Its February. In just over one month I will move out of Tokyo with my wife and baby to live in Nagano. The place we will move to is near a town called Mochizuki, which is near a city called Saku, which is on the bullet train line from Tokyo. It is just over one hour on this train to Tokyo station.
I will not go into why Mochizuki, except to say that there is an old family house there which was unoccupied.
A little over two years ago when I decided to renounce British citizenship and become Japanese, the reality of this move began to be formed. Two years has enabled me to organise how I will work. The plan is to take the train into Tokyo for two days a week. During these two days I will lecture at the two universities I teach at as well as at AIT classes in the evenings. The rest of the time I will work from Nagano. Fast internet makes this possible. I will teach online from this May for two new AIT courses.
The house we will live in is in a forest on a mountain about 700m above sea level. The nearest place to buy milk or rice is a twenty five minute walk away. There is an onsen hot spring a short walk from the house.
The house is built on a south facing slope surrounded by red pine trees. It would be difficult to farm this land on any big scale, but compact productive forest gardening might work. You can see the North Alps on a clear day in the distance. The soil needs a lot of work and the slopes need to be leveled if they are to host productive beds of any kind. Projects are being planned.
The house is much larger than where we live now in Tokyo. It has an upstairs and a downstairs.
The asphalt road in front of the house literally ends at our back door. It gradually fizzles out and becomes the forest floor.
So, in a couple of weeks we will switch our registered place of residence from Tokyo to Nagano, buy a car and finalize the installing of a wood fire stove.
This is quite a big thing. It's time to do a big thing about now.
I will not go into why Mochizuki, except to say that there is an old family house there which was unoccupied.
A little over two years ago when I decided to renounce British citizenship and become Japanese, the reality of this move began to be formed. Two years has enabled me to organise how I will work. The plan is to take the train into Tokyo for two days a week. During these two days I will lecture at the two universities I teach at as well as at AIT classes in the evenings. The rest of the time I will work from Nagano. Fast internet makes this possible. I will teach online from this May for two new AIT courses.
The house we will live in is in a forest on a mountain about 700m above sea level. The nearest place to buy milk or rice is a twenty five minute walk away. There is an onsen hot spring a short walk from the house.
The house is built on a south facing slope surrounded by red pine trees. It would be difficult to farm this land on any big scale, but compact productive forest gardening might work. You can see the North Alps on a clear day in the distance. The soil needs a lot of work and the slopes need to be leveled if they are to host productive beds of any kind. Projects are being planned.
The house is much larger than where we live now in Tokyo. It has an upstairs and a downstairs.
The asphalt road in front of the house literally ends at our back door. It gradually fizzles out and becomes the forest floor.
So, in a couple of weeks we will switch our registered place of residence from Tokyo to Nagano, buy a car and finalize the installing of a wood fire stove.
This is quite a big thing. It's time to do a big thing about now.
I am preparing some curatorial/ art things there in the forest which shall be announced soon via the internet.
The asphalt road ends outside the back door.
Nice tactics! I'm sure it's good for our museum and your creative life.
Posted by: koseki | February 09, 2010 at 09:34 AM