Springing

Gathering fukinoto again can only mean that it is just over one year since we moved on to this land. Actions repeated as our rhythms synchronise with the seasons. Seasonal tasks emerge: a winter of pruning to revive long abandoned fruit and nut trees, cutting logs for growing mushrooms, gathering vines from the forest for basketry, thinning the bamboo grove, making miso and, of course, plenty of foraging for winter foods.

Short evenings spent with a pot of hot tea on the hibachi (a large urn in which charcoal is placed on a bed of ash), hands kept warm with the whittling of bamboo utensils, weaving of baskets or binding of grass brooms. Legs warm under the low, quilt covered table, covering also another bed of ash and more glowing charcoal. An arrangement the Japanese call kotatsu. For the inexperienced it will be meaningless to talk of the qualitative difference in the heat that emanates from charcoal. It may lack the look of adequate heat, the brash and violent blaze of a well fuelled wood fire but nevertheless it slowly, quietly projects a heat that penetrates deeply.  A little can go a surprisingly long way, but we are talking quality not quantity. This may be the old secret to the close-knit nature of Japanese family life: there is but one warm place in the house and you must be within inches of it to receive its warmth.

Now spring is returning, so says fukinoto, a proclamation seconded by the flowering willows. The clear days are warm. Birds sing encouragement to the swelling buds in the build up to a full spring crescendo. Encouragement is needed for the spring comes in fits and starts. Warm humid days fool shiitake into a premature flushing. The return to cold dry weather leaving only knobs of stunted and dehydrated would-be mushrooms on the logs. A hapless wasp, likewise fooled into a premature emergence, staggers on the door step, dazed by the cold.

There are good reasons for the long delay since my last post. I prefer to write in the early morning but as winter progressed my warm futon produced increasingly compelling arguments against such a routine. Winter almost done I had a novel idea: I could write with pencil and paper! Imagine that. And no need to get out of bed. Wake up, reach for notebook and pencil and dip in to the flow. Writing when half asleep is an interesting exercise. A revealing exercise. Jotting down whatever comes in to your head as you linger in that sweet space between sleep and wakefulness… But whatever comes into my head, interesting, or revealing as it may be, doesn’t necessarily make for appropriate blog material. Nevertheless, I am quite taken by this pencil and paper thing and will happily spend a lot less time in front of a glowing screen.

It is not that I have not been writing at all though. I have written a piece on miso making for the Permaculture Research Institute website and have another couple of articles in the works for them. There is a wealth of interesting articles posted regularly on the PRI website.  The pieces by Kyle Chamberlain I have found particularly interesting.

I am also working on a book. Ostensibly about wild harvesting though not a field guide. More like a politico-philosophical treatise, or a foragers manifesto, if you will.

It has been a wonderful first year at Shikigami. A difficult thing to say in light  of the traumatic events in Japan. The best news this past year has been the permanent closure of the Hamaoka nuclear power plant, about 80km’s south west of Shikigami. We are very happy indeed with this announcement and look forward to future announcements of the closure of all the remaining nuclear reactors in Japan and throughout the world. From the timing of the announcement (or our awareness of it, at least) it could be tempting to think of it as last years Christmas present but we know that Christmas presents go with the opening of power stations, not their closings.

The closure of Hamaoka is good and necessary, to be sure, but it remains that the options in Japan are largely between nuclear and coal fired power plants. We say, none of the above! And forget about green tech fantasies to keep the economy rolling (bulldozing) along. Our economic system is the driver for the wholesale destruction of environments and the lives woven through them, not to mention the further decimation of communities long stripped from sustaining environments. We put our own energy into showing the desirability and wealth of low energy living. (More workshops to be held in Tokyo in March. Details soon.)

Given the continuing and deepening global economic crisis, playing out most dramatically in Greece at present, the time may have finally come  when significant numbers of people will realize that not only is a change of system desirable but also inevitable. I continue to do work on gift economics, mostly focused on researching anthropological works on traditional gift economies. I am beginning to think that the notion of reciprocity may be overemphasized in contemporary reconstructions of gift economies, something I have done in my own writing. Perhaps the inevitable result of those fully immersed in market ideologies trying to come to terms with the radical difference of gift cultures.

Recently, thanks to the brilliantly titled Art for Housewives blog, I have been introduced to the work of Mark Boyle, a Brit who has lived for over two years without using any money. Boyle has written a book, with the rather dull title, The Moneyless Man (a publishers, not a writers title choice, to be sure), recounting his cash free experiences. He has a second book on the way that addresses many of the questions and criticisms raised by the earlier work. I have not read his book but I have been looking at freeconomy, the community website he founded. Freeconomy is basically a site to find local people to join with in the creation of gift circles. People list skills, tools and other things they can share and if you require something you contact the individual concerned and a connection is established. At first it may sound somewhat like LETS (Local Energy Trading System) but an important difference is that LETS is based on the exchange of time, that is, time is used as a unit of currency. Its essential difference from the regular economy is a difference in the means of exchange. Freeconomy has no accounting, no unit of exchange and is therefore a true gift economy.

I do not mean to suggest some kind of purist gift economics dogma though. Our current economic system will be the dea(r)th of us all and any and all methods of operating outside of that system are needed. Now.

Finally, while on the subject of gift economies, this blog now features a new Gift Circle page. The Shikigami gift circle provides a way for you, should you so wish, to offer gifts that will help in the continuation of our work and the work of others we wish to support. If you enjoy reading this blog, find the information useful, the ideas stimulating  or inspiring, the pictures nice, please take a moment to check it out.

The Inexpressible

Sitting on the floor around a low table with friends visiting from Tokyo, eating fresh produce from the garden not ten metres away. Spirits enlivened with a light buzz from the mugwort homebrew.

During the course of the evening the conversation inevitably turns to Fukushima and, like a dark storm cloud filling a summer sky, a heaviness descends on the gathering. Voices are lowered, sentences punctuated with long silences as we each struggle to find the words.

One of our friends is from Fukushima prefecture, her parents still living there. They are a “safe” distance away but not saying it aloud we all know in Fukushima there are no safe distances. There is much that is not said aloud, it doesn’t need to be, our facial expressions and body language show what we are all thinking or trying not to think.

What should we say to the large numbers of people living there? The government’s reassurances are disingenuous at best and often just blatant lies. Arising in Fukushima is a sort of prefectural patriotism where overt concern is scorned, the worried considered hysterical. The reaction of a traumatized population that cannot leave.

Compensation is being offered only to those that were living inside the official evacuation zone, a 30km radius around Fukushima Daiichi. Considered grossly inadequate by all international observers and non-government/industry affiliated experts in Japan, such a small evacuation zone certainly eases the financial burden on TEPCO, the nuclear plants operator, and the government. What this decision means is that hundreds of thousands of residents are unable to leave. Unable to sell their houses and with no hope of assistance from the government or TEPCO they believe they are condemned to remain. Denial their only defence against the invisible threat.

The danger they face is amplified by the shameful response of the government. One of the latest examples of reprehensible (in)action by the Japanese government regards the burning of contaminated rubble. Materials so highly radioactive that in other countries they would be subject to the strict controls of radioactive waste and disposed of in secure underground facilities are being burnt in Fukushima, releasing even more radioactive material into the atmosphere and re-contaminating sites, such as school playgrounds, that have been stripped of their topsoil already in efforts to lower radioactivity. [For more on this see the second half of this video issued by Fairewinds]

To say the unspeakable: Like a human sacrifice offered to the gods of industrial civilization the people of Fukushima and surrounding prefectures are offered up by their government to pay the price of our collective madness.

And the madness runs deep indeed. The young parents of a Fukushima family state in an interview that they are remaining in an area known to be highly contaminated because of their jobs! The “security” of a job trumps the health of their children. Obviously not an isolated case as the school the children attend appears to still have a substantial number of students, masked, in long sleeves and pants during the heat of summer.

Whether one views the modern world as insane or not may even be a criterion of one’s own sanity. – Masanobu Fukuoka

In the local supermarket of our Tokyo friends leafy vegetables from prefectures bordering Fukushima are still being sold. Whilst Japanese scientists are pleading for all food grown in Japan to be tested for radiatioactivity before going to market the most vulnerable types of vegetables grown dangerously close to the site of the multiple nuclear reactor meltdowns are still finding their way onto the shelves of Tokyo stores. There are not enough facilities to expand current testing, apparently, and there are no signs of any action being taken to remedy this situation.

I could go on and on…a screed of words borne of anger and frustration…but, beneath the anger, deeper than the place from where the rage stirs there is a pain for which I cannot find words, an inexpressible sorrow…What have we become? What are we doing?

DIY Kitchen Appliances

Living up in the mountains with the nearest road a good ten minutes walk along a steep forest path it is quite extraordinary that we have mains electricity. I imagine that nowhere else but Japan would a utility company go to such lengths to get a house on the grid. Its true this connection allows us some modern comforts – well, three at least: laptop, lights and a refrigerator (whose days are definitely numbered) – but, had we been the original occupants we probably would have opted to stay off the grid. Right from the time we first moved here we have discussed options for generating electricity ourselves, at first in the context of long-term plans but following events at Fukushima these discussions have gained some urgency. Reasons for generating our own electricity are hopefully too obvious to warrant comment but why detach from the grid altogether? Our grid is owned and operated by Tepco (the Devil itself!).

Although the micro-hydro system we would like to have generating the few kilowatts of electricity we need might still be a little way off we have been working on some super low technologies to better align our energy use with our circumstances and needs.

The previous occupant of our house seems to have done most of her cooking by gas. Convenient if you live in a city, or village, or just if there is a road nearby, really. Far less convenient when the gas bottles have to be carried on your back up in to the mountains. Also when you live in the midst of a forest there tends to be an abundance of fuel, everywhere. And, of course, you gotta pay for the gas (and which friendly neighboorhood corporation will be taking your money this time?).

Rice Cooker

To reduce overall fuel consumption the first cooking appliance we built was a heat retention cooker (HRC). These brilliantly simple devices – sometimes referred to as ‘haybox cookers’ due to the insulation material originally used or by us as our ‘rice cooker’ due to what we mostly use it for -  are certainly one of the most effective energy-saving cooking devices around. Using the gas rice cooker that we inherited with the house it took around 35 – 40 minutes of fuel usage to cook one days supply of rice plus another 10 or so minutes each time we wanted to reheat the rice. With the heat retention rice cooker it takes around 10 minutes of fuel usage to generate enough heat to cook the rice and 3 – 5 minutes to reheat it (the HRC will keep the rice warm for the best part of a day but we avoid doing this due to the risks of bacterial growth in a constantly warm environment). Keep in mind the times I have given are for fuel usage not cooking time [see below].

The principle of the HRC is simply that you heat food in a pot then place the pot in the HRC (an insulated container) which traps the heat emitted from the food in the pot and uses this heat to cook the food. Essentially it’s a sort of slow cooker so can be used for anything you might cook in a slow cooker such as grains, beans, stews, casseroles etc., or anything you might  use an insulated box for such as making yoghurt or keeping food warm.

A couple of cardboard boxes, wood ash, a sheet of styrofoam-like material backed with a reflective material (used in Japan for covering bath tubs to keep the water hot), tape, a bag of batting an old blanket.

We used wood-ash as an insulator because we have it but other insulating materials could be corrugated cardboard, old blankets, polystyrene type packaging materials… As most of the heat escapes from the top of the box this must be insulated well hence our two layers of corrugated cardboard covered with the reflective material, the batting inside a plastic bag (preventing it from becoming moist and smelly) and the old blanket over the lid of the cooker (added mainly to hold the lid down but gives one more layer of insulation to the cooker). It is well worth lining the inside of the box with some sort of reflective material as this will reflect the heat emanating from the pot back at the pot.

The model we designed and built might seem a little over engineered but it works so well I would say the little extra effort and materials  really paid off. Before making our HRC we had read that brown rice would require 10 to 15 minutes boiling then 2 hours in the HRC. We boil our brown rice for 5 minutes and after one hour in the HRC it is perfectly cooked (this is only 15 to 20 minutes more than most electric rice cookers!). It’s true that our cooking time is improved because we sprout the rice before cooking but no matter how you cook it brown rice should be soaked for a long time or, better, sprouted.

The Macrowave

Another simple device we have built is a solar box cooker.

Two boxes, a sheet of glass, some aluminium foil, wheat paste, tape and a blackened pot.

We completed the solar cooker just as we entered the rainy season so we haven’t had many opportunities to use it yet. But on the rare sunny days that we have had over the past month it has performed reasonably well. Putting a pot of water on in the morning we have boiling water for morning tea. Nothing but beautiful rays of sunshine…

The dimensions of our solar cooker were determined by the piece of glass we had and it is a little smaller than ideal. Not shown in the photograph is a ‘splash plate’ of aluminium painted flat black that sits under the pot. It’s critical to use blackened pots in solar cookers as they make an immense difference to the cooking time.

For the low down on all things solar cooking including plans: solarcooking.org

The Rocket

Our latest DIY cooking appliance is a little rocket stove. With just a handful of sticks it burns really hot producing very little smoke. Since we introduced the rocket stove to our kitchen set-up we have almost entirely ceased using the gas cooker.

An old commercial size soy sauce can, a length of stove-pipe, a stove-pipe elbow bend, a tin can, wood ash.

A rocket stove maximizes combustion and heat transfer efficiency. In a well built stove all the volatile gases released as the wood gets hot will be combusted. This occurs when there is sufficient temperature. To attain the necessary temperatures the stove is insulated with low mass, heat resistant materials (wood ash, again, in our case). The complete combustion of the volatile gases results in virtually no smoke being emitted – a cleaner, more efficient use of wood as cooking fuel.

Rocket stove before the addition of wood-ash insulation

Although our little rocket stove works brilliantly we’re planning a new improved model already: multiple burners with high, medium and low heat, raising it to table top height… At present we use ‘risers’ to elevate our pots above the flame when we need to ‘turn the heat down’ and when we want to turn it right up we have a ‘skirt’ that fits snugly around the pot and directs the heat vertically up the sides of the pot increasing efficiency.

Video tutorial on making a rocket stove

The Rocket Stove Principle