The Greening of Japan #2From Consumption to Participation

Buy materials instead of finished products.

Seeds. Seedlings. Timber. Thread. Rice koji.

Buying materials is not simply an act of consumption. It is an investment in the life you are going to build for yourself. If things go well, those materials eventually return to you as food, tools, clothes, or even a house.

And even if things fail, the learning remains as a kind of harvest—something that can nourish the following year.

Instead of allowing consumption to become the only destination for our money and time, we can gradually redirect some of both toward the productive work of making our own lives. Like a small acorn eventually growing into a great tree, perhaps we too can put down roots in the earth, stretch our arms toward the sky, and keep moving toward the light.

When we begin to see money and time as assets that can be invested, the idea of quality of life starts to take on a different shape.

It becomes less about price and more about participation.

Or perhaps, the amount of time we have actually spent being involved.

Vegetables you grew yourself. A house you repaired with your own hands. Miso you fermented. A meal you cooked. Clothes you sewed.

Their value may be impossible to measure on the market, but within your own life—within your own world—their value is obvious.

Modern society spends a great deal of time talking about how to increase income. Of course, income matters.

But there is another approach: reduce the amount of cash you need in order to live.

If your rent drops by ¥30,000 a month, the effect is not so different from earning an extra ¥30,000. If you grow half of your own vegetables, your food costs fall, and so does the amount of consumption tax you pay.

In the future, if self-driving cars are shared rather than individually owned, we may be able to reduce car loans, insurance, inspections, maintenance, and all the other costs that come with ownership. If you can repair even part of an old vacant house yourself, taking out a thirty-year mortgage on a brand-new home stops being the only imaginable path.

We can still remain ambitious about increasing our income. But at the same time, we can make more of our lives with our own hands, reduce unnecessary expenses, and recover both our health and a sense of purpose.

In this age, richness cannot be measured simply by how much we earn.

How little money do we need purely for consumption? How directly are we involved in making our own lives? And how much inner space do we still have left?

But none of this means we need to become completely self-sufficient.

Barter is fine. I want to eat things made by my neighbors. I want to wear clothes made by friends. I want to travel overseas.

No matter how old I become, I want to keep stepping outside my usual surroundings a few times a year and encountering values different from my own.

That is why economic activity still matters.

There is no need to devote our entire lives to producing all of our own food. But there is also no reason to spend our entire lives chasing money simply in order to survive.

What matters is the balance between the time we spend making money and the time we spend making our lives.

This is where the idea of Han-no Han-X comes in.

The concept was proposed by Naoki Shiomi in 1995. Literally, it means something like “half farming, half X.”

One half is time spent making your own life with your own hands—touching the soil, growing food, moving your body, and bringing the foundations of clothing, food, shelter, play, knowledge, and beauty back within the reach of your own senses.

The other half is time spent connected to society—working with things you love, things you are good at, or things you are genuinely interested in, and exchanging value with other people and with society.

But the point is not to divide these two halves neatly.

The point is to move back and forth between them.

You carry the sensibilities you gained from the soil into society, and then bring the knowledge, skills, and technologies you gained from society back to the soil.

By maintaining this kind of direct relationship with nature, environmental problems may stop feeling like distant social phenomena and begin to feel like something happening right in front of us—something that is also our own concern.

And even if we talk about producing our own food, aiming for 100 percent self-sufficiency in modern life is neither particularly realistic nor necessary.

I want to drink Chinese tea as well as Japanese tea. I want to use Himalayan rock salt. I want to eat things from the sea as well as things from the mountains.

Trade with the outside world is a good thing.

The question is not whether we should choose zero or one hundred.

The real fragility lies in a place where almost nothing is produced nearby and nearly everything has to be bought from somewhere else.

Rice. Beans. Potatoes. Vegetables. Fruit. Meat. Eggs. Soy sauce.

Maybe we begin with 30 percent. Maybe 50.

The simple fact that food exists within a region already provides a form of security for the people who live there. And having people in a community who know how to grow and make food is a form of wealth that GDP cannot measure.

We do not have to do everything.

But knowing that we could, if we wanted or needed to, changes the way the world looks.

Han-no Han-X is not simply a way of working.

It is also a way of measuring quality of life—not through price, but through participation.

How much of your life do you touch with your own hands?

How much do you connect with the soil, and with the wider world, through your physical body?

How much time do you spend with the people you love?

How much time can you spend with your children?

How long can you sit beneath the sky and do absolutely nothing?

The density of those experiences—and the space around them—together create the quality of a life.

Up to this point, perhaps much of this can still be achieved through individual choices and ingenuity.

(I will write another piece later about home gardening that almost anyone can start.)

The bigger problem begins when someone wants to enter farming as a profession, or when an entire community wants to support this kind of life.

In the next chapter, I want to think about the idea of the hyakusho, the possibilities opened by AI, and a new kind of agriculture built around access rather than ownership.