Kana Chan is living in Kamikatsu which is Japan’s first “zero waste” village in rural Japan.  She writes a substack at Tending Gardens and runs INOW which is an educational homestay programme to stay to at Kamikatsu. She has lived and worked in Bangladesh, and travelled widely as a photographer and story teller. You can find her @laurkana on Instagram, at her Substack, or on her own podcast. 

I ask Kana about how she arrived in Kamikatsu.

I ask what people should understand or misunderstand, how Kana finds Japanese culture and how it differs between rural and city. What she misses about the city.

 What people have learned coming to Kamikatsu, all the farming knowledge she has learned growing and harvesting her own food, and what the process of tea farming (awa bancha) has been like.

 Kana explains that zero waste currently means here that 80% of all waste in the village is recycled (in 45 different categories!) and how the villagers manage their waste systems.

We play overrated/underated on toilets that play music, sitting in hot baths and Japan train journeys.

 Kana ends on her latest projects and her advice on what can be learned from disconnecting from a culture of convenience.

 I think being able to just see a diverse amount of the way people live and seeing how people choose to spend their time, how people choose to spend their money, I think can be just a really enriching experience. And so you have those things to contrast and see, "Oh, that's probably something I can take into my own life or not." I don't think the countryside is necessarily for everyone, but I do think that people can incorporate aspects that bring more nature into their lives or bring more self-sufficiency into their lives and I think a good starting point for that is spending time in the countryside and then being able to see what you can take back to wherever home is for you. 

 

If you do decide to move to the countryside, just changing your frame of mind and seeing the things that are inconveniences as opportunities for you to spend your time in other ways, and disconnecting from a culture of convenience can be just a really personally enriching thing. That's what I've found for myself and so, yeah, I hope everyone gets to spend some time in the countryside; whether it's permanent, temporal, or just transient. If Kamikatsu interests you in particular or sustainability from a countryside perspective, I'd be happy to welcome you here to Kamikatsu

Transcript below, video above or on YouTube. Podcast available wherever you get podcasts or below.

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Transcript (only lightly edited, expect typos etc.)

Ben

Hey, everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Kana Chan. Kana is living in Kamikatsu, which is Japan's first zero waste village. It's in rural Japan. She writes a substack at Tending Gardens and runs INOW, which is an educational home stay program to stay at Kamikatsu. Kana, welcome.

Kana

Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.

Ben

So you have roots in Canada, as well as Japan and Hong Kong. What's the story of what brought you out to Kamikatsu and why?

Kana

Yeah, sure. So as you said, my mom is Japanese and my father is from Hong Kong. They actually both met in the UK studying abroad and then immigrated to Canada where I was born and raised. I had never lived in Japan and I've never actually lived in Hong Kong either, but would visit quite frequently as a child. I was working during COVID, but my job stopped and so I had a chance to pause and reflect and decided that I wanted to live somewhere that was more in nature. Japan's countryside was somewhere that I wanted to move to so I looked into that and now here I am in Kamikatsu.

Ben

Wow. So you just thought Japan is my roots and countryside and figured it out on a map and just kind of pointed and went, or was there some other kind of impetus or catalysts, or was it really kind of almost as random as that?

Kana

Yeah. There's a word in Japanese called 'goen,' which is kind of like fate. So I definitely do feel like I have some fate that tied me to this place. I would also say that I studied sustainability and so I was interested in towns where maybe sustainability was something that the town was thinking about, or there were initiatives related to sustainability. Kamikatsu is the first zero waste village so it was on my radar. I had no intention of moving to Kamikatsu, but then again, goen (fate), was such so that I had the opportunity to move here. So then I came within a month of researching and starting the search and that was a year and a half ago.

Ben

And maybe before we get to living in a zero waste type of way, I'd love to understand a little bit more about your rural life experience versus city life. I've been to Tokyo and Kobe and particularly Tokyo, if you've been to big cities like New York or London, although Tokyo is obviously very Japanese, there's something very familiar about it. Lots of people, subways, busyness, although I know people in Tokyo are very good about crossing the road and there's no actual rubbish around and things like that. But I get the impression when going through the Japanese countryside that the rural life is still quite different. And in some ways, Tokyo being different from rural countryside is kind of more different than Tokyo being different to somewhere like London. Was that your kind of experience? I guess you started off in a city and then went off to Kamikatsu.

Kana

Yeah. So I spent my whole life in cities; born and raised in a city as well. I was born in Toronto and then moved to Vancouver; so both the largest cities in Canada. I've spent a bit of time in Tokyo and other big cities in Japan and it's just such a contrast. I think most noticeably being surrounded by nature, the inconvenience of not having-- Especially being in a place like Tokyo, I think every two blocks you see a convenient store so things are really within arm’s reach wherever you are in the city. Here, we have to drive 20 minutes to the nearest convenient store. I would just say the pace feels different. I think anyone who spent enough time in a city knows that there's a flow and there's a pace and that just feels like its halted when you're in the countryside and people move at their own pace. Not to say that people aren't busy, but just the perception of time is probably a little bit different.

Ben

I noticed that there was a sense of rhythm actually throughout Japan, which I don't really note in Europe and America as much. You really see it through the seasonality of food, even sometimes the plates, and the cutlery. I get the sense from where you are living you are very close to that because of the way that you do harvesting, the way that the kind of food cycle works, the dishes that things would come out. So maybe would you reflect on that and what season it is at the moment? What are you growing and picking, or farming?

Kana

Yeah. I love talking about the seasons and I love talking about food through the seasons because I think it's something that you can only truly experience in the countryside. I think again, just to contrast to the city, you have kind of anything and everything at your disposal. Here, we have one small farmer's market, but the farmer's market only grows what is grown in season and so you can kind of really see what's available and what's being grown. Right now it is very hot. It's a hot and humid summer in Japan. But right now, what is being grown and harvested is tea. Kamikatsu has a long tradition of a fermented tea called awa-bancha and it is right now the season to pick the tea leaves.

Ben

And I was reading, there's an extraordinary process in your region for doing this. That you still pick it by hand in essentially kind of semi wild. They're not fully cultivated, they’re patches, and they have this fermentation process and it was only kind of locally. But maybe, how have you found that and do you think you're going to become a tea farmer, or is this only ever going to be for local consumption?

Kana

I technically am actually the "youngest tea farmer" because we did make our own small batch production of awa-bancha tea last year; my friend Linda and I. Tea, unlike for example, green tea or maybe some black tea that you see in regions like South Asia, there're usually rows and rows of tea leaves that can be cut by machines. But awa-bancha is grown wildly in the mountains. So rather than cultivated, it's more maintained. The bushes are maintained. Machines can't pluck the tea leaves off the stems and so hand and labor is required. So it is a very laborious task. Once it's collected, it's boiled, rolled, and then put into wooden barrels and fermented for up to a month, and then dried under the sun for up to three days. When you do the drying process, most farmers say that's the most tedious process because you have to pick apart each tea leaf because it's been so pressed. Then after that you have awa-bancha fermented tea.

Ben

The flavor is like a roasted green tea. Is it worth all of this effort?

Kana

I actually would not compare it to green tea. I would compare it more to something purple. I think because people hear fermented-- And it's fermented in the same way that a lot of the pickles are fermented in Japan. So people imagine it being quite sour or acidic, but it's actually quite mellow. Matcha has a very strong flavor as well. But maybe something more like a chamomile, you have kind of a lighter flavor. I would say it's quite unique. It's worth trying if you can get your hands on some.

Ben

And everything around the village life-- or not everything, but it seems so much more manual. Is that really true or is this crossed between manual and machine, or much still seems to be embedded with the countryside traditions out there in Japan?

Kana

Yeah. I think there's a bit of both. I think that people who practice agriculture, for example, as a living, use machines to harvest rice. For example, I also am growing rice right now and it's quite a small plot of land. I don't have those kind of machineries and everything is doable by hand, especially at that capacity. So I am almost only exclusively manual labor.

Ben

Is it just you, or can you get some friends or other people to help you, or do you have to do your own paddy field?

Kana

We do get friends. We do get help. We just had some students visiting Kamikatsu who wanted to make a documentary about Kamikatsu and part of the exchange was that they would help us with the weeding in our rice fields.

Ben

Okay. So how is the rhythm of your day? So kind of just waking up, breakfast, and then you are going out doing a lot of this farming stuff as well as working in the café. Then we'll get to the waste sorting and everything. Is there a still busy, but there's a slower, more deliberate rhythm to the day?

Kana

It's interesting. This was surprising to me. It's not surprising to some Japanese who at least have a bell that rings at 5:00 PM. But in Kamikatsu, there's a bell that goes off at seven, ten, noon, three, and five. So five bells during the day, and that kind of breaks apart your day. The idea was that this was introduced for farmers. So that kind of rhythm is really true especially when doing something like tea picking where you start the day in the morning, and then you have a tea break at 10, then you continue to work until noon, and then you have another tea break at three, and then you done the day at five. Then you really just go home and then it's dark. Your days are full, but there is kind of rhythm to it.

Ben

Excellent. What about some of these other things that you've picked and harvested? What have you been most intrigued by? So I was really intrigued by your picture of you picking yuzu, which is a citrus I really like but I didn't realize the plants had thorns. Obviously there's the bancha tea. I hadn't realized that you were also growing rice. So, do you grow most of your own food and things and what's been the most strange or interesting harvest that you've been involved in?

Kana

Actually, some of the prefecture that Kamikatsu is located in is known for citrus fruits. So not just yuzu, but there's a hybrid between yuzu and yuko, which is like a mandarin orange called yuko. About 90 percent of the production of yuko is made in Kamikatsu as well. I didn't even know about these types of citrus fruits, but harvesting these have been quite interesting and learning about these have been quite interesting. I think more than the harvesting itself, it's interesting to see how people ferment them or make them into juices or make them into things for food. So that part has been more interesting than the actual just repetitiveness of harvesting. Same with the tea leaves. To make the tea is more interesting than just picking the tea leaves.

Ben

And it's still very manual. All the citrus picking is still essentially done by hand rather than machines, right?

Kana

Yeah. That is all by hand.

Ben

But I did get the impression that along with the rituals of making the tea and the foods afterwards, there seemed to be a kind of storytelling banter with the workers who work together and come together and do this. Is there some ritual element to that or is that just people meeting and chatting while you're picking?

Kana

I think that happens naturally. Because Kamikatsu is a very mountainous village, there's no central gathering spot; maybe other than the recycling center where we recycle our garbage. But otherwise, people are busy doing their own harvesting. So when there's the harvesting that requires a lot of people to come together at the same time for a shorter season, I think naturally people like to catch up and so there's a lot of chatter. I don't know if that's part of the ritual, but it definitely happens yearly.

Ben

There’s no religious town hall space or temple, or like a square that you have in some European type places to meet. It's more dispersed and people meet actually on the harvest rather than in community spaces.

Kana

Yeah. No European square. Actually, there are Matsuri which are festivals in Japan and that is also another time for gathering. Just recently a couple days ago, there was a gathering actually at a temple where people who were planting rice in the same area came together to say prayers and make wishes for a good harvest in the fall. So that's something that happens yearly. And so people wrote wishes that bugs won't eat the crops and wishes that the harvest goes smoothly or that the grass continues to grow well. So those things still persist.

Ben

Is there something you found really surprising about overall Japanese culture or Japanese village culture compared to your experience in Canada or even Bangladesh and places like that? It's too big a question, isn't it? Because there's everything. It's like the food, the people; everything. I was wondering, I guess, about the everyday rituals or the way that people are or interact with you.

Kana

Well, growing up in kind of half Japanese household, there are a lot of things that I grow accustomed to. My mom would speak Japanese and we would still visit Japan every summer when I was young. I think though actually living here, I'm aware of how people are very hospitable; not just necessarily polite or kind. But particularly in Japanese countryside, people look out for each other and are very generous with what they have in abundance and are willing to share that abundance. I have no other countryside experience in Japan to compare that with. But that's certainly the case here for me.

Ben

Great. So maybe let's move on to the zero waste aspect, because a lot of this you've talked about rural, in the city, which I can kind of get, but it still seems amazing this pace of life and being closer to nature. But it seems that Kamikatsu has gone one further and tried to be much more circular in its living and zero waste. I was reading you have some extraordinary number of different recyclables that you have to sort and that everyone spends time in the recycling. Tell me how people have found the zero wasting. I guess it's kind of closer to how rural farming works to some degree anyway. But we use a lot of plastic in our every day. Obviously there's clothing and all of that. I don't know how you find the zero waste. Is there a rhythm to that because everyone gets together and recycles.

Kana

Zero waste is not the zero waste concept in maybe traditionally the west where you're not producing any garbage. But what Kamikatsu does focus on is recycling all the waste that is produced. We currently recycle into 45 different categories. That seems like a lot when you hear the number, but it's not overwhelming because the separation is done very clearly when you bring your waste to the recycling center. A lot of the things are just separated by colors. So if you have glass bottles; you have clear, you have green, you have brown and so that kind of increases the categories very quickly.

Ben

So there's a lot of sorting and recycling. Is that the major element, or are there other things that the village has had to adapt to? I guess people would probably maybe try and buy less plastic or single use or that type of thing, or is it much more focused on whatever you do have just making sure that goes circular and recycled?

Kana

Yeah. Their waste system started about 20 years ago and there are other efforts, not just recycling, but also on the reduce and reuse side. It's not just recycling, but I would say that has been the focus.

Ben

Great. How does the recycling center and things operate? A lot of people in the village rotate and work there, right? Everyone goes there together and you have these big sorting machines and then they crush and then it goes off. Is that kind of the process? That's what I gathered from the pictures

Kana

Yeah. So every person living in Kamikatsu is responsible for bringing their own waste to the recycling center. After you bring your boxes of waste to the recycling center, you separate at the facility. So you actually go into the garbage station. And while you're separating, there's staff there all the time who help with the separation. The staff are managed by the town office so there's a lot of support. You never really get in trouble for improperly separating and you do get a whole lot of guidance if you don't know. Especially when I first moved here, it’s like, "Where do I put this piece of rubber or something like that?" You can also collect points if you recycle into certain categories and so it's kind of a whole system. There are also a lot of elderly in Kamikatsu. So if you are unable to drive a car or bring your own waste to the separation system, they pick up your garbage once every two months and then bring it to the station.

Ben

I guess most people do not have a car, would that be right? And there's a little carpooling sharing and I guess most people walk or maybe even cycle.

Kana

Actually, most people do have a car because Kamikatsu is very mountainous. About 80% of Kamikatsu is mountainous. So only 20% of flat land. Even the rice field and the personal gardens are kind of on mountains. So cars are quite necessary. You do see people with e-bikes, but walking is difficult.

Ben

Okay. I didn't get that sense. But yeah, you don't want to be walking 20 minutes just to your paddy field up and down all the time I guess, especially as you get older. I guess with a village that size around 1500 - 2000, your local hospital is going to be quite far away if you need that sort of emergency. I remember you had to travel quite far when you had some sort of injury to attend to. Does that make life and living that much harder or is there a rhythm that you just incorporate it in? Is it just an inconvenience or can you see like, "Oh, if it was that much more remote, it be even harder?"

Kana

Yeah. I think it depends on what life circumstance you are in. Being able bodied and healthy is such a privilege and I don't normally need any hospital care. That time I was recently attacked by my rooster and had to tend to the wound. There is a local clinic in Kamikatsu, but for certain injuries we have to go to the nearest hospital which is about 45 minutes away. So it is certainly an inconvenience, and again, that would require a car. Relying only on buses in such emergencies could be very risky.

Ben

How are you getting on with your animals? Because as part of this deal, you have to look after chickens and dogs. And like you say, at one point your rooster was a bit of a bully. Have you made peace with each other?

Kana

Yeah. I grew up in a city and I grew up in a family that traveled quite a bit so pets were never something that made sense for my parents. But I've always wanted a dog and I always wanted to live with animals. So I finally get this chance to take care of two dogs and four chickens. They also kind of add to the daily rhythms of life; waking up and then taking the dogs for a walk, feeding the chicken, letting them out so they're free range and run free. It's been wonderful.

Ben

In exchange, I'm gathering you get great eggs.

Kana

Great free eggs and great cheap ranch.

Ben

Do you cook with the eggs often or do you have a particular dish? Do you do this Japanese omelet thing or do you do much more Western style stuff?

Kana

Tamagoyaki. Yeah. That's a classic. I do that definitely if I have to prepare some sort of bencho for the day.

Ben

What would be your signature dish? If you have a friend or if a family or someone would come around, do you have anything you particularly cook and this is what you whip out?

Kana

Well, right now it's summer so the only thing I'm really whipping out is cold somen. It's like a thin noodle and we put it over ice so it's very cold. That's something I'm eating almost every other day so probably that. And then a squeeze of sudachi which is like a lime and it's local to Tokushima.

Ben

Wow. That sounds amazing. Making me feel hungry. So you've adapted to this slower living or different pace of living seemingly quite quickly from city life and Canada life. Do you feel that's true? Do you think now that you found this kind of pace or type of living, do you think this could be this kind of lifestyle for the rest of your life, or do you think this will be a period and you might get the travel bug again or go back to cities? Or do you think this is somewhere, even if it's not forever, you'll always come back to this stillness and being closer to nature.

Kana

Yeah. I do think I adapted quickly and I think adapting quickly came from also traveling quite a bit in my early twenties. But I think that when people spend enough time in nature and not just as a trip, I find that it's really just better for your mental and physical wellbeing. So in that sense, it almost feels kind of natural or intuitive to return to nature. There are challenges and things I certainly miss in the city. The cultural aspects and access to different entertainment, arts, and culture. But I think that especially coming out of the pandemic and the worst of the pandemic, that this is a lifestyle that feels much more sustainable for myself personally, but also for the planet and being able to do things like grow my own food, and being in close contact with a community that feels very nurturing. That definitely does feel more long term than short term.

Ben

I guess you have Golden Week and these festivals and holidays and things like that. But I'm supposing there isn't much theater or music or cinema. I guess you probably have streaming online services there that you can have at home like everywhere else. But that sort of arts and culture still probably seemed quite concentrated in the cities.

Kana

Yeah, definitely. There's no theater. I think that if you take entertainment or arts and culture from a broader perspective, the festivals, the Matsuri that happens in the summer and the fall, and small ones throughout the year, they are definitely so fascinating from an outsider perspective where there's a lot of dance that have been passed on and performances. There's a lot of instruments and musical components to these festivals as well. But certainly not theatrical performances or entertainment in maybe the more modern sense.

Ben

Yeah. I remember going all the way to actually Kyoto to go and see a Noh play. So obviously that doesn't happen very much anywhere anymore, but still very much of the cities. So how have you found your home stay program? Have you had many visitors and how's that been? How have people found it and have they been very differently surprised? What have they been surprised about the way of life?

Kana

So the home stay program I run is called INOW. INOW is the local dialect for return home and so the idea was to create a place in Kamikatsu where people felt like they could come back to any time and create connections with the community so much so that they felt like it was kind of a home of sorts. So the home stay program we primarily guide foreigners; so our English speaking guests in Japan. We started in the pandemic so our borders have been quite strict. It was foreigners already living in Japan who wanted a chance to travel domestically but couldn't leave. And so a lot of our guests were seeking also an escape from the city to go somewhere more in nature.

Ben

Have people been really surprised when they've come to visit or have they been surprised by how it hasn't been as different or difficult to live or adapt there? Or if they've sort of come away with like, "Oh, I didn't realize about this or that."

Kana

Yeah. I think in terms of natural beauty, I certainly think that Kamikatsu is a beautiful place in Japan; maybe in the world. But I think people are less surprised by the nature and more surprised by the sense of community they feel in Kamikatsu. I think that kind of access to community is very hard in the countryside, even for Japanese who speak Japanese. Not that necessarily people are closed, but that fostering those relationship just takes time. And I think that's true anywhere else in the world. But through us and through this home stay program, they have a chance to really have that access to the community much quicker and then can feel the depths of that.

Ben

How have you found meeting up with the locals? I guess picking tea and making tea together must immediately bond you. As you say, you're the youngest of the bancha tea farmers. Suddenly they embraced you with that. But I guess that community aspect, because there's just that sense of time and doing things and going through those seasons so you experience things together. Have you learned anything particular from maybe the older locals or that sense of community you'd want to share?

Kana

Yeah. I think that certainly the only way to be in the community is to just spend time doing the things where the needs are the most and that is often labor. So spending time harvesting tea as you said. I'm also part of a woman's group in my local area within Kamikatsu and what we do is we plant flower beds along the sides of the road just to make Kamikatsu look pretty. So there are a lot of community efforts that are done from Kamikatsu as a whole, but even within the smaller areas within Kamikatsu. So spending time doing those activities really helps strengthen and nurture the relationships.

Ben

I'm interested also because you speak Japanese, but I've been told even people who spoke for a long time you have a lot of… Well first in the rule, there's a very strong dialect which can be very hard to understand even for people who lived all of their life there but come from the city. I forget the technical word, but there are a lot of these sounds in Japanese which don't have a specified meaning, but really change the context of a sentence and give a sense of like ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ and those type of words. Like these ‘was’ and ‘cause’ and ‘O's’ and ‘no’ type of sounds. But the way you put them into sentences really have a very subtle meaning of how conversations happen. Have you found that sort of conversation goes well still with the locals, or do you find you feel you are missing some nuance about what they're saying? Or do you just let the musicality of their words flow over you?

Kana

I would definitely say a bit of both. The local dialect, especially in people who are more elderly is so thick that I sometimes question if I can really speak or understand Japanese. But slowly over time I'm starting to hear some of the words or as you said, the way people integrate or use those kind of smaller particles. I think what's more interesting is that Japanese has a culture of kind of reading the air or trying to understand what people feel. It's kind of like empathy but maybe even more nuanced in that you're trying to understand how the room feels. So that kind of culture is quite challenging for me. Growing up in North America and being used to just being much more direct; if I don't understand what you're feeling, I'll ask you how you're feeling, and communicating that is sometimes difficult for Japanese who are trying to share that through what they say, like the air. So that's difficult and that's probably true of most of Japan, not just where I am.

Ben

Okay. That makes sense of that sort of feeling that sometimes it's a little bit more closed as a first order impression on the surface. But like you say, actually there's a lot going around in the room or through other things, which you can understand if you understand the culture very well. But it's harder to if you're just visiting or there for a short time. Do many of the younger people in Kamikatsu end up leaving to the cities, or do they find that they want to live this way of life? Is there this typical pull between the rural and the city that you found, or if you have this reverse that we’ve seen with people like you coming back to the village?

Kana

Yeah. Kamikatsu has no high school so that's definitely a challenge for the younger kids. There's only a middle school, and after middle school people have to leave Kamikatsu to do boarding school in the city or go to other cities and other prefectures. So that's definitely a loss of young people. You see more late twenties or people in their thirties moving to Kamikatsu. There's a term in Japan called I- turn and U-turn. U-turn is when someone born from the rural areas leaves and goes to a city and comes back to the rural places. I-turn refers to somebody who is born in a city and moves to the countryside. So you see a couple U-turns happening now, but more I-turns; people from the cities coming to rural areas, rural places like Kamikatsu.

Ben

I was reading an article about wasabi farming and how on the one hand, some of the wasabi farms are dying out because traditionally they were in families and the younger generations of that family don't want to work on the farms anymore. But it was partially offset a little bit by these people returning from the city-- not being part of the family, but being welcomed as potentially handing over to the farms to these essentially strangers, but people who work there. So I can see that in the tradition. Do you think this might happen a little bit with the tea farming? Because I had the impression that a lot of these older tea farmers-- It's very hard work, so they've got to an age where they can't farm that season anymore and so you are losing those tea farms. But they've managed to recruit someone like you at least for the now to do that, or do you think inevitably this sort of tradition will start decaying away because there's not enough of a younger cohort to come and keep it alive?

Kana

Yeah, I think that's definitely a concern of the locals in Kamikatsu for the tea; for bancha. Well, in the case of bancha, people used to do it only for their families and it was not something that was being sold and produced. I think when it reaches a level of selling and production then it is necessary for others from outside to come support that. I think that there are an increasing number of farmers who are coming to Kamikatsu to support those things. So I hope that's not the case and I hope it doesn't die out. I hope that people see the value in these traditions or these kind of agricultural practices and are motivated by the lifestyle to move to the countryside.

Ben

Excellent. I thought maybe we'd play a very short round of overrated underrated. I just give a thing and then you can say whether you think it's overrated or underrated, or you can pass or make some comments.

Kana

Sounds good.

Ben

Okay. So the first one is toilets that play music.

Kana

Underrated.

Ben

I found this was quite common in the cities. In hotels and places like Tokyo and things they would often have these kind of toilets and things. I don't know whether you have many restaurants or communal toilets in the village; probably not. But I'm assuming you don't have music playing toilets much in Kamikatsu or is it a thing as well?

Kana

No, no music playing toilets in Kamikatsu. You're so far apart from your neighbors that you could really make any noise you want and probably won't be heard. But I think that they're nice definitely in the city when you want a bit of privacy and it's usually nature sounds.

Ben

Sure. Okay. Sitting in very hot baths

Kana

Underrated. I love the bathing houses and I enjoy a nice soak.

Ben

Yeah. Is there a bathing house in the village? Is there like a village inn or something like this as well? Is that still a tradition or do people just mostly have it in their houses?

Kana (44:54):

Yeah. There's one actually about a hundred meters away from me, so I'm very close to an onsen and I frequent the onsen especially in the winter.

Ben

Is there a little community which builds around that or is it still a very kind of private thing? Because sometimes you have more of a community feel and obviously sometimes there's like a woman female gathering aspect to it.

Kana

Yeah. There is. In the past actually, the onsen thing used to be free for locals. It's not anymore, there's a discounted rate for locals. But during that time I heard that it was just a gathering place. Even now if I go there I'm bound to run into somebody I know. So I think that can be a turn off for some people, but for me, it's not a problem.

Ben

Were there a lot of grumbles when they were being charged?

Kana

Yeah, probably.

Ben

I can imagine. Okay. Train journeys in Japan.

Kana

These are all I think underrated. I think that the train journeys are some of the best things about Japan. It's really accessible, and as a foreigner you can usually get a discounted Japan rail pass. So I think it's the best way to travel.

Ben

Great. Well that's all of my underrated overrated ones. Just a handful there. Is there any other local foods or dishes around in your place that you've either learnt to cook or that you really like? So you say there's a lot of citrus and obviously you have this quite famous tea. But there seems to be a lot of regional specialties which you really only get around the region. Have you picked up any and is there a little local restaurant that people go to or do people mostly eat at home?

Kana

Yeah. There are not so many restaurants in Kamikatsu. But the ones that are here I think they're great, in my opinion. I think that there's a lot of dishes using shiitake (like a mushroom), and that's delicious in the season. In early spring there's a river fish called ayu. It's kind of a sweet fish that's also delicious. A lot of the vegetable and rice in Kamikatsu is great and people attest to the water being the source of tasty vegetables and rice. I think for an average Japanese there's nothing extremely special, but for me being able to eat such good local seasonal vegetables it’s very wonderful.

Ben

And is maybe like a quarter or a half of your vegetables now grown by you in some fashion or you have a helping hand in it, or is it not quite that large amount?

Kana

Not quite that large amount yet. But I aspire to be able to grow that much, or maybe all of my vegetables. Right now, I do go to the farmer's market and purchase most of my produce there which is grown by local farmers in Kamikatsu.

Ben

Great. What sort of projects are you working on at the moment? Obviously you have INOW, so the home stay, and it seems that you write this wonderful newsletter. But before that you did a lot of photography and you seem to have rediscovered writing. Are these kind of artistic projects you're doing? Obviously you're growing food. Are you excited for any projects now or into the long term?

Kana

Yeah. I definitely enjoy capturing what I'm feeling and what I'm seeing through writing and photos. That's something I've always done, maybe a bit more privately and now a bit more publicly through the newsletter. But touching dirt and doing things with my own hands is quite new to me. I didn't think I was capable of doing things like growing my own food or making things with wood, but these are things that I'm learning I actually can do. So using my hands and doing these projects are something that I have been putting a lot of time and labor of love into.

Ben

Great. And then final question. Do you have any advice or thoughts for people? Maybe advice if you're thinking about traveling, or advice for people who are thinking of going from city to rural, or thinking of living in a more circular or slower way. Any thoughts or advice you've had on all of the travels and things and living that you've done so far?

Kana

Yeah. I think being able to just see a diverse amount of the way people live and seeing how people choose to spend their time, how people choose to spend their money, I think can be just a really enriching experience. And so you have those things to contrast and see, "Oh, that's probably something I can take into my own life or not." I don't think the countryside is necessarily for everyone, but I do think that people can incorporate aspects that bring more nature into their lives or bring more self-sufficiency into their lives and I think a good starting point for that is spending time in the countryside and then being able to see what you can take back to wherever home is for you.

If you do decide to move to the countryside, just changing your frame of mind and seeing the things that are inconveniences as opportunities for you to spend your time in other ways, and disconnecting from a culture of convenience can be just a really personally enriching thing. That's what I've found for myself and so, yeah, I hope everyone gets to spend some time in the countryside; whether it's permanent, temporal, or just transient. If Kamikatsu interests you in particular or sustainability from a countryside perspective, I'd be happy to welcome you here to Kamikatsu.

Ben

Excellent. That would be an excellent opportunity to visit and that sounds really good. So change your mind-set in terms of inconvenience, and wherever you go bring back something to wherever you think of is home. That sounds excellent. So Kana Chan, thank you very much.

Kana

Thank you so much.