Sh*t (Number Two)

I'm not lying. In the hours between my last post and a visit to the Inax showroom yesterday--a matter of less than a week--the manufacturer once again reached new frontiers in toileting. My awe as reported in the last post about Inax toilet engineers lowering the water usage from an average flush of 13 liters (3 gallons and a bit) to 6 (a gallon and a half) is no longer valid. The Eco 6 has now become the Eco 5 (another liter of water usage bites the bullet).

I know this because yesterday M and I spent the better part of a day with the contractor's rep, Y-san, and the architect, T-san, wandering about the Inax showroom with one of their sales women showing us the company take on kitchens, toilets, tiles and wash basins. As impressed as I was by dish washers that remove the grease with a grime-removing mist, and kitchen cabinets that not only hold your dishes but dry them with a toasty breeze, it's the toilet floor that rocks, straight from the display at the entry of stacked PET bottles showing how much water you save in two days with the Eco 5 toilet (above).

The design of the newest bowls are as sleek as the new Tesla, but the biggest kick is the newest thing: toilet seats that rise as you approach and lower themselves when you walk away. I couldn't tear myself away from strolling down the row of toilets to a synchronized salute of seats rearing their lids at my approach. Then I'd wait until they sensed no presence nearby and slowly closed before I'd trot by again. Fun stuff, and just the thing when you find yourself uninterested in the discussion about the space for cosmetics behind the washroom sink mirror.

(By the way, that five liters of water use by the Satis Eco 5 includes two swirling whirlpools, one to wash away the waste, another to wash away whatever waste was left by the water washing away the first waste. Or something like that: as you can imagine, my attention was still on the bowing toilet seats.)

Then it was off to the Toto showroom down the street to check out their half-unit baths. These are bathrooms (and I mean bathrooms in the Japanese sense: a room for a bath) that are one solid piece of molded material that includes the tub, the floor, and washing aparatus. It ends around the top of the tub, so that you can add any kind of wall and ceiling you want. These are dying out these days, since most people are buying whole units which is a complete cocoon from top to bottom, and easier to clean.

We picked the half unit because we want to do the walls and ceiling in hinoki, or Japanese cypress, which is one of the greatest smelling woods around. It's the wood that the best of the old Japanese wooden baths were made of and, in fact, there was still an oval hinoki bathtub in the Akiya house when I first started renting there. You had to keep water in it to keep it from drying out, but it was an old one and when the slats of the carefully fitted tub walls started splitting there was nothing else to do but tear it up while tearing up.


We walked past the Toto toilets while we were there, and and it was hard not to love the display case of little ceramic toilets on the shelf overlooking the madness of west Shinjuku. I thought they were ashtrays, but they're actually used to set on tile samples to give customers a feel for the color scheme.

Toto did compete on the cool scale, being on the 27th floor next to one of Japan's architectural wonders, but all said and done, I'm an Inax man. You can't beat a line up of toilets that ooze as much personality as the Pixar lamp.

Bones of the dead(ly tasty)

The benefits of Akiya life. M's parents had come down to spend some time at the house for the last time before it gets leveled, and since they live in the mountains we decided to go with the sea for meals. On Friday night, we ate at a local restaurant in the next town of Sajima run by one of the fishing unions. We all went with the sashimi teishoku set for ¥1500, with all the rice you can eat. We stuffed ourselves on maguro, hamachi, squid, tai, etc., etc., etc. (It's quite a deal, though you can get the same set for only ¥1000 at lunchtime.) On Saturday we made the rounds of the various markets. Got plenty of fresh spring cabbage and broccoli at a stall next to a local farmer's field before going to the fish market, where we picked up some large, freshly caught hotate scallops and sanma, Pacific saury for ¥80 each (above). That choice forced us to go back to the farmers' market to get some daikon to grate for the sanma. The scallops we barbecued in their shells with butter and shoyu. The saury we just grilled with salt and dipped in the grated daikon and ponzu, the shoyu and vinegar sauce. We talked about what a feast Mario would have with the left-overs, but unfortunately for him, we did a good enough job on the fish bones to turn them into cartoon-level leftovers and he was left with canned cat food.

Just Enough: Sales Pitch 1

I’m having a wonderful time these days editing a book by Azby Brown, a good friend and professor at Kanazawa University. And I wouldn’t bring my work into this except that the same grains of thought that resulted in the book idea were very much responsible for this house-building project and leaving Tokyo.

The book is called just enough: lessons in living green from traditional japan. I think it started (and Azby can correct me if he ever stumbles across this blog) at a bar that we got together at on the way to join M and m in some grilled squid and a beer at a local festival. We’d been batting ideas back and forth and I was waxing hops-fed poetic about the Akiya house and the comfort zone of traditional houses because I know Azby is one of the few people I know who knows exactly what I’m talking about. (He’s the author of some amazing books including The Genius of Japanese Carpentry, about a temple carpenter, Small Spaces about how Japanese use space, and The Very Small Home: Japanese Ideas for Living Well in Limited Space.) And Azby took that idea and came back with the idea for this book. It’s about how Edo-period people lived, and lived fairly comfortably with very little impact on the environment.

It was while we were putting together the outline for this book, as Azby took me deeper and deeper into the mindset behind Edo-period life, that I realized how much the Akiya house—though built some sixty years after the period met its demise—reflected those same values. The title, “just enough,” came from the period thought of finding value and method in minimalism; of treating things with long-term caring—mainly because it was drummed into the society for survival’s sake. The beauty of it is that what started as political dogma for survival’s sake became an aesthetic that permeated society. It’s not only the basis of all the industry that developed during this period, but led to the melding of industry and art in the craft of making things of great usefulness. (I think the West also has this ideal, but here it’s as if the Puritans had several centuries of developing without the religious restrictions turning them into sex-starved wackos.)

I haven’t included any footnotes for the above paragraph, and if any academic reads this and grows a six-inch goiter on their neck from irritation with my research methods, they’re welcome to write to the folks at the neojaponisme web site, or the prime minister’s office. It’ll have the same affect.

But the chance to try to experience living with some of those traditional values in a way that just can’t be done in Tokyo—say, building in local woods, making a compost, using a wood stove, or looking for healthy compromises of traditional methods and contemporary conveniences—has me hooked. And I’ve got pages and pages now of Azby’s prose—as well as sketches of everything from toilets (and oddly smirking people squatting on them) to an entire breakdown of rice planting and thatch roof-making to keep me happy.

Got to go. Little m wants a story and is not appreciating my pontificating. But trust me. My bedtime monogatari, or bedtime tales, are not nearly as windy as these blog entries.

Screw the Azaleas

When I first started visiting Akiya, there was a mountain village nearby that could only be accessed by one road that lead from the beach. The mountain was forested—real forest, not cultivated—and the houses were old, a few still with thatched roofs. They built a road over the mountain a decade ago, and pretty much shaved the entire top of the mountain bald as a goat. Then they put in a development of houses based on American suburbia, absent any yard space, and called it an International Village. Most of the open space was then planted in azaleas, acres and acres and acres of azaleas. Azaleas as far as you could see. Someone really liked azaleas.
Or hated the International Villagers.

They forgot that, with all the trees gone, the offshore wind would have nothing to slow it down, so now it screams up the valley and howls over that mountain top like a banshee, frequently so strong that it’s difficult for the residents to go outdoors. Not that they would want to, since there's only a bus stop, a supermarket that has an entire aisle of chips but, strangely, no vegetables, a “resort” restaurant, a Family Mart convenience store and a few hi-tech looking research facilities.

The irony is that one of the research institutes is focused on reforestation. When a colleague of mine mentioned last May that she was a volunteer with the institute and that they were having a tree-planting event there on the mountain, we signed up. The head of the NPO is a man named Miyawaki, who has developed a way to reforest very quickly, with a high success rate. There are some photos here that show how quickly he’s developed forest areas in a number of countries—China, Malaysia, etc.—as well as Japan. Some of the photos I’ve seen in brochures, where an entire forest appears from an empty space in ten years, are hard to believe.

The event was held in an open space next to the institute’s parking lot. The plan was to have the volunteers that showed up plant 3000 trees. It was surprising to see how little land would be covered by that many trees—surely not more than an acre, maybe closer to half. The Miyawaki method, as I understand it, is simple in concept, but it does take a lot of preparation. His people had already spent several days at the site, removing all the rocks, plowing the ground, putting stakes in, and hauling in the 3000 seedlings. There was an instructional lecture describing the different trees we’d be planting because one of the main tenets is how important it is to use local trees. Another directive was to mix them up, and make sure there was no pattern, although we were to plant them relatively close together. He believes that competition between the trees helps them grow much faster and taller.

So many people showed up—over 500—that everyone, including M and m and I, who planted perhaps two dozen trees, finished in 45 minutes. After spreading mulch, and roping it down with stakes, there were a few cheers, and we were done. They had even supplied the gloves and shovels.

It’s not a lot of land compared to that given over the azaleas, but it felt good to do something proactive after shooting my mouth off for many years about how they destroyed the old forest. And it was great to see all those people come together—way many more than they’d expected. My friend said this happens with every event they do, regardless of the country: the word spreads and people come out of nowhere. I just read on their blog that some of the members of the institute had been up at the International Village site weeding and checking. I’m going to have to contact them and tell them that we’d like to be involved if possible in keeping an eye out on the plot. We’ve got some investment there.

Apocalypse Never

One of the great things about our village of Akiya is that one minute you can be scuffing your way down the beach, stumbling over sea shells and starfish, dodging shore fishermen while looking down for pottery fragments that have washed up . . . and the next you can make a hard left turn and head up the river like Captain Willard. Well, they call it a river, but it’s more like a stream that makes it’s way down from Mt. Ogusu. Which they call a mountain but is more like a large hill. The open space at the top, though, is the highest point on the Miura Peninsula, and from it you can see Yokohama, Mt. Fuji, and the sprawling spread of the much larger peninsulas that put Miura to shame: Izu to the west and Chiba to the east. Miura and Chiba are like crab claws closing around Tokyo Bay: Chiba’s the big fat one with lots of meat; Miura is the little thumb-like appendage.

M and I used to make the trip up the hill often, but since little m’s been around, we have gotten lazy. It’s only a four-kilometer-or-so hike, but it’s mostly carved out steps too high for little legs and numbingly painful for larger legs carrying little legs. But the prefectural government has done something very nice. For about a mile upstream from the sea, they’ve laid a series of (very natural) stepping stones that make a slightly uphill and very secluded walk through the forest and along the stream that little m can handle. On the round trip, we may pass one or two hikers, but that’s it. The stream passes through bamboo groves, over several waterfalls, through a fairly deep gorge, and there are places where we can stop to picnic or, like this last weekend, stop to eat a sweet potato that has been baked over hot stones. To get to the hiking path, we have to pass several stalls that sell freshly harvested vegetables. The last one sells the baked yaki imo potatoes when the weather gets cold, and the skins are crisp and crunchy and the inside is soft and sweet. Next time we’ll remember to bring salt.

Standing Rock

"Standing Rock" is the literal translation of Tateishi, the name of a fifteen-meter tall rock formation leaping out of the sea just a hundred meters or so north of the house site. (You can see just the edge of it on the far right of the photo at the top of the page.) It's been there long enough for Hiroshige, the famous Edo-period woodblock artist to do a print of it (no doubt with Mt. Fuji in the background). I say no doubt, because although every mention of the rock includes that fact, I haven't been able to find a copy of the print anywhere. Not even on the internet, so I'm beginning to doubt it exists.

The name of the village where the house is located is Akiya, or more poetically in English--"Autumn Valley"--which is not an image that immediately comes to mind when one thinks of beachfront. Phonetically, it can also mean deserted house, which does come to the mind of many people when we tell them we have an old place in a former fishing village or show them this picture.

The front windows face southwest. A little to the right, over the water looms Mt. Fuji, which can be disconcerting, since all our senses tell us we should be looking toward Hawaii when we're actually gazing in the direction of Shanghai. Across the bay lies the long arm of the Izu Peninsula, where I first fell in love with beach life back in 1972, while working as a day laborer on a construction team digging huge holes in the jungle floor for resort hotel hot spring tanks. (¥3000 per 10-hour day with all you could drink--and a bath. Not a hot spring bath either, but a cold hose and a barrel half.)