"Living The Abundance Of Less"
Osamu Nakamura

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

  
 
Excerpted from "A Different Kind of Luxury"
  
     
 
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  Nakamura-san's small wooden cottage can be found at the end of a steep footpath that passes through terraced rice paddies and small stands of cedar. Standing in front of his house, you can look out across the narrow valley and see on the opposite side a few other tile-roofed farmhouses here and there amongst the dark blue-green trees that lay thickly upon the slope of the mountain. Several hundred feet below, a rushing creek cuts along the valley floor.  
   
  Nakamura is someone who is almost always at home. That is except when he's off studying in the tiny Sherpa village in the mountains of Nepal where he learns woodblock printmaking from his teacher, Tapkhay Gendun, a Tibetan monk. Nakamura so seldom leaves the tiny farmhouse where he lives that when I stop by late one winter's morning eager for another lively conversation with my friend, I find it odd that he's not around. He has no telephone, so one just has to walk up the winding path and see if he is in.  
  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.  
   
  Since he seems to be gone, I leave him a note in his small wooden mailbox made from weathered slats, and traipse back down the path to the narrow road which runs beside the creek as it tumbles between large boulders into deep, blue-green pools. Soon it joins the larger Katsura river where I cross a bridge and make my way to the small building which houses the local public hot spring. When I enter the bathing area, I am surprised to find the shaven-headed gentleman himself soaping up in the adjacent stall.  
  "Yes, during the winter," Nakamura says, "I only go out about three times, and that's usually to the hot spring. With the snowfall last night, the pipes to my bathtub in the other building are frozen, so I decided to come down here."  
  We talk a little as we soak in the mineral-rich waters, and, as we are drying off in the dressing room, he invites me back up the mountain for some locally-produced tea--"Awa bancha." As we walk up the road together, our breath steaming in the cold, Nakamura tells me how this specialty, fermented-type tea is now only made in two remote regions of rural Japan, and, interestingly, rural Burma.  
   
  When we arrive back at his house, Nakamura welcomes me and slides back the perfectly-maintained paper shoji doors, and we step into the dirt-floored entry room typical to all old farmhouses in Japan. Unusual, however is the yellow-brown Nepali style cookstove made of mud and brick on which Nakamura prepares all his food. We take off our shoes and step up into the living area and sit down on the rough straw mats around the sunken fire pit in the middle of the floor. As he starts to make a fire, I look around at the few old hand tools (still in use, of course) hanging on the mud walls and, in the corner, two large circular grinding stones for making flour from wheat berries.  
  Nakamura builds a fire well. He places several logs in a cross pattern in the ashes, between which he arranges crisp, dry cedar needles that he pulls out of a tight-fitting straw basket which he keeps near the wall. He then puts a few pieces of split bamboo--which burn quickly and hot--on top of the cedar, and finally, on top of that, he lays some short, one-inch diameter branches. Each of these items has been, over the preceding year, gathered, cut to length, dried and stacked neatly by size and type under the eaves in front of his house.  
   
  As always, the fire lights on the very first match.  
   
  Nakamura has lived in this house for almost eleven years now, since he returned from Nepal at age 42. When I first met him and visited his house, I imagined that his way of living (which from a certain perspective might appear quite austere) was based on some moral or ethical philosophy.  
  "No," Nakamura says, "everything I do is because I completely enjoy doing it this way. And that's the way it's been since I left my factory job when I was 28 and began my travels."  
  Nakamura then places an elegantly-shaped cast iron tea kettle on the hook that hangs over the fire pit, and, when the water starts steaming out of the spout, takes a small handful of dried, olive-colored leaves from a tin canister and places them in a mottled, russet clay tea pot. He pours the boiling water slowly over the tea leaves in a circular motion with as much care as one might when transplanting a seedling. He then reaches over to the wooden shelves behind him and removes a second tin canister containing another specialty, this time from Nepal: some hard, twisted biscuit-like snacks that he has made according to a recipe he learned from the Sherpa villagers.  
  He tilts the canister, and five or six slide out onto a small earthenware plate. Each one is coated with unrefined sugar, is perfectly crunchy, and makes an excellent complement to the fragrant yellowish-green tea.  
   
  As we warm ourselves by the fire, the smoke billows and gathers around the blackened roof timbers above our head. We look out the open sliding doors on the snow-dusted mountains, and he begins to tell me of the travels that eventually brought him to this life in the mountains.  
  "Ever since I was a child," he begins, "I always looked at the hills behind where we lived and wanted to know what was on the other side. Many people are satisfied with where they are and with what they have. I don't judge that at all, but for me, as soon as I was able, maybe seven years old, I got on a bus by myself to see what was in the next town. As I got older, I would go farther and farther away. Eventually I had seen a lot of Japan, but I still wanted to know what was beyond. By that time, I was working in a factory and had a steady income; but I had that same yearning, this time to know what was on the other side of the ocean."  
  Like the minute geometric designs he chisels into woodblock templates, Nakamura's way of speaking is both precise and simultaneously evocative. But neither is he 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 straw mats, drinking tea, and talking of life.  
  "The decision to actually leave happened in an instant," he recalls. "I looked at my life, and I knew that I didn't want to wake up one day and find myself an old man and be filled with regret that I hadn't seen the things of this world."  
   
  From what I know about Japan in the mid-seventies, it was quite uncommon for someone, especially a working-class man with a factory job to leave it all and go abroad. His father and mother, he tells me, did not approve.  
  "Of course," he continues, "there are two kinds of regret I could have faced: I knew it was quite possible that I might end up stranded in some foreign country, miserable, without any money and having given up my job. But when I compared that possible regret against retiring at 65 years old, having known nothing except working in a factory--that was when I knew. Though the idea had certainly been building up inside for a long time before that, and it took at least six months afterwards before I could finish my preparations and finally leave, the decision itself came upon me in a single second. I was twenty eight years old."  
   
  Nakamura's storytelling technique is always full of nuances, balances and contexts. It's as though if he cares enough to tell you something, he cares enough to make sure you understand perfectly what he is trying to communicate. A friend of his, Atsuko Watanabe, once commented, "Nakamura-san is a craftsperson, a calling which often involves repeating the same movement over and over again. Many people who come to visit him ask the same questions--Why doesn't he have a telephone? Why does he cook only with wood? Where does he get his money from? etc.--yet he never shows any annoyance at having to say the same thing again. He uses each time as an opportunity to refine his way of speaking and explaining, trying to make it clearer and more easy to understand each time."  
   
  When Nakamura quit the factory job, he left Japan and boarded the almost legendary Trans-Siberian Railroad, and, changing in Moscow, came down into Europe. He spent the next two years travelling, much of it by bicycle. He rode from northern Europe through France, across the Alps, and down the entire length of the Italian peninsula, and then all the way back up and through Germany, through most of the countries of Eastern Europe, down through Yugoslavia and then into Greece--all on his own. When I inquire as to the length of his journey, he calculates for a moment and says that it must have been around 14,000 miles. (Nakamura seems to have no pride on this account--it is only when I ask him to estimate the distances, and list the different countries that he passed through that I understand the magnitude of what he accomplished.)  
  "At one point", he tells me, "I ran out of money, and began to look for work. I was in Sweden at the time, and my money was going fast. Every day I went to fifty different shops asking for work. And each place just told me 'No.' 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. If a human is starving, it's quite natural to think about doing bad things."  
  "Why didn't you just write to your parents," I interrupt, "and ask them for money?"  
  "No," he answers simply. "I did not consult my parents before I left, so I would not ask them for any kind of assistance."  
  He continues, "Just before I completely ran out of money, someone gave me a job as a dishwasher." Then he adds, almost as an afterthought, "I decided at that time that living a life focussed on money was definitely not for me. Thinking about money all the time just twisted my personality too much."  
   
  Hearing this, I consider that most people after such an experience decide exactly the opposite. It's indicative, I think, of the way Nakamura responds to life in general.  
  But it was when he first visited the high mountain villages of the Himalayas that he first encountered people existing almost totally outside the cash economy. He ended up spending most of the 1980s living with Sherpa villagers and monks in a small mountain hut in Nepal and studying the techniques of woodblock print making.  
  "Sometimes when you reminisce," Nakamura begins, looking up from the fire straight into my eyes, "you think about a particular turn your life has taken--say, if you hadn't realized as you were going out of your guesthouse in New Delhi that you had forgotten something, and gone back to get it, you would not have met that man in the lobby, who recommended you talk to that priest in Katmandu about traditional crafts, who, when you met him, told you about that woodblock print teacher living in the mountains. And if you hadn't gone to study woodblocks, you wouldn't have learned the attitude toward living that has allowed you to lead the life you now do. It all seemed quite ordinary at the time, but looking back you see that your life would have been different if you had not forgotten something in your room."  
  It's now getting on toward evening, and Nakamura asks if I would like to spend the night. Having nothing to do the next day, I happily accept. We then go back down to the dirt-floored entry room with the cookstove, and he selects the items for dinner. I know from my visits before that I am in for a treat. Nakamura is one of the most accomplished--though understated--cooks that I have ever met. Cooking and eating are not things he does because he has to; they are central to his life.  
   
  "I am reading Walden Pond now," he says, "and though it's interesting, I was hoping that there'd be more about growing and cooking food. Life in the woods or the mountains should be 50% about food.  
  "It's funny," he continues, "Thoreau only lived there for a little more than two years. It's more like he moved there in order to write the book. One needs about ten years to understand a particular way of living. Thoreau seems like he was more of a tourist."  
  I laugh. I've never heard such an unorthodox opinion about the great man, who, to most people's thinking, pioneered the idea of an urban person intentionally choosing a rural life.  
  Then Nakamura goes into the back room and brings out a book, Rhythms of a Himalayan Village. He hands it to me as I sit at the wooden table. "This book was written about the village where I lived," he says, pointing to a black-and-white photograph of a misty, barren mountainside with several mud and tile houses scattered on the ridgeline, and distant snowy peaks towering in back. "This is the monastery where I studied woodblock carving, and," he turns the page, "this man is my teacher." He points to a photo of a monk sitting by a window, his face lined by years of cold-weather living and meager conditions.  
  As I page through the book, I get lost in its beautiful images and enigmatic quotes--some from the Sherpa villagers and others from Tibetan Buddhist scriptures. I begin to get a sense of how the villagers' way of living, in its utter simplicity as well as in its depth of meaning, could have given Nakamura the basic understanding of how to live a simplified life of reduced desires and reduced consumption when he returned to Japan. Living five days' walk from the nearest roads or electric lines, on a windy ridgetop covered in stunted grasses and rock, the people show both a physical strength and--through their words--a humility, steadiness, and an unmistakable wisdom.  
  "It was because I saw the Sherpa's way of living, and had lived it myself," says Nakamura, "that when I came back to Japan and saw this house, I knew the same way of living would be possible here."  
  Nakamura has switched on one of the three light bulbs in his house, and, as we speak, he starts to grind together some cumin, ginger, salt, garlic and red pepper in a rough-hewn stone bowl. He puts this aside and starts a wood fire in the low, clay cookstove and places a blackened frying pan on top. He cuts up some onions into tiny cubes with a well-sharpened knife and slides them into the oil in the pan. He puts a great deal of intention into each action: adjusting the fire, carefully eyeing (but not measuring) the quantities of each item. It's a pleasure to watch. He then adds some cut potatoes, and some cabbage, and then the spice paste from the heavy stone bowl.  
  As I watch him go through the process, I think how funny and wonderful it is to be this far back into the mountains on a cold winter's evening, as the early darkness falls about us, just about to eat potato vindaloo, when in the closest city (a long, tortuous two hour bus ride away) although it has a quarter of a million residents, it is impossible to find Indian food at all.  
  Though he lives in a remote area, Nakamura is far from uninformed. During dinner, our discussion ranges from his theories about representational versus abstract art; the transition of the Japanese economy from manufacturing to information-processing; and, most surprisingly to me, the symbolic issues of identity and self in the phenomenon of young Japanese people who blacken their faces and dress as though they were urban African Americans. He also, as we speak, explains to me nuances of usage of several different Japanese ideograms, and their history.  
  He gets a lot of his information from the excellent national radio station, NHK, which broadcasts discussions and essays and literary forums in a much greater depth than one can hear in the U.S. When I ask him what he usually reads, he tells me, "I like this literary and arts quarterly, Ginga," and picks up a thick, illustrated magazine sitting beside his table. The date is 1973.  
  "I think that the tone has not been as elegant in recent years as it was in the '70s. That's why I tend to re-read the issues from that era more than buy any new ones."  
  I compare Nakamura's absolutely simple--almost bare--existence to the sophisticated level of his thought and discussion, and I really feel an admiration for his decisions in life as to what to prioritize. For all the time he obviously spends cutting and gathering firewood, gardening, cooking or simply gazing into the fire, it doesn't seem that his intellectual life has suffered in the least. It is as though the mastery that he has achieved as a craftsperson suffuses all the other spheres of his life. In fact--as I consider our various conversations over time--I recognize that his way of life has profoundly shifted my own feelings about "manual labor"--that is, work with the hands.  
  After dinner, we go to the furthest back room where Nakamura carves his woodblocks. He reaches inside the handsome antique tansu chest and pulls out his most recent work. It is a collection of prints, which he has mounted on traditional Japanese mulberry paper, and then hand-bound, exquisitely, with a dark, indigo-blue cloth cover. This book, I consider as I hold it, is the only one of its kind in all of the world.  
  It opens accordion style, the way many books once did in Japan. Each page reveals, on one side, a rectangular sample of rough-woven Nepali cloth printed with a red and black geometric design, and on the opposing side, a rendition of that same pattern done by Nakamura as a woodblock print on paper. Nakamura's reproductions of these designs exhibits his characteristic precision and love of his work. He is nothing if not exact. He uses the same color scheme as the Nepali cloth, but the flawlessly matching flywheels, rosettes, chevrons, zigzags and diagonal inscriptions, because of their concise fit, merge and shift such that my eyes start to play tricks on me, as if I was viewing an optical illusion.  
  Nakamura explains that he collected the cloth samples (of which there are over thirty different designs) on his last visit to Nepal, and, when he came back, he carved the interlocking designs one by one into solid blocks of cherry wood. We sit at his low work table and he shows me his tools, pointing out differences between those typically used by carvers in Nepal and Japan. The Nepali-Tibetan chisel is compact, and has a rounded handle that fits into the concave surface of the palm of the hand. The handles of the tools reveal a softness and seasoning that only comes from long years of use.  
  As I page through the fine book, I see that it is at once a work of cultural preservation, and of interpretive change. In the Nepali cloth samples, the lines of the black and red patterns often don't fit exactly with each other, but nonetheless exhibit a strangely beguiling beauty, one that can only be found in folk items that are made to be used. The cloth itself seems to speak of the life of mountain peasants, and a of way of living that has existed for hundreds of years. Nakamura says that these pieces come from all over Nepal, but they are becoming rarer and rarer with the advent of cloth printed by silkscreen.  
  "When I first arrived in Nepal, more than 90 percent of the people wore clothing that had been hand-printed by small woodblocks. On my most recent trip, it was less than 10 percent. Silkscreens can print much more space of cloth in a much shorter time."  
  "When I first arrived in Nepal, more than 90 percent of the people wore clothing that had been hand-printed by small woodblocks. On my most recent trip, it was less than 10 percent. Silkscreens can print much more space of cloth in a much shorter time."  
  Nakamura then takes out of his cabinet the dense rectangular wooden blocks that he used to make these prints. On closer examination, I see that each one has rows and rows of intricate, identical patterns, and that each pattern is cut deep into the thick, solid block. A single slip of the chisel, I realize, would ruin the pattern, and he would have to start over from scratch.  
  I ask him if this repetitive, unforgiving work sometimes gets on his nerves.  
  By way of answer he says, "Yes, it's true that making something of minute detail takes a lot of focused concentration: at first you do feel some tension because you are worrying about making mistakes. In my experience such feelings can continue for a half hour or more.  
  "However if you keep working, all of a sudden you slip into a timeless space, where the work and you cease to be different. There's only the work itself. When you come out, you don't know whether several minutes or several hours have passed. It's a particular feature of this kind of work."  
  As he speaks, Nakamura's facial expression and posture take on the look of a man in a trance: his eyelids flutter, his head floats back slightly, his movements approach a liquid pace, like in dreams. It's the genius of his way of communicating that even if one isn't a craftsperson, and knows nothing of woodblock print carving, one immediately identifies with his state. It's like his words are more story and induction than explanation of fact.  
  "A craftsperson's job is half meditation, half creation. There's the creativity to design whatever you are working on, but it takes meditation to do it right."  
  When he says this, I think to myself that perhaps a lot of the frustration that modern people feel doing manual work or taking care of what needs to be done might not be because manual labor is itself so objectionable, but because our attitude towards it might not be right.  
  "Making things with one's own hands," I remember Nakamura telling me once, "cultivates a certain generosity and openness of the heart. It nourishes that state of mind in the craftsperson themselves, which is intimately connected with an entire way of life."  
  I think then, with sadness, of the epidemic levels of depression in my own country, and wonder whether it might have any connection to the general aversion we have as a culture to work with our hands.  
  Nakamura then shows me the diagram that is used for the practice of the beginning student of Tibetan wood carving. Instead of images or patterns, it's a chart of Tibetan lettering, with arrows indicating the correct angle and pressure that the chisel should take.  
  The Tibetan script is tremendously attractive. It has the flow and sweep of Arabic, but also an angular, blade-like assertiveness. It moves from right to left, and drops down like curved icicles from a ledge at the top.  
  "Learning how to accurately carve all the letters of the Tibetan script," says Nakamura, "gives the learner all the skills with the eyes, fingers and hands that he needs to be a proficient wood carver, no matter what the image to carve may be."  
  Nakamura then takes from a wooden box some of his older work, from when he lived in Nepal. These images from Buddhist iconography are entirely different. One, which has been printed on the most translucent of rice paper is of a female deity with a multitude of arms and a beatific face who sits on a lotus flower wrapped about by wisps of a cloud. The lines are razor thin, and curve with an sweep and an elegance that is hard to describe.  
  "You made this as well?" I ask. For the work I had been shown before, though exact, is nowhere near as gossamer and delicate as what I now hold in my hands. Some of the lines are so thin that they would require a ridge of wood no wider than a hair.  
  "Yes," says Nakamura, "if you carve every single day, for many hours a day, the skill in your hands develops to a very high level. If you reduce the time you spend on it, your ability decreases as well."  
  Nakamura then pulls from the cabinet some other books that he has bound by hand, explaining to me the Japanese method of sewing together the cloth and paper covers. I look at each of them, and marvel at the care that went into them. Given how much labor they take, I realize that it is only possible to make a few copies of each, and only a few people will look at them; and, despite myself, I think that it's a lot of effort for very little reward. But then I consider, picking up one of these hand-sewn, cloth-covered volumes, that, in contrast to a book published by machine, even one selling thousands of copies, the simple potency and beauty of a book made with intention by a human hand gives the reader pleasure of an entirely different order.  
  One of the books Nakamura has made is a thin item bound for himself explaining how to make sandals out of rice straw. Paging through it, I see how much my way of thinking about "craft" has changed over the period I have known him. Instead of craft being a "nice" pursuit, a hobby to waste away several bored hours (as I had somewhat unconsciously thought before), I understand it now as one of the most fundamental, and deeply ancient ways that human's have to meet their needs: baskets for winnowing grain, woven cloth to cover the body, the blacksmithing of tools with which to cultivate the soil, and woodblocks to print images and to communicate with others. I also have seen, in spending time with Nakamura, that a person, in the process of making something simple like straw sandals, or a handmade book, cultivates their humility while doing something that is actually, incontrovertibly, meaningful.  
  And yet, I still wonder, especially as he starts to explain to me the painstaking process of sewing the cover on a handmade book--how the cloth has to be tucked in at a certain angle under the paper, how the cover should extend just one millimeter beyond the stack of pages--whether it's really necessary to be that careful.  
  Nakamura's answer, as usual, is simple, and clear: "If you make it this way, every time you look at it later, it's an enjoyable experience."  
  Hearing these words, I understand now that the energy he puts in to making something properly continues to feed his spirit time and again, and this is the reason his house is such a pleasure to visit.  
  Looking back now at the book on how to make sandals from straw, whose pages are only photocopies from a set of instructions he found on his travels, I see that they have become, through his binding them in a cover of that same Nepali cloth, something of beauty where simply functional would easily have done. I remember my own piles of various papers at home, in stacks and in boxes all over my house, and compare them less than favorably to the elegant simplicity of his way of keeping some information that he deems important.  
  When I tell Nakamura how moved I am by this kind of beauty, and how this kind of seeing is new and different to me, he gets up and goes to his bookshelf and pulls down a tiny book covered in yellowed kraft paper.  
  "If I were to leave this house and this way of living behind, this is one of the three books I would take with me."  
  "This one is entitled The Culture of Handicrafts. It was written in the 1920s by Muneyoshi Yanagi. He asked himself the question: 'What is beautiful?' And the answer, for him, was: 'Everyday things; things that are used in daily life by ordinary people. ' "  
  Yanagi, I learn, was one of the pioneers of the Japanese folk handicrafts movement, which rejected ostentatious ideals of beauty held by many Japanese of the time. He traveled throughout the Japanese islands, and Korea as well, living with peasants and farmers, looking for rough earthenware rice bowls, handmade wooden buckets, bamboo and straw baskets, all of which, to him, expressed a more subtle and nuanced type of beauty.  
  Here I find the foundation of the ideas which underlies Nakamura's approach to his life: "The Beauty of Usefulness" in Yanagi's words.  
  As I look around the three rooms that make up Nakamura's house again, I can see with new eyes his developed aesthetic sense. At first it seems that the house is empty of everything except the smoke from the fire, but examining each of the rooms more closely, I notice some simple details that speak to his whole way of life. Next to the fire pit, where we have returned to kindle the fire for another cup of bancha tea, I look more carefully at the few simple fire implements, as well as the several woven, wheat-colored kindling baskets, and a section of bamboo with a hole in the end for bringing embers to life. In the adjacent cooking area, back in the shadows, sits a heavy ceramic urn almost three feet high in which he stores his water. To the right of the sink, there is an ochre ceramic vessel with a fitted lid containing ash from the fire which, together with a compact, natural-bristle brush, is all that he uses for washing the dishes.  
  Next to the dining table, a sturdy set of amber-colored shelves holds glass jars of different sizes containing powders, spices, chili peppers and several types of flour, each of which has been lined up and classified by size. A well-proportioned cast-iron spatula with a long tapering handle and a blade shaped almost like that of a Ginko leaf hangs on a post of the shelves vertically on two tiny wooden pegs. Behind the shelves, in back, his cereals and grains are all in glass jars in woven straw baskets hanging from the ceiling to keep out the mice  
  Nakamura stores his small collection of books in the room where he sleeps instead of having them on display in the living room where the multitude of titles might distract from the serenity one feels by the fire. Every single volume has been covered in paper and labeled, and arranged into sections. Other items, such as his sleeping bag and winter clothing, are all stored up high, near the roof, on a set of two parallel bamboo poles and in clean cardboard boxes well out of sight.  
  But of the things to see in his house, perhaps most enigmatic of all is the texture and colorations of the walls and the sliding paper shoji doors. Though much of the patina is simply the result of years of making fires and the aging of natural materials--wood, paper, mud and straw--their effect is that of a fine piece of art, a kind of supplication to the senses. One can gaze at them for a very long time. From the mats on the floor to the chocolate black ceiling timbers, the rice paper in its rectangular sections changes hues in a subtle gradation, starting with a parchment yellow and moving through amber to dark tan and then to a thick caramel brown. Smoke from the fires--the tannins and oils from the cedar and oak firewood--has left a speckled pattern on the walls, accumulating gradually like siltation on the shore of a beach.  
  The water is again boiling, and Nakamura takes out more tea. Smelling the fragrance, I think back to the previous summer when I came up to the mountains to learn the process of making the fermented tea with some of the people in the village. In the heat of July, we picked the large, rough leaves from bushes on the mountain slopes, and then transferred them from the straw baskets we wore on our chests into large boiling cauldrons of water. We then crushed the leaves with a long handled wooden press and packed them into large ceramic jars covered with stones so they could cure for a month. Many of the older village residents have been making this tea in exactly this manner since they were small children when almost everything was (by necessity) done by hand.  
  It's one of the unique features of choosing a life close to the land in Japan that, not so long ago, even up through most of the 1950s, almost all rural people had to make do with little more than what they could grow or make without using much cash at all. Thus the techniques and procedures for living self-reliantly in Japan do not need, necessarily, to be learned by the study of books as they do in the US. One simply walks to a nearby house and asks one of the old grandmothers or grandfathers how it's done.  
  This point was illustrated to me one day when Nakamura was walking with me on the path through the woods to the homestead of the Watanabe family, who are also recent settlers here and are friends of Nakamura from his years in Nepal.  
  After setting out from his house through some stands of thick-trunked bamboo, and then into the predominant forests of Japanese cedar, we came, to my surprise, upon an isolated cottage that, despite being more than twenty minutes by foot from the nearest road is still inhabited by the Fukuuras, a couple in their eighties, and their 40-year-old son who works in the village.  
  As I looked at the house, I shook my head to think that even in the most technologically advanced nation on the planet, right there in front of me was a house without a car where people still live close to the way that their great great grandparents did.  
  I felt then a peculiar paradox: on the one hand a tragic sense of loss as I knew that the mainstream of Japanese society had little regard for this old way of life, yet on the other hand a recognition of how blessed were my friends, who are able to have a real continuity with people who have lived self-reliantly for all of their lives.  
  Behind the Fukuuras house, Nakamura pointed out several cedar trees, which had been recently felled. "Fukuura-san knows how to properly care for his woodlot," said Nakamura with obvious respect. "He's cut a few of the weaker cedar trees, thinned them for the health of the forest, and left the logs to dry, with the top branches still on. It dries correctly that way because the top branches, in trying to keep themselves alive a little longer, pull the water up out of the trunk. This natural drying method makes superior lumber for building. Nowadays, most people just want to make money fast, so they cut the whole stand of trees and sell it right off."  
  I asked Nakamura, "Did you say that he was more than 80 years old?"  
  "Yes," he replied, "he knows how to accomplish things, even cutting down trees, without having to rely on physical exertion. Long ago everyone needed such skills because the amount of work one had to do just to exist day-to-day in the mountains was far too much to accomplish if one over-exerted oneself. It's the same if you want to move a very large rock. If you look long enough, from enough different angles, you can find the exact right place to insert a stick so that, with very little power, you can move it right where you want it." As I considered his words, it seemed an apt metaphor for Nakamura's own general practice of using the minimum of effort in just the right place.  
  As we continued on, he told me that the footpath used to be a main thoroughfare from one part of the village to the other.  
  "Now I am the only person who uses this mountain path. Ten years ago, the old Fukuura grandmother used to use it as well." Nakamura walks the path about once every ten days, on his way to the agricultural cooperative, where he buys his few store-bought items, like tofu and soy sauce and cooking oil. He carries it all back in his woven bamboo backpack.  
  As we walked along, Nakamura gestured to a patch of mulberry trees growing on an old rice terrace. "There used to be no trees here. Up until thirty years ago people were still growing rice in this place. But mountain water is actually a little too cold for perfect rice growing, and, furthermore, moles tend to dig holes through the mud, which makes all the water run off. It's so much easier to grow rice in the flatlands. That's why as soon as there was work in the cities, Bam! Off everyone went."  
  I smiled thinking how it is Nakamura's way to talk about sociological phenomena like rural depopulation while we are taking a hike through the shady green woods.  
  The mountains, he tells me, used to be the central resource for village-living people all over Japan, providing them with wild vegetables, medicinal herbs, materials for tools, fuel for their fires and thatch for their roofs. But now, with cars and the almost universal use of cash to meet people's needs, the mountains have become simply the location of people's houses, many of whom wish they did not live in such an inconvenient location.  
  As I bring up the topic with him again, now, in front of the fire on a winter's night with a cup of warm tea in my hands, Nakamura explains to me that it is only because of the breakdown in the traditional structure of the rural village that he is able to live here at all.  
  "Fifty or a hundred years ago, it would have been impossible for an outsider like me to have come here and live. Not only would this house not have been empty, it would have been impossible for me to be able to use the community water, or the community roads, because I had not been part of helping to repair and maintain them for all of these years. The way of life I live today here in this house is only possible because I am a small minority. If everyone lived this kind of a life, I would have to run out early in the morning to gather wood, otherwise someone else would get it first, and it would all be gone."  
  Nakamura lives on less than $4,000 a year. To earn this cash, he leaves his mountain home in October, and for about 40 or 50 days, he works at a reconstructed nineteenth-century crafts village baking mochi, a traditional sticky white rice cake, over a charcoal fire for urban visitors eager for a taste of old Japan. For his woodblock prints, however, he will accept no money. "If I did," he says, "it might spoil the enjoyment I get from the process of carving." And losing the pleasure he gets from the things he does in life, it seems, is the last thing he will do.  
  "In the summer," he says, "when I spend time making this bancha with the older villagers around here, it's 'work,' but it's not labor. Making bancha is something that I do once a year, and afterwards, I have enough tea to last me a whole year. Labor, like at the crafts village, is when I exchange my time for money, and I will do whatever is asked of me, whether I enjoy it or not."  
  As the fire burns down and we stare into the coals, I think about how little money he uses, yet how satisfied he is with his life. 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.  
  He keeps only a few books. As he says, "I can re-read the most important ones every two or three years and, as I grow older and change, I see different things, although the pages are the same." In the summer, he grows only two or three plants of each kind of vegetable. They are, as he says, all that he needs. As you might expect, his garden is meticulously kept, and each plant is strong and healthy.  
  Frugality, it seems, does not mean deprivation, and I see that the lack of clutter in his house (as well as in his mind) truly does give him a feeling of peacefulness that others can easily sense. It is his attentiveness to material things, I speculate, that allows him to get so much out of life.  
  I think of his firewood all stacked and drying under the overhanging eaves of his roof, with the fully dry pieces cut and stored under the floor of the house. I think also of the bamboo trellises, the neatly weeded garden, and the wooden washboard with which he cleans all his clothes. I remember thinking, when I first met him, what a burden it all must be. But when I asked him about it he told me, in his typically clear-thinking way, "If you have time, a lot of things are enjoyable. Making this kind of woodblock, or collecting the wood for the fire, making the fire and cooking, doing the gardening, or even cleaning things--it's all enjoyable and satisfying if you give yourself time."  
  "I think," he continues, "that humans have a tendency to create an image in their minds, of what they think they can accomplish in a particular period of time--say in a day or in a year. But one thing I noticed when I first came here was that there was a gap between my expectations and what I could actually do. I felt ill at ease, and irritable. I had to adjust my imagination, and plans, to what was actually possible."  
  Perhaps this is how Nakamura keeps his presence so calm: by reducing the number of plans he makes so that they fit easily into the time that he actually has available instead of trying to accelerate his life to fulfill his desires. And reciprocally, I consider, he has come upon this understanding of how to be satisfied in life because the pace that he had set for himself provides enough space so that he can observe the processes of his own mind--what ways of thinking cause suffering, and how one might escape. The first time I came to visit Nakamura he told me (and I remember it puzzling me at the time), "The reason I choose this kind of existence is as an experiment, a way to discover the best way for me to live my life."  
  And now, after many conversations, I understand that he is not living based upon a set of abstract ideas or ideals. As he says, "Everything I do is because I enjoy doing it this way. 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 preparing a soup."  
  Outside, the snow has turned to rain, and with its gentle sounds on the roof, Nakamura lays out some old futons for me to sleep on. As my body begins to warm up the bedclothes, the familiar tranquility of the Japanese countryside settles over me again, and with the sounds of the river below and the rain on the roof, I drift off to sleep.  
  In the morning, when I awake, Nakamura is already up and cooking us breakfast. Out the windows, rain and fog are gathering and drifting on the dark green cedar forest across the valley, looking like nothing so much as an old Chinese ink painting.  
  On the clay cookstove, Nakamura is steaming some "sticky bread" muffins in a stack of straw basket steamers. The crackle of kindling is warm and reminds me again of Nakamura's wood-centered life. At the table he is cutting up dates and other dried fruits to add to our tsampa, the Tibetan staple food made from toasted barley flour, dried fruit, a chunk of butter and (in Nakamura's case) Awa sour tea, all mixed into a paste. It's not what I usually have for breakfast, but it's warm and tasty, and the dried fruit makes it particularly delicious.  
  Looking outside, it seems like it might just keep raining all day, and so I ask him what he usually does on days like today.  
  "Sometimes I carve woodblocks, or read, but mostly, when I have nothing to do, I just stare into the fire," he says, and his face takes on the expression of a man who often gets lost in the mesmerizing movement of flames in the hearth.  
  There's a pause and Nakamura looks at my face. "Doing nothing all day--it's difficult at first," and he laughs. It's true, I think: busyness is a habit, and a hard one to break. But perhaps such a life--very little production, very little consumption--might be a big part of the solution to the world ecological crisis.  
  As we look out on the clouds on the far mountains, I ask Nakamura, "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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