A new start
Finding home in Kamikatsu
Hello reader, thanks for being here! I’m Kana and this is the Sunday edition of Tending Gardens, which you can read about here.
If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing.
Finding a home in Kamikatsu
Home, both a place and an idea, is complex and multifaceted. I’ve had many homes over the past years but something about this small village and its seemingly limitless potential to make a local impact makes my heart feel rooted. The age-old saying “home is where the heart is” rings true while trying to find my place in this tiny village. In these fleeting months, this place has become a repository of memories and experiences (so much to share!)
Before moving, I lived and worked in Bangladesh. The contrast between Bangladesh and rural Japan is quite dramatic—while I am very happy to be here, in Japan, I occasionally yearn for the bustle of life filling the streets and sipping milk tea on the side of the road with friends.
Almost 3 months ago, I packed a suitcase and moved to a village called Kamikatsu—a small town in the middle of Tokushima prefecture on Shikoku Island, located in the Southeastern part of Japan. This village has one traffic light and the nearest konbini (convenience store) is a 25-minute drive to the neighbouring town.
The small, picturesque town of Kamikatsu is home to a community of about 1,500 residents. I officially registered as resident number 1,501 at the time I went to the town office at the end of November.
I wake up each morning to thin, cold, but fresh, mountain air. I hear birds chirping from my window, I see the passing of the season in the fruit on the trees and the flowers on the ground. I’ve also grown accustomed to greeting all villagers—a warm friendly hello goes such a long way. The scenes of companionship (“here’s an extra daikon (Japanese radish) for you”, says the neighbour), are deeply appreciated in times when the whole world is practising social distancing.
I don’t want to idealise country life but I do feel immense peace day-to-day and it's the kind of peace I’m hard-pressed to believe you can’t find in a city without a connection to nature. Being in Kamikatsu I’m reminded of the beauty of simplicity. To paraphrase a friend, I am reminded of the parts of our lives that have gotten lost in the pursuit of convenience.
Zero waste village
It was the zero-waste and sustainability efforts that drew my attention to Kamikatsu nearly 5 years ago. I think this video by Great Big Story (above!) was one of the first videos I saw about the village. Kamikatsu is the first municipality in Japan to implement Zero Waste—an intensive recycling program that tries to avoid the use of incinerators or landfills. The village separates garbage into 45 categories—an impressive feat by many standards, but there are a lot of thoughts unpack with regards to recycling, waste, and sustainability (I will share more with newsletters to come).
A place to create with your own hands
A thought that has been lingering in my mind these past months is the value of creating and doing things with our own hands—whether that’s growing our own food or designing and conceiving the products we use every day, a lot of my most treasured experiences have been associated with learning, or more so realizing, that I’m capable of creating for everyday life, not only for art or leisure, though the lines blur and it all becomes part of the process of creation.
As consumers, most of us no longer make things, we buy them instead. We don’t fix, we replace. We have lost our ability to pick up a product or food and know it’s origins. When I pick up vegetables from the local market in Kamikatsu, I know which farmers harvested the vegetables. I started affirming this was normal until I went to Tokyo for a short trip and asked a friend where her mikans (tangerine oranges) came from and she said, both sincerely and jokingly, “Tokyo”; but mikans don’t grow in Tokyo. I’ve become accustomed to knowing where my food was grown and by whom.
Most of the people I’ve met in Kamikatsu know how to do things with their own hands. I see how manual craft has the profound ability to make us feel and act better. In trying to do and make things, I’ve gained a sense of autonomy and responsibility for my work. I have an admiration for the patience, focus, and persistence behind everything handmade.
Instead of imagining ourselves to be all-powerful, yet all the while feeling strangely powerless, making and fixing things instils both a sense of power over what you can control and honesty about what you can't.
Working with your hands: the secret to happiness? Guardian
Simply said, I realize that the more I create, the happier I am. I wonder if the desire to create and make things with our hands is innate. Living in Kamikatsu has shown me the potential for creation. To sow seeds into the ground and study the contents of the soil, or to take the fibers of trees bark and make cloth, or to cultivate natural yeast and make bread, is both to make something and to make sense of it—turning something raw and unfinished into something of substance and value. Maybe in this sense, finding a home in Kamikatsu is less about finding it physically but about creating it.
That’s it for this week! I think I could go on and on, but I want to keep it a (relatively) short and enjoyable read. If you have any comments, please let me know. I’m learning and I recognize the immense room to improve so if you have a comment, do share!
Take care,
Kana
I’d love for you to think of me as your penpal—sharing a note from a tiny village in Japan. With Tending Gardens, I want to bring you a small joy in the form of a newsletter. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing.
If you’d like to share this piece as a web page, click the button below.
Uhhhh where was my shoutout at 🤔
Thank you for the reminder about fixing, building, and creating things with our hands! You're right that most of us forget about the act of creation in our day-to-day lives, and that this creativity is such a great source of joy! So good to keep in mind!