A Different Kind of Luxury

"Drawing Attention to the Generous Pace of Nature"
Miyuki Kobayashi

	Articles from the Japan Times series "Alternative Luxuries" (each article will be rewritten into a book chapter in the forthcoming: A Different Kind of Luxury)

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	When he first came to Reibun Island, wilderness guide and temple carpenter Miyuki Kobayashi was struck speechless with the pageantry before his eyes. In early June this small northern island explodes into bloom, wildflowers blanketing every crevice of plateau, glade and meadow. Glimpsing this cacophony of blossom for the first time, he knew he had to structure his life so that nothing would get in the way of being outside, in nature.
	It wasn't an easy road, however, breaking the conditioning to overwork he had grown up with and building a livelihood to fit with his priorities. "Several years later I was working as surveyor," says Kobayashi in his assured and generous tenor voice, "and the company I was working for was so busy I couldn't quit to go north as usual. By the time I made it to Reibun Island, it was already July and the wildflowers had finished blooming. Everyone there told me that it had been, as I had expected, incredible."
	He was crestfallen by the loss, but it still took several more years and quite literally a brush with death from overwork before he finally was able to create for himself the profoundly slow-paced and richly satisfying life he lives today.
	I am speaking with the gentle-featured man with the high eyebrows and prominent cheekbones at his winter quarters at a temple in a small forest preserve in Nagoya city where he works as a carpenter and a caretaker. He works by himself, lovingly maintaining the temple grounds and building alcoves, daises, shelves and porticos to beautify the interior of the temple buildings.
	When the snows begin to melt in Hokkaido, he drives slowly through the back roads and forests of rural Japan, sleeping outside in forests and fields along the way, to his home in the north. In between his stints as a mountaineering guide, he lives in a steep valley blanketed by old-growth maple and oak alongside a large coursing river.
	Such places, tragically, are quite rare today in industrial Japan. "When I was a schoolboy " relates Kobayashi, "I would spend every weekend following animal trails in the mountains surrounding my village." While his school friends would be putting on their fine clothes and taking the train into the city, he would head the other direction, exploring the wildlands with a map and a compass, following bird calls and searching for wild edibles. Since that time, Kobayashi tells me, all the wildlife habitat he experienced as a boy has disappeared under roads and housing developments--just one small part of the blanket of concrete which now covers most of the Japanese archipelago.
	All over the country, even in rural areas, cemented hillsides alternate with orderly plantations of cedar trees, between which one finds plastic greenhouses and riverbeds caulked in from side to side with concrete. "It's pitiful to the point of tragedy," he says decidedly, "how stupid those people are who celebrate the building of a new road or 'development' of the country."
	However, with the current surge in interest in hiking, Kobayashi has a chance to talk with city folk about how precious our natural heritage is to us.
	"Nature is at the very center of all human existence" declares Kobayashi firmly. "Nature can do very well on its own without humans, but we will all die if there is no nature. To have the opportunity to tell this to people who don't know anything but city life--that is why I do this job."
	It is this respect for, and gentleness toward, our non-human relatives that Kobayashi tries to teach those who he guides, some of whom come to the mountains with the sole purpose of 'collecting' another few peaks to add to their total. "I try to show people specific ways to really enjoy their time in nature," he says, "instead of simply pushing themselves to the limits, gritting their teeth trying to get to the top of some mountain."
	Kobayashi also instructs the novice hikers how to get down close to each individual flower and how to listen for different birds calls. He calculates for them exactly how much greenery, in plants and trees they see before them, that each of them individually needs to breathe oxygen every day. "But more than anything," he says, "I help people slow down, to just stand and look, to turn around and really see the beauty that they are in the midst of."
	Kobayashi's carpentry work at the temple in winter also manifests his deeply-held values about moving at a sustainable pace and devoting oneself to beauty. He takes great pleasure in making things slowly and carefully, even though banging a couple of pieces of wood together with nails would be faster and more efficient. "I want to look at whatever I have made after I have finished and see that it is a well-made, beautiful thing."
	His fine joinery is indeed a pleasure to look at. Handsome mortise and tenon joints play with complex interlocking three-dimensional angles. Precisely-chiseled geometrical pegs fit perfectly into recessed notches and are held in place by triangular shims creating firm joints that could well last for centuries.
	At the end of our time together, Kobayashi tells me the parable of the mountain water lotus, and how it is like our human situation here on Earth. "In a mountain lake," Kobayashi tells me, "if you plant one lotus plant and come back the next year, you will find two. The following year, four. Every year the number doubles. When the pond or lake is completely full, there is a massive, sudden die off. There are too many, and they choke each other out.
	"Humans, and human development is just like that. Some still say, 'Look: we still have half a pond left to expand into, not to worry.' But the very next year our numbers will be double, and we will choke our own selves out."
	The tone we end on is serious, but as I see the choices he has made as a Japanese man, coming through the perils of overwork and pressures to conform, and as I see how he has recognized the precious nature of this human life, I know that every human can change, and there's still some chance for this green breathing earth.
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