"Living The Abundance Of Less"
Osamu Nakamura

by Andy Couturier (C) 1999
Kamikatsu, Tokushima, Japan

  
 
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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  Except when he's in the mountains of Nepal studying wood block print making, Osamu Nakamura is almost always at home, a small farmhouse among the terraced rice fields in the interior of Shikoku. He has no telephone, so if you want to visit, you have to stop by to see if he is in.  
   
  As I walk up the narrow footpath (his place is still inaccessible by car) I call out a greeting, and the shaven-headed gentleman with the bushy black eyebrows slides back the paper shoji doors and invites me in for a cup of locally-harvested tea.  
  As he makes a fire in the sunken pit in the middle of the floor, I look around at the meticulously stacked firewood, bamboo shelves, mud walls and, in the corner, a stone grinder for making flour from wheat berries. Above our heads, the smoke gathers and billows around the exposed roof timbers.  
   
  I tell him that I really admire the traditional life that he leads.  
  "I am not living a lifestyle of the past," he corrects me. "I am alive here, now, in the 21st century. I live like this as an experiment to find out what is the best way for a human being to live."  
  I ask him to explain what he means. . . for entering Nakamura's three-room cottage certainly gives one the feeling of stepping into another era, with the old-style doma, (dirt-floored entry way and cooking area), the authentic wood-fired clay cook stove which Nakamura built himself, and only three light bulbs and a radio to remind you that you are still in the present century.  
   
  "Everything I do is because I enjoy doing it this way," he tells me.  
  "It's true that I could start cooking on a gas stove, but then I would lose the pleasure I get from gathering and splitting firewood. And if I didn't grow and prepare my own food, I would lose the enjoyment of tilling the soil or making curry potatoes and Nepali fry bread."  
   
  Similarly, when I try to give Nakamura some money for one of his handsome black and red prints, he explains that he is not interested in receiving money for his artwork. "If I did, it might spoil the enjoyment I get from the process of carving."  
   
  Though he spends less than 400,000 yen a year, he does not own any cheaply made or plastic items of any kind.  
  Among his few possessions are his straw rain hat, a woven bamboo backpack for carrying things, and a fine collection of antique agricultural hand tools.  
  These items are not museum pieces, however, but are for his everyday use in cultivating, clearing the land, repairing the terraces, or cleaning out the pit toilet.  
  "The thing about Nakamura," says Hank Glassman, one of his many visitors and a researcher into Japanese history, "is that he'll live on almost no money at all for months, and then he'll spend 30 or 40 thousand yen on a single tool. He won't buy things of low quality."  
   
  For the money he does use, every October Nakamura works baking mochi over a charcoal fire pit at the reconstructed Edo-period village Asuke Yashiki in Aichi Prefecture for urban visitors eager for a taste of old Japan.  
  I ask Nakamura how he decided to live a life using almost no money.  
  "About twenty years ago I quit my job in the factory to travel the world. I was worried that I might have experienced regret when I got older if I hadn't gone, and I didn't want that.  
  "I was bicycling in Sweden when I came to the end of my money. Every day I went to fifty different places looking for work. And each place just told me 'No.' And every night my stomach hurt from hunger and especially from stress--I was so worried about what I would do. I even started, in the back of my mind, to think about stealing food, just to get something to eat.  
   
  "At the last moment, however, I found a job as a dishwasher. I decided then that I didn't ever want to live a life that depended upon having an income. It just twisted my personality too much to think about it all the time."  
  But it was when Nakamura first visited the mountain villages of Nepal that he met and lived with people existing almost totally outside the cash economy. He spent most of the 1980s living in a small mountain hut there while studying the techniques of wood block print making.  
   
  By the time Nakamura returned to Japan a decade later, he had a deep understanding of how to live a simplified life of reduced desires and reduced consumption. It has clearly served him well.  
   
  He still travels to Nepal every third year for a three month period (an unimaginably long vacation even for most well-paid city dwellers) to continue to study with his teacher, a master carver and Buddhist priest from Tibet.  
  Like the minute geometric designs he chisels into the cherry wood templates, Nakamura's way of speaking is both precise and simultaneously evocative. But that's not to say that he is overly serious.  
  His thoughtful face often breaks up in animated laughter when telling his travel stories, and he can easily spend four or five hours with you just relaxing on the rough woven straw mats, drinking tea, and talking philosophy.  
  In fact, later, when Horiguchi the carpenter stops by, Nakamura chides the more recent arrival in the village when he begins to fidget after finishing his cup of tea. "Horiguchi-san isn't used to doing nothing all day," he says with a twinkle in his eye. "It's an acquired skill to not keep yourself busy all the time, and it takes work at first to do it."  
  Busyness is a hard habit to break, it's true. But perhaps such a life--very little production, very little consumption--might be the very solution needed for the world ecological crisis.  
   
  Even things which Nakamura has in abundance, such as water or garden space, he uses extremely sparingly. It is as if he is training his spirit by refraining from any form of psychological or material gluttony. The lack of clutter in his house (as well as in his personality) I notice, truly does produce a peacefulness and sense of possibility.  
  Although one could view Nakamura's life as retreat from the many problems of the world, in his more than twenty years of simple living he has inspired dozens of his visitors to follow his more environmentally sustainable path.  
  As we look out on the clouds gathering and shifting on the far mountains across the valley, I ask Nakamura--in the state of suspended relaxation that comes from the lazy use of a long winter's afternoon--"Do you feel that you are living a life of luxury?"  
  "Luxury? No, not luxury. It's an ordinary life, but I do feel an abundance, a sense of plenty. A hundred years ago, I would not have been able to choose what kind of life to live. I feel very lucky to be living in this age. "  
   
 
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