. We don’t need lots of radiation to makes things worse, things are already worse. [UPDATE]
March 15. To all CL members -> Established Connection made here: http://bcountrylivinginjapan.runboard.com/f16 March 15. { edited out }
March 14. As the Northerners suffer, and nuclear Fukushima slowly melts, respectable Tokyo voices on the news speak to what happens to their refrigerators and telephones and convenience stores and escalators; how they can get more electricity from the West to keep everything going.
March 13. Yocoa writes,
Hoping all yours are OK.
Thanks. We are OK here on the Nobi Plain. I have nothing to say about the earthquake/tsunami that isn’t completely obvious. I mean… holy mackerel ! On the Nuclear power plant in Fukushima, apparently they are flooding the reactor(s) with seawater in what seems like a last ditch move. It means they will never be able to salvage the site. It will have to be sealed and contained. But it also means that maybe radiation won’t go up in smoke.
March 8. On a role – I finished re-furbishing the garten shed today, using raw sugi planks for the walls and hinoki shingles for the roof. Here you see it: 
March 7. I finished building the Mon (門, lit. gate) yesterday. In the end I decided against doing a roof with commercial shingles, and instead to layer raw sugi planks. Here you see the entire gate: 
March 5. Two weeks ago in Next, Kunstler argued that the Arab uprisings are about scarcity, and this week Celente of Trend A\ert writes that they’re about money, not democracy. Here’s what Celente said about it:
When the money stops flowing down to the man in the street, the blood starts flowing in the streets.
I tend to think it’s about both scarcity and money, and a bunch of other stuff that we can’t imagine yet. A world away here in Japan, industry still drives by my home everyday (although they are paying ever increasing prices for it { [NEWS] from Kurashi }) and people in the street apparently have got pocket change.
March 4. I’ve checked “Double Barrel Washing Machine” off my Wish List. It’s for cleaning large amounts of ginkgo nuts in one go, and here you see the one I scored for free: 
And here’s a boring { motion picture } of it [VID].
March 3. Here’s my new big idea: Satomachi. While satoyama and satoumi are collectively huge, satomachi is where the people are at — with the majority of these people living on some kind of government subsistence, and therefore unlikely to participate in any urban exodus — so this { the satomachi } is where reconnecting townscapes and cityscapes to their original bioregional environments can take place, and will take place. ・Share knowledge/buck-up ・de-pave ・grow stuff ### end
March 2. Recently there’s been bird flu in Japan, and massive culls in tow. Two weeks ago, JohnE of Inaka Life forewarned me that town authority would be by my place to check on the ducks that live here, because of the bird flu. JohnE was right – they came. After they logged the ducks and said their goodbyes, it occurred to me that the purpose of the bird flu scare is to exterminate autonomously-raised flocks and force us to depend for survival on big agribusiness. This is the same as “terminator” seeds or the massacre of the plains buffalo: Top-down systems are so inefficient and unpleasant that they can only survive by violently destroying all alternatives. And even then they can only survive for a little while. Luckily we’re omnivores — we can just eat stuff other than poultry and eggs until the bird flu and the J-empire blow over and the backyard flocks return. Like { this } [VID].
March 1. I’ve added “Double Barrel Washing Machine” to my Wish List. Also, here’s a link to Keeping it Living [BOOK], which explains how many “primitive” people were not passive forager-hunters, but advanced gardeners, consciously tending the land to increase fertility and food production.
February 28. OurWorld 2.0 finally gets it. In their latest, To serve the ecosystems that serve us, they write about being biodiversity, instead of their usual stuff on saving biodiversity.
February 27. In JMG’s latest, Energy: Embracing the Real Alternative, he proposes the best alternative energy yet: Using less energy. That link goes to his post.
February 25. I’m tired of the word permaculture. It’s too loaded now, with too many basic tenants to follow. So instead, to replace it with a similar but different culture, I made up the word “evergarten“. But don’t ask me about it, because I can’t explain it and there are no certificates for it.
February 24. Just over two years ago, my homestead/forest garten was launched, in large part, to offer an alternative to myself and maybe some birds and insects in our current society. I’ve explored ways to produce at least some of our own food in our own garten, using hand tools and readily available organic soil amendments in place of the extravagantly energy-wasting methods of food production indulged in by the majority of farmers and gardeners today. There’s plenty more to be said on this subject, and as the ideas and experience role in I will be typing them, but before all that stuff I just want to mention each passing year’s theme here at my place: }
February 21. I’m sick of ideas. Today, some music. Supernova Pilot gets me every time. [VID]
February 20. FOR SALE in Kyushu: 20 year old Chestnut orchard (50 trees) on 1,198 tsubo. 3,500,000 yen. { Link }
February 18. Great paragraph from Happyblacksheep speaking to a recently published essay, Japan: the world’s first post-growth economy :
Its something that has been going around in my head for a while too, if Japan crashed so bad, and is an economic basket case, how come things seems to be fairly stable there still after 20 years of stagnation? Sure, things are a bit run down in places, there was way to much spent on stupid mega-projects, and the government owes its people, well a kings ransom really, but for all that, it seems that life without growth has not been too bad for most people. There are still some nasty crunch times ahead for Japan, due to its dependance still on external inputs to get by, but when those disasters have played out, maybe the scalled down Japan will be not so bad after all. The ‘Just Enough‘ will be a lot less than now, but there is no reason it has to be the end of the world either. Interested in your thoughts. Food and energy will always be a bit of a problem, but… not entirely unmanagable unless the energy tap gets turned off faster than adaption can occur, which is still very much a possibility. Thats the only real black cloud I see really. So do you agree that Japan is the future setter, or is this wishful thinking?
I think Japan is the future setter for Japan, and so far from a cursory glance things have looked rather nice here, at least – they have been for me over a 7-8 year period. But on a whole I see the character of the ongoing collapse here shifting like – for better or for worse – this: Global financial system = >> corruption, instability, environmental pillage = >> Depression 2 for many in Japan, but not for all, super-expensive petrol = >> alternative trading systems (i.e { fill in the blank } ), alternative goods traded (i.e { fill in the blank } ), bio-regionalism, neo-agriculture = >> family economy. W/
* working well in to retirement age/less cushy jobs for 4 year University graduates
* traditional University “system” devolved into a new, simpler one (2 year vocational/trade schools, etc)
* less inexpensive stuff coming from abroad/less exporting stuff to abroad
* aging fishermen, farmers, craftsmen and timbermen without inexpensive petrol
* healthcare for most people, but not for all
* depleted natural habitat fish stocks (as much as 1/5 + short-lived dependency on non-lasting expensive fish farms )
* reduced government ability (maybe more public service jobs, but reduced ability)
* stored wealth destruction (your pension, the value of your eco-car, the value of the hard cash under your futon)
* a quickly expanding transient/squatting population (centered mainly amongst urban waterways and elevated expressways)
* socioeconomic class formation w/ eventual leadership + platforms { movements }
* higher crime rate (general scamming, etc)
* urban/rural land value inversion
* resource/ scrap hording
* investment in “shelter/tool shares”
* corporate/government land grabbing (this time for ag-lands)
* neo-agriculture
February 17. The wood-chip mulch job. Can’t say it was easy, but here you see it:
February 16. Lately, the summers here have been getting hotter and the winters colder, with more snow and wind in the later and drought and heat-stroke in the former ( I think I had a heat-stroke last summer). A lot is going on the world over, but if there were a good title and an interesting illustration to describe the changing of weather, I’d say Rossby Wave and show you this of it: 
Basically there’s always this band of jet stream, or Rossby Wave, meandering around the northern hemisphere west to east like a cap, and it doesn’t move along the same latitude, but undulates… sometimes traveling northward on its eastern journey, sometimes southward, with globally four/six massive dips or troughs and four/six massive crests or peaks around the entire northern hemisphere. Traveling from the south these meanders bring warmth… traveling from the north these meandering winds bring colder weather. a.) Shows stable conditions. b.) Shows mildly unstable conditions. c.) Shows intense variation of Rossby Wave. We now live in “c”. Plant/grow/live and think accordingly, or perish !
February 15. New from Kunstler, Next, in which he argues that the Arab uprisings are about scarcity. That link goes to it. Related (although watered-down): Bleak Hiring Conditions in Japan Prompt Students to Rally in Tokyo.
February 14. For the near future, I expect to continue to post little links to other pages and not write much about my own thoughts. I’ve added SavingJapan to my blogs in japan list. Here’s a neat firewood stacking idea: Holzmiete. And here’s three separate video links to : Coppice Agroforestry and Closed Canopy Gardening and Black Locust Trees.
February 12. Yocoa writes with lots of stuff to mull over,
Today I am in a good mood so I have a question, did you write that “… Japan sensors nothing”? Please ask the Ainu… and then for an intro. and more fun watch this: The Cove (2009)
I was speaking to internet censorship in Japan. Anyone here can read about what’s going on in Egypt right now or the history of the Ainu people, or about those guys that made a movie about dolphins being herded, slaughtered or sold. So yes, Japan sensors nothing on the internet.
“The word “Permaculture” was defined & copyrighted by publications in the Organic Gardening & Farming Society’s newsletter in Hobart, Tasmania in 1975…..Ownership of the copyright is equally invested (by B C Mollison in the Pc Institutes & their graduates from a Certificated permaculture course. It cannot be given away except to graduates. http://www.permaculture.net/apd/permaculture_use_and_copyrights.htm I repeat it again. It is all non-sense. Well, maybe we should start our own brand of seeds and copyright them. Honestly, I prefer the no-name brand seeds…
People make words up all the time, and through the cutting-edge technology of the “printer,” you can make paper copies of those words yourself, and then they become yours. Ownership is silly indeed, but that’s how things are. On Fukuoka, consider the myth of him. We don’t know the reality. Maybe he was a freak — a creepy guy who brainwashed his pupils and didn’t get along with his neighbors. Or not. But myth doesn’t care. And lastly:
BTW, have you consider becoming an immigration consultant or something like that? Just kidding…
Right now I’m leaning towards Family Chieftain. :-)
February 11. When people talk about low-budget building, they talk almost exclusively about the walls. This is because the roof is more complex than the walls, there are more ways to mess it up, the consequences of messing it up are worse, and it’s damn hard to make a roof that’s natural and low-budget. For a week now I’ve been hung up on what to do for the big Mon (門, lit. gate) I am building at the front of the house. Should I do an expensive metal roof or a labor-intensive thatch roof, or what ?! Here you see stalled project #2,465hm-fs: 
February 9. Added a new blog I like, asukealexander, to Japan Peoples at the right.
February 4. Lately I’ve been seeing lots of good links on Energy Bulletin. Everything you’ve ever thought about is being written on there. Climate change, energy depletion, and the ongoing collapse of the American empire. Changing the subject, I’ve got a coupla firewood pick-up spots in Yawase, Japan’s biggest ornamental tree and fruit sapling nursery, and yesterday as I was making my rounds collecting firewood I came upon a pretty good sized fire in the fields, so I got it on [ video ]. Thant link goes to it. Here you see a picture of a firewood score: 
February 3. Permies.com shares rocket mass heater technology on film [ VID ]. Also, a big welcome goes out to Country Living in Japan forum’s newest member, Riceboy.
February 2. Notes on collapse and revolution in the Orient, specifically Japan: Cati* { suoıʇɐzıןɐɹǝuǝƃ ƃuıdǝǝʍs } ### China is apparently blocking “Egypt” in their internet keyword searches so people there won’t get any ideas about revolt, but Japan sensors nothing. And for good reason. Because people and economy here are different. A. At least a third of Japanese do not fit any political category. They’re hedonists, living for work, or alcohol, or sex, or a small hobby, or if they’re rich, golfing at an actual golf course somewhere in the satoyama. When circumstances force these people to become aware of politics, I don’t know what they’re going to do, but it’s important. B. At least another third are old, slowly shambling down the aisle of the train, huffing and puffing after decades of smoking cigarettes. When things get tough, these people will not participate in a revolution, or attempt to steal your food. They will have to be supported by friends and family, or they will crumple up and quietly die. C. Further still, another third are a new “lost generation” of disenfranchised young adults, kept under their gray seniors in irregular jobs with little in the way of benefits and a cushy future. This lost generation – for which I will not partake in – as we know, are affably apathetic to the whole situation. D. When good foods become rare or unavailable and petrol gets expensive (think late 2008), people don’t go berserk – they adapt with all the stuff they already have. That’s what makes Japan different: when people are taxed more or can’t afford to buy new stuff anymore, they just pull all their old shit out of the closet.
February 1. Farmish is a great little website showing what land rental prices (for growing food) landlords can get away with in the city. Here you see the specs:
区 画：Ｄ面 積：約６㎡賃 料：５，０００円/月額保証金：５，０００円（契約時のみ）新規準備代：１０，０００円（契約時のみ）
January 31. So Kitchengardenjapan unveils their latest item for trade: longevity, eer, a.k.a. *dried Daikon*. That link goes to some. How to top that ? I’ll try with these: (drum roll please) … 1. Fresh and tasty aigamo duck eggs can now be had for something I need ( see Trad’er for details), shipping included to any corner of Japan. The eggs themselves taste good, with a faint flavor of duck meat. And size- wise, they are as big as, if not bigger than, an extra-large chicken egg. 2. Katou’s heirloom late season mini-black corn seed. Plant as late as September and harvest before winter’s first snow { in Japan Hardiness zone 9a }. Grows four ears to a stalk ! 3. Hand-whittled Cinnamon toothpicks.
January 30. Good research article on Forest Journalist: Early logging: Gods and Horses. Basically, sliding out timber down the mountain is so much cheaper and more adaptable that it makes the use of skidders and mountain roads look like an extravagant fad. Here’s a { link } to a good picture.
January 28. Still busy and will remain so for a while. But I just wanted to mention that I think degrowth actually requires growth, because of how far from the basics our economy has taken us. What I mean is that when you look at our infrastructure and landscapes, you see but electrical hubs and manicured fields, with any other space devoted to car-parks or air-conditioning units or cement. To devolve to a degrowth economy, we’re going to have to re-install the basics – from woodlots to water wells – all over again.
January 23. I’m pretty busy right now, so posting and emailing will be light for a while. Here you see a picture of today’s firewood score: 
It doesn’t get any better than this: already-split and seasoned sakura and elm, for free.
January 21. Keeping with my policy of not talking about projects until after I finish them, I won’t speak on the big gate/firewood shed I’m building at the front of the house, but instead, show you a picture of some newly hung bee blocks: 
I basically copied this guy in Oregon {VID}.
January 20. So, our first duck eggs have come in the middle of winter. Here you see them in my hand to show scale: 
January 19. For the new year, I’m unveiling a new subsection of this site, and making a new page called Shareland, on which I will be sharing tidbits on the land where I live and the garten I am making on it. January 18. In the right hand navigation bar, under Japan Peoples, there’s a bunch of links to blogs I read daily. One of them, Wallabi’s Farm, has recently opened up a bakery, and they’re selling stuff online ! The second link goes to the online menu.
January 17. -2°C, still snowing. We’ve had over a foot of snowfall in the past 24 hours. The olive trees look like weeping willows ! Here you see the garten under a foot of snow: 
January 16. -3°C. Here you see our place under 7 inches of snow: 
January 15. A reader writes,
How do you live ?
Outside the money economy as much as possible. I like to think I run my own empire between my family the mountains and the garten here. Also, I’m installing the Satoyama where I live and not accepting most of the post-war new world industrialized conveniences. My fringe OKs are: any appropriate conveniences, including appropriate technologies, that were produced prior to new world industrialization, like town water allocation or telephone lines (internet !) or paying night-soil collectors to pump my sh*t and take it away for treatment/fertilizer. Or, scavenging/ re-re-re-purposing stuff that was produced post-war new world industrialization that would otherwise be thrown away at the base of Mt. Fuji or scrapped and used to build new buildings or such other things that’d further suck up more energy and kill things. I’m also an opportunist and not a purist, and my support for this socialism is opportunistic, so when and if it ever goes away in small collapses and partial recoveries, I want to have a place in order that will provide basic self-sufficiency, some clean air, and maybe a pet dog { guard dog }.
January 14. So, I’m in the garten everyday, doing stuff. And I think I’ve figured out how to make this life-idea of garten and us for sustainability, main-stream, without having to talk about it: Gartens are not servants or exploits, but allies and friends, and the only way you can benefit from them is to spend years being a steward of them, making them much more alive and in synergy with the region and the biosphere, than it would have been without you. In other words, do shit.
January 13. Firewood Satoyama [dead link]. The idea is, we deliver firewood to the elderly through subsidies and by NPO’s.
January 12. I’ve checked wheelbarrow over at my wish list. Woo-hoo ! January 10. I was planning to start off the year with a flurry of new posts, but my parents decided to drop in for a visit, and that means zero internet time. Also, to all who are and have been making trades with me: watch for your stuff in the mail.
January 1, 2011. Happy new year !
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- January 2012. My boy, aged 3, got three stitches in the noggin.
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- A personal project to save 
- It's gonna be an interesting 4o years to come, no doubt. People, stuff, oil, food, forest, weather, and all of it. In 
Hey Ken; don’t feel bad. You don’t need workshops, you have a blog! ;p
I bet that reaches a LOT more people anyway…
Cheers. IB
Thanks IB. No, no – I don’t feel bad or anything. ‘Tis just that my location wins no hearts.
Thanks,
ken
Well, speaking as a random stranger who has just stumbled on and bookmarked your blog, I hope you keep doing them every now and again. I’m in Osaka so can’t just head up there anytime, but my mid-term goals is to get some land and a house in Gifu, so I would love to hear and see what you have been doing there.
More generally, thanks for the blog, and please keep it up!
John
Me too, Gifu land is in the plan. Cheers, John.
ken
Swings and roundabouts, K, swings and roundabouts. And rollercoasters…
On “The Tree”: Great kudos. 5 (five?!?!?!?) days of work for a lifetime of pleasure (and sustenance)? Really can’t beat that equation.
On “Permaculture”: Gaman… Good things happen to good people. Hold in there…
All the best,
T
Gaman (ing) here. No worries !
ken
“The day after tomorrow, TALL change cometh to the garten here. ZING!”
Nice timing… Call it “The Christmas Tree” ;)
BTW, do you name any of your trees? Here, all the trees planted by kids have somehow ended up with one. Kinda kooky, but we like it…
Cheers,
T
Hey T,
Thinking of another name for it, as we’ve already got “The Christmas Tree”. It’s a Yeddo Spruce, or Touhi – grows fast, is hardy, and doubles as an X-mas tree and Blueberry bush mulcher (acidic). { Here } she is.
Besides this, the only other tree we’ve named so far is the BIG olive tree, appropriately “Mother Olive”.
ken
Hi Ken
Just read this on your blog:
“Next, here’s something to think about. America’s Silent Collapse. The author, Sam Smith, points out that the shit doesn’t hit the fan all it once, it “creeps into a room like a shy new guest”.” and I went over and read the article.
I finished reading it disheartened. I do enjoy your blog and all, and I know you didn’t write this, but it struck me as more hyperbole. And the cumulative effect of it is just the opposite that the writer intends. I just think to myself, “Really? Really? I just don’t think it’s *that* bad.” I agree with all the examples, sure, but by overstating the case, I tend to have an opposite response and tend to disregard the things I should actually be paying attention to. I think the freak out modality is really not taking us where we need to go.
I should say that I remain your fan, but I just wanted to share my honest reaction. (Actually I’ve been reading Alexander Cockburn, who started Counter Punch, since the mid-80s, and it’s always, ALWAYS, in complete freak out mode. I rather think things would be a LOT worse if he had been right all that time.)
Thanks Ken
Andy
Hi Andy, hisashiburi! Thanks and, so that you know, I’m your fan too.
Re: the article; I didn’t even read the whole thing, and I don’t know who San Smith is. I just mentioned his name because I quoted him. And the one point he makes about the slow crash, which draws lines between my own hunch(s) about what’s going on the world over, is what made me think of the old paper from Antony F.F. Boys.
I’ve taken the Silent Collapse link off this blog to lessen any confusion.
Thanks and Hope all is well over your way,
ken
Nice tree! and great postings, have a great one with the family.
You too, JohnE. You too.
Cheers,
ken
Impressive tree. That’ll look FANTASTIC in autumn.
Happy Holidays and all that jive to you all down there on the Nobi plains.
jjt
Thanks, jjt. OTSUKARE to y’all this year. What a year, eh?
Cheers,
ken
Hi Ken
Been browsing your blog again after some time. Contemplating a visit to Jp next year some time. Thought I’d take a moment to ask a question, and then to share my experience of reading your blog. First, the question:
“A local and natural long-term solution to the problem of disturbed food and tree balance to all animals, including humans,”
Sorry but I don’t understand the “disturbed food and tree balance” reference. What does that mean? Is it something I should be in the know about?
Secondly, you wrote this (I’m a mad fan of ginko trees by the way–my mom’s neighborhood in Wash DC has one street with about 30 HUGE ginko trees, they grow East Coast big, no castrato pruning as in Jp, and they are GLORIOUS in fall, 80 feet tall)–anyway, you wrote this:
“They can contribute to peace-building, placemaking and greenspacing. Instead of writing more on the trees’ qualities, I’ll just share this { link }.”
Now I don’t want to get labeled as a complainer or nothing, but just to say that my internal response is “huh, why are ginko trees especially good at placemaking?” thiniking I’m about to read this, then I see that I have to go to another link, and– just what’s true for me– I don’t follow that link, thinking, “ugg, I gotta get off this computer soon, and I don’t want to lose the thread of what Ken is writing.” But the result being is that I don’t learn.
I remember reading here some years back a philosophical approach from permaculture that you were applying to your blog, like not re-writing a bunch of stuff that’s already out there. I was in admiration of that then, but in terms of the phenomenological experience of my reading, the need to follow a link to finish the thought is disruptive, and i’d really love to learn a lot of the things you are referencing with at least a short synopsis. I’m a big proponent of books on pages of paper for that exact same reason: links add to my distraction factor, which is pretty off the chart as it is.
Anyway, I hope that’s helpful and welcome.
Forward on!
Andy
Hi Andy, your words are totally welcome. I’ll take constructive criticism anytime, anywhere.
First, my entries are quick and to a point.
I’ve got children (almost 3), a garten and a woodstove to attend to, you must understand.
Do you have any children, Andy ?
“disturbed food and tree balance” means this: 1. Where I live there is a low ratio between local food and people/the fury and feathered, and 2. Where I live there is a low ratio between trees and people. Also, yes, I didn’t write in detail this time, for I already have before, how Ginkgo trees are good at “place-making” in my neighborhood. But can one not imagine how it would be so ? Did you think you have to go to another web-page to find out why ? Could you not imagine how the tree(s) would lend themselves to making place ? Hmm…
Continuing further on the link/thought conundrum: You’re reading my entries on the internet, and the latest link to “Some Interesting Ginkgo Tree Facts and Benefits” is precisely there because I’ve already explored those details here.
Stay warm, brrr,
ken
Honshu’s southernmost Fellow would like to join. You’ll need a new pic ;)
http://i.imgur.com/J8jfJ.jpg
^this^
A big otsukare on a big year. Enjoy the family, enjoy the trees, enjoy life. Catch you in 2012.
Cheers,
T
T, delighted to hear that. Watch for yer ~ Fellowship ~ T-shirt in the mail. ；」 (NEXT project).
Cheers to your clan,
ken
Ken;
I’m with T on the Fellowship as you know. http://i.imgur.com/J8jfJ.jpg
(Does that make me the Southern Extreme or does Kyushu Ranger have that distinction?)
Nice post on JHK’s Bang and Whimper, too. I enjoyed reading it.
Keep it real up there in the garten.
IB
Thanks!, B. Replied up above.
ken
Ken, interesting food for thought on the peak oil discussion. As you probably know I am not a fan of top down solutions to any problem. I find it ironic that the same people who complain about big government subsidies for oil companies usually support the same types of subsidies for their renewables. Why not just get rid of ALL the subsidies, and let the chips fall where they may?
IB, I think the same way as you. Subsidies are bad, forcing taxpayers to pay banks for corporations to go build stuff when they should be able to build only if they can afford it, not to mention if the Earth can afford it. I think the reasonable way to increase access to solutions is to lower the costs, and one way to do that is to make loans not available at all, so anyone innovating something will have to compete in a free market in which everyone pays out of pocket.
Take, for example, the garten of which I am tending at the moment. I do not borrow money to do everything all at once, I go to a Job part of the day where I get some money, and then I turn around and use that money on the garten over a long period of time. In other words, forever.
I’ll speak on the telephone conversation in my next reply.
Cheers,
ken
Yo Ken, I’m real happy for you, Imma let you finish, but Laurence Fishburne has the best Matrix of all time.
THE BEST MATRIX OF ALL TIME!
(if you didn’t get that just ignore it…)
seriously though, I think I may have to respond to you via reciprocal blog post soon… look for it. IB
Ha! Kayne’s words best directed at *bama: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxKIcrDsJAs {vid}
Yes! Please reply. Waiting…
ken
Agent Smith ( a Brit btw) with the best, gloomy half truth, Matrix line of all time,
I’m still working on brodoland’s joke …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM1-DQ2Wo_w&feature=related {vid}
I think I half got Brodoland’s joke. Maybe he can clarify it for us?
Best lines in the movei! But oil has been the food in our petri dish. Take that away and we’ll eat each other (make war) for the remaining time…until an equilibrium be found again, like it used to be pre oil.
I guess we’re not so bad after all. What has been bad has been the unsustainable oil induced feeding frenzy. That may well be coming to an end.
Wrap up warm, everyone!
ranger