Writing Journey to Rural Japan

Back in 2013 I wrote a review about a book I very much admire, Andy Couturier's The Abundance of Less (when it was titled A Different Kind of Luxury).   

I am happy to see that he is leading a group to Japan this spring, to get a taste of the Japanese rural life, and to meet a few of the people from the book itself.  

Details can be found here.


My original 2013 review in it's entirety:

It was alternative culture that led me to Japan.  In my final couple years as a university student, I found myself ducking classes more and more in order to read the works of those whose viewpoints didn't necessarily align themselves with the conservative mainstream '80's microcosm that was my school.  Despite this, their words were available on the shelves of the campus library, and it is from this berth that my imagination began to sail in directions at odds with what I was learning in the classroom. 

The radical ideals of many of these writers had been honed in the temples of Asia, so it was only natural that I would gravitate there.  When I arrived in the Japanese countryside in the very-much-analogue year of 1994, I found myself in an environment similar to the University I'd left a few years before, an environment of materialism and conformity.  I learned quite early that even the people on the street who looked the most radical were most often merely dressing the part, and that eventually they too would be absorbed back into the greater culture at large.  I did eventually find a few aspiring artists or those who "aspired to" a simpler way of life, (and there were also rumors of interesting happenings down in Kyoto), but for the most part I settled into this cultural outback of the countryside.

Little did I know that it was exactly there where the kindred spirits dwell.  In the late '90's, an article began appearing in The Japan Times, an article called "Alternative Luxuries."  I would read Andy Couturier's pieces with great relish.  I had found over the years that in Japan, people are allowed to have dreams, but it is only the brave few who actually act on them.  Yet here in print were people who had not only followed their dreams, but had let those dreams shape their very way of existing.

A handful of years later, I once again came across Andy's articles in this very blog.  Not only had the articles been fleshed out further, but so had my own relation to them and to Japan itself.  Some of the inspiration had rubbed off to the extent that I too had crafted my own semi-alternative life here (Not being Japanese in the first place, this isn't terribly difficult.)  Like Andy, I had built my own friendships with people to whom a simple life is simply common sense.  Though a few are based in cities, most live deep in the countryside, and share with the men and women in Andy's book not only the ordinariness in how they live, but the complexity in how they view their lives and their interconnectedness. 

I had a glimpse of the latter one autumn night, a few weeks before I was leaving Japan, a departure that had I assumed at the time was final.  The night that my wife and I had just finished the Shikoku 88 Temple pilgrimage, we were put up by a few young people living deep in a valley in Tokushima.   As the evening went on, my hosts and I found that we had many friends in common, and I began to sink into a certain melancholy, saddened to be leaving this country in which I had built deep friendships over 15 years.  But then it dawned on me that I wasn't stepping away from the circle.  In moving back to the States, I was helping that circle to expand.

And there, upon arrival, I found Andy's book, a book I'd been waiting all of those 15 years to see published.  And in rereading those familiar voices, and in reading the comments of those who praise this book, the circle continues to expand.    


On the turntable: James Gang, "Thirds"