The Greening of Japan #1Bringing Life Back Into Our Own Hands

The Greening of Japan is a five-part series in which I reconsider, in my own way, how we might live in Japan from here on.

We have come a long way.

Food is always waiting for us at the supermarket. Turn on the tap and water seems to flow endlessly. Flip a switch and electricity is there, as if it will last forever. With a smartphone, we can talk to someone on the other side of the planet and access knowledge from all over the world within seconds. Ask AI almost anything and it will give you an answer. Cars can now drive themselves, and we are moving toward an age when agricultural machines will work fields without anyone sitting in them.

Life has become convenient. There is no doubt about that.

And yet, something has been sitting quietly in the back of my mind for a long time.

If we have gained so much, why have we become almost incapable of making the things we actually need in order to live?

Food, electricity, houses, clothes, transportation—we have entrusted most of our lives to enormous systems somewhere far beyond our reach. As long as those systems keep running, everything seems fine.

But if oil stops flowing, logistics or fertilizer supplies are disrupted, the yen weakens, or electricity goes out, the fragility of our lives is suddenly exposed. If the shelves of the supermarket became empty tomorrow, how many days could I survive?

That question has stayed with me for years.

This is not an argument against civilization. Quite the opposite. I want to use civilization more. I want us to use it better. AI, robotics, science, energy technologies—we should continue developing them and make full use of them.

But not to make ourselves even more dependent on enormous systems.

We should use them to bring our lives back into our own hands.

I think there is something important for the next era hidden there.

In 1970, the American legal scholar Charles A. Reich published The Greening of America, later introduced in Japan under the title Green Revolution.

Reich described human consciousness in three broad stages.

Consciousness I belonged to a world in which people owned land and tools, worked for themselves, and made their own decisions about how to live. Farmers, pioneers, and small shopkeepers had a relatively direct relationship between their work and their everyday lives.

Then came Consciousness II.

Large corporations, governments, universities, the military, finance, and mass media moved toward the center of society, and people increasingly began to live within large organizations.

Go to school. Get into a good university. Join a company. Earn more money. Buy a house. Buy a car. Consume.

We came to accept this path almost without questioning it.

Reich believed that the stronger these organizations became, the further people drifted from their own sense of who they were.

And then came Consciousness III.

Instead of asking how to succeed inside a company, a different question appears:

“How do I actually want to live?”

Music, the body, nature, food, community, sexuality, clothing, spirituality, creativity.

Life itself begins to return to your own hands.

Reich saw the counterculture and hippie movements of the 1960s as signs of this emerging consciousness.

For me, this is not simply a piece of intellectual history. Looking back, I realize that I spent much of my early twenties wandering through almost exactly the same questions.

I tend to think about life through six elements:

Clothing, Food, Shelter, Play, Knowledge, and Beauty.

What do I wear? What do I eat? What kind of place do I live in? How do I play? What do I learn? What kind of beauty do I want around me?

I think one of the great pleasures of life lies in shaping each of these things for yourself, and then continuing to dig deeper into them.

But in modern society, “quality” is often translated into price.

Expensive clothes. Expensive meals. Expensive houses. Expensive cars.

If we try to improve the quality of our lives mainly through consumption, we need more income, and life slowly tilts toward a competition over how much money we can earn.

Get into a good university. Join a good company. Raise your salary.

Within the game of capitalism, it makes perfect sense.

But I was a business administration student who was almost completely uninterested in that game. I studied it all, of course.

A consumer who lives by spending money can only exist because someone else is making things. And if your life is built entirely by purchasing finished products, you are also spending your whole life inside an environment prepared for you by somebody else.

I felt this strongly during the 2011 earthquake, when I was living in a tiny six-tatami-room apartment in Asaka,Saitama.

Outside, everything was in confusion. Electricity, transportation, logistics—the things I had assumed would always be there suddenly became uncertain all at once.

That was when I began to think:

I cannot spend my entire life entrusting everything I need to live to somewhere outside myself.

In 2016, we started Takigahara Farm.

In a nostalgic rural landscape, we brought in ideas and sensibilities shaped by the city and used an old farmhouse as a base for an experiment in living: How can we enjoy being here?

It was not an escape into some romantic idea of slow life.

It was a period of thinking, in the middle of satoyama, about a more fundamental question:

How do we want to live from here?

Stand on the soil and try to see the world from the perspective of plants. Learn from the older men and women living nearby. Burn firewood. Gather food from rice fields, vegetable fields, and mountains. Make umeboshi and miso. Grow mushrooms. Keep animals. Preserve and process yuzu and persimmons when the season brings more fruit than anyone could possibly eat.

A satoyama life built around working with your hands looks inefficient at first. It takes time.

But the longer I lived that way, the more I began to wonder whether, when everything is taken into account, it might actually be one of the most efficient, enduring, and physically natural ways to live.

Mountain ridgelines stretch into the distance, changing color from one day to the next. The landscape cuts open senses that had grown dull and lets them bloom again. You wake to birdsong, touch the soil, sit around a fire.

Things that were completely ordinary to our ancestors can shake something surprisingly deep inside a modern person.

But this is not about saying, “Things were better in the old days,” and going backward.

It is about mixing an urban sensibility with the spirit of the fields—tradition with the present, soil with design, the body with information—and creating something new in between.

A so-called genkai shuraku, a “marginal village,” is not necessarily at its limit at all. Precisely because the existing systems have become thinner there, these places can contain space for experimenting with entirely new ones.

And bringing life back into our own hands does not mean making absolutely everything by ourselves.

It means slowly moving away from a life in which we only buy finished things, toward a life in which we participate again.

In the next chapter, I want to think more about what that participation means—through the quality of life and the idea of Han-no Han-X: half farming, half something else.