A Different Kind of Luxury

"Making the Time to Simply Stop and Think"
Atsuko Watanabe

by Andy Couturier (C) 1999
Kamikatsu, Tokushima

	Excerpted from "A Different Kind of Luxury"

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	We are sitting up late sipping plum wine from small glasses at Atsuko Watanabe's dinner table next to the woodstove in an old farmhouse deep in the mountains of Shikoku. Atsuko's husband, Gufudo, is washing the dishes from tonight's seven-course Indian vegetarian meal served on the Watanabes' own handmade pottery. Nothing out of the ordinary here where the time to prepare elaborate delicacies from the sub-continent, or linger over a discussion of cultural philosophy is clearly valued more highly than getting a bit more work done.
	A single light bulb hangs over the wooden table where we speak, and enigmatic line drawings of animals by Indian villagers peer out at us from the wood-paneled walls. Upstairs, Atsuko's two daughters are, as usual, engrossed in their drawing, and we can hear the sounds of her husband doing the dishes in the adjacent room. She has just been telling me of her many years of living in India and other parts of Asia.

	"I was influenced greatly by the Indians in two ways. First, it was clear to me that spirituality was absolutely central to their lives in a way that it isn't here in Japan for us. Secondly, I recognized that humans could live a completely fulfilling life in simple houses without much money or even electricity. This was an entirely new concept for me. And I started to believe that I might be able to live such a life myself."
	Curious, as always, why people take the roads that they do, I ask her when she first started feeling that she might live a different way.
	"When I was twelve or thirteen, I began to think that the ordinary way of living life would be tedious and boring. The office worker in Japan is always being used by someone or another: they have no freedom at all. I knew that I didn't want to live that kind of life."
	When I first met her, I thought the unadorned rural life that Atsuko lived was a return to ways long gone in most parts of Japan. She cooks her meals on a wood-fired stove made of mud-and-brick, grows much of her family's food in terraced vegetable gardens that descend from their house on the ridge top into the misty valley below, and hand-paints flowers, birds, fruits and mythical animals onto the ceramics by which she and her husband earn their modest income. The Watanabes bathe in a hand-made wooden bath tub, and in the rice fields outside, freshly-harvested rice plants hang upside down from bamboo poles to dry. In the old house in which she lives, there is no television, no electronic appliances, and no items made of plastic.
	But when I tell her that I respect her traditional way of living, she corrects me immediately. "I am not a traditional person. I am a just a woman living a simple life in the middle of the mountains. That's all."

	In fact, she says, many of the decisions she has made about her life path were in direct reaction to the negative aspects of her grandparents' ways.
	"My father was raised by parents with an extremely old way of thinking. In Japan eighty years ago, it was only the first son who was valued at all. He was forced to study every second of his boyhood, never allowed to play or develop who he was. In a sense, he was never really completed as a human being. If you think about it, it's really quite tragic."
	Far from being romantic or idealistic about "tradition," each of the choices that Atsuko made about how to live, she tells me, were made consciously, with a particular purpose in mind, often environmental or spiritual.

	"I gave up using a gas stove to cook on because here in the village there are a lot of lumber mills which throw away their scrap wood; I didn't like seeing it all go to waste. It's also quite interesting to cook with wood."
	As I think of the flickering of firelight, I have to agree.

	"Planting rice by hand," she continues, "makes me feel happy and at peace. And when I cut the stalks for the harvest, I feel a connection to my ancestors--their lives and their world. Also I like knowing where my food comes from. And, as far as the television, we don't want it here because I don't think it's healthy for the development of the children's minds."
	I ask her what made her give up the city life that her brothers and sisters all chose.
	"When I was a child I played in the rivers and fields near our rural relatives, even though I myself was raised in the city. My mother would tell me all about different kinds of plants and trees, explaining the medicinal uses of certain leaves, or telling me folk tales about a particular flower."
	As she speaks, her words transport me to the intense profusion of weeds, flowers, insects and fragrances of the countryside in summer. The feel of these things seems to be part of her voice. "Also I would love to spend hours just looking at the moon, musing about philosophical questions. Even when I was a child, I felt that I would have to have a life with enough time to contemplate, to let my mind range freely. I knew from that time I wanted to live in the midst of nature."
	At college, she studied painting, particularly the use of the luminous, mineral-based pigments of the traditional Japanese palette. For the most part she drew botanicals and landscapes: "I would just go out to any abandoned field and sketch pictures of flowering weeds for hours at a time." Even now, the designs she paints on the pottery that she and her husband sell are primarily of wildflowers, and dinner table conversation often turns to rare or exotic species and sub-species of flora, about which she and her husband have encyclopedic knowledge.
	After college Atsuko began traveling in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal, studying not only the natural environment but the religious and aesthetic traditions of these ancient civilizations. Instead of just taking a ten-day "graduation voyage" as many Japanese young people do, she stayed on for several years, absorbing the lifestyles, the rhythms, and, most of all, the spiritual philosophies of these diverse peoples.
	"In India, traveling alone, I had a lot of time to just sit and think, and to wonder about the reasons that I am here on this earth. What is it that I should do and be? At the same time, I observed that the Indians spent a lot of time in the temples, working to improve their souls, and move up when they go on to the next life. I started to give a lot of thought to what the purpose of being alive actually is. Many Japanese don't have the opportunity--don't make an opportunity--for themselves to think deeply about things for an extended period of time. Maybe that's why many people aren't satisfied with the lives they live."
	After several years of living on the sub-continent--occasionally returning to Japan to work in mountain lodges for hikers in order to earn money to continue her travels--Atsuko found out about a small lodging house in Katmandu run by a young Japanese Zen priest who was documenting traditional Nepali Buddhist wood block printing. It was a meeting place for Japanese travelers who would spend long hours simply sitting around, drinking tea, discussing with each other the culture and teachings they had come across, and making elaborate dishes of Indian and Nepali food that they had learned from street stalls vendors in marketplaces along the way. They would also help the priest with his studies of Nepali arts and ceremonies, absorbing many of the perspectives of a Buddhism quite different than their own.
	In a sense, they were all trying to discover, or to create, a new way of living for themselves that didn't involve them in the striving for social status or the constant rush that was their inheritance from the Japanese society in which they had been raised.
	It was there that Atsuko met a man, a Japanese potter named Gufudo (meaning "crazy or foolish wind") who also had a dream to live a simple life in the mountains. After some time, they returned to Japan together to search for a suitable location.
	Meanwhile, in Japan, in the early 1980s, the urban economy was booming, and rural people were leaving the hardscrabble life of rice farming for construction jobs in the towns and cities. Throughout the countryside, fine old farmhouses were being abandoned, and often left to rot.
	In the mountain village of Kamikatsu, Atsuko and Gufudo made an agreement with a family who had moved to the city to lease a farm consisting of two sturdy, traditionally-built old dwellings and seven very overgrown terraced rice fields. Gufudo had his kiln and wheel shipped from the prefecture where he had done his apprenticeship, and they started to cut back the ten-foot weeds that had grown in the paddies that had been abandoned for the last decade.
	During this time, Atsuko had been giving consideration to what she felt was the central question of human existence: the fact of death.
	"The best way to discover how it is we are supposed to live this life is to think about what it means to die, and about where we go after we die." In pursuit of this question, she spent years studying Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy, but at some point she stumbled upon the books of the 19th century European esoteric theosophist and Christian mystic Rudolf Steiner.

	"One of the main influences I had from the thinking of Steiner has to do with what it means to 'succeed' in this life, and about what in this existence I should attach value to. Becoming rich or getting famous by painting pictures--these things have no value at all. I live almost without money, and I don't mind at all. It's not important to focus on what people think of me." And, she adds, in her typically unambiguous manner, "There is no value in thinking about such things; that is not what this life is for."
	Moved by Steiner's ideas, especially about the progression of souls through numerous incarnations, she decided to become a Christian--although her form of Christianity is quite different than that advocated by the mainstream of people in an organized church.
	"I don't believe, for example," she explains, "that we have only one life and either go to heaven or hell. I believe that we are reincarnated and gather up abilities and potencies passing from one incarnation to the next. A concept such as 'sin' just means those things that get in your way of moving higher up to another level."
	I remember being surprised when first meeting her to find that in this land of very few Christians, this extremely progressive woman had chosen not only Christianity, but Catholicism, its most traditional form. I decided to ask her how she reached that decision.
	"I chose Catholicism because I was interested in those things that might have remained, passed down century by century all the way through from Jesus Christ himself. I wanted to understand what, specifically, are the essential elements of Christianity and what has been mixed in later by ordinary people. Also I am very interested in experiencing the phenomenon of transubstantiation, of becoming one with the body of Christ."
	Though she is a Christian, she reads widely about all spiritual beliefs, and is always eager to enter into discussion with people of other faiths. Recently she hosted an American monk in the Thai Buddhist tradition, Jayanto Bikkhu, for more than a month at her house.
	"Jayanto's case, in a sense, is the exact opposite of mine. I came from a Buddhist country, and became a Christian, while he has chosen Buddhism coming from the USA."
	During his visit they would spend hours in conversation. Atsuko's mind is, more than anything, inquisitive and discerning. She would ask him questions about why he chose Thai Buddhism, and how he maintains his strict observances over years at a time.
	"I was very inspired by Jayanto's piety," she says, "and his earnestness about his spirituality. There is a purity about him, I feel. He follows the rules of his Buddhist order strictly, even though he may or may not agree with those rules or understand their purpose. I think this is extremely important: spirituality can not always be about analysis, comprehension and consent."
	When I ask her if she plans to travel again to India, she tells me that the most important journey for her would be to do the Christian pilgrimage of Santiago De Compostella in northern Spain.
	"There is a devotion and faith in those pilgrims that we lack here in Japan. I want to understand the root of their faith. Doubt is an easy thing, but belief is so much more difficult to achieve."
	Firmness of purpose, and convictions about right and wrong also underlie her devotion to her political action. Though she lives in the mountains, and spends many hours planting, weeding and harvesting the vegetables in the garden, she also gives her energy to a number of environmental and political struggles, taking leadership roles. I remember an incident several years ago in which she stood in front of the office building of the local utility company with a small group of protesters. When a few officials came down in their fine tailored suits to make a show of "listening," it was Atsuko Watanabe who confronted them, looking them in the eyes, furious when they started lying to her, and asking how they could expose their children, as well as her own, to atomic radiation leaking from the plants. It was a beautiful show of force, and it commanded my deepest respect.
	She has fought the construction of coal-fired electricity generating stations and massive dam construction projects, yet neither does she neglect the quiet activism of writing letters to dictators protesting human rights violations. In all of these, one can see her deep-seated spiritual basis for her actions. She neither boasts of her activities, nor hesitates to speak with people about her political work.
	One who has not lived in Japan can hardly imagine the fortitude it takes to resist the power of the government and corporations there. The chance of success is so low; and the social ostracism is intense, especially for women, for those who cannot "get along with the group."
	None of this seems to bother Atsuko, however; she laughs and enjoys her life, weeding the gardens, talking and telling stories, spending good time with her network of friends.
	Her main field of activism, however, is education: fighting for a freer, less competition-focused school system for her two girls. "They want to assign a number for everything in school," she says. "Who can swim better, who can climb a rope faster. Why all this ranking? It does nothing to help the children develop who they are."
	"You can see how powerful a force education is in Japan when you look at our history, and the catastrophe of Japanese militarism in World War II. All those boys were willing to die because they were told that the emperor was above them, a god, that their death would have meaning. And I don't think the basic philosophy of ranking, of 'above' and 'below', and of conditioning the children has changed that much even today."
	Her respect for children and her belief in their natural competence was demonstrated to me some years ago when I saw that she had allowed her younger daughter, Shoko, who had just turned three, to peel an apple with a very sharp paring knife. "Don't you think she'll cut herself?" I asked looking at the tiny child, incredulous.
	"If she does, then she'll learn to be more careful," replied Atsuko with characteristic aplomb. And, indeed, the little girl kept up a tremendous focus on her task and finished cleanly peeling the entire apple.
	The extent to which Atsuko puts faith in a child's innate wisdom was also evident in her decision, several years back, to allow her elder daughter, Junko, to quit school for several years and do home-schooling. "If my child doesn't want to go to school, I am not going to force her."
	When Junko was at home all day, Atsuko simply encouraged her to pursue her own interests. "Sometimes we studied things together, she and I. It was difficult to keep up with her!" she says, laughing again. "And when she decided to return to school several years later, she was actually ahead of all the kids in her class."
	This I do not doubt. The two girls often initiate dinner table conversation about topics such as 7th Century Chinese geomancy and its relation to court intrigues in Kyoto, or engage in linguistic punning that makes use of knowledge of complex ideographs not taught to most students until the later years of high school. Junko is also a tremendously dexterous piano player, and the old house is often filled at night with the lightning arpeggios of Chopin or Beethoven. The lack of a television in the house, I am sure, goes a long way to explain the range of the children's abilities.
	When Junko graduated from elementary school last year, the parent's group asked Watanabe to give the traditional "thank you to the teachers" address. She wasn't particularly eager to do so, but since the other parents didn't want to, she agreed. I smile to myself imagining how the local officials and school administrators might have felt upon hearing that it was Ms. Watanabe--known for her outspoken views--who was going to be given a platform at a public function.
	"What did you say?" I ask.
	"Well, I told the teachers I couldn't thank them, not yet, because their relationship with the children has just begun."
	"I don't understand," I told her, "what you mean by 'begun.' The children are just graduating, saying goodbye to those teachers."
	"Children at that age are just starting to have a real interaction with what they have encountered so far in life. Up until this point, they have just been receiving all that has been told to them, all that the teachers have said and taught. Now they are entering the age in which they can reflect and can criticize. So their interaction with the teachers is actually just beginning.
	"That's why I told the teachers that it's too soon to thank them. Once my child has a chance to really relate to their teaching, I'll be able to know whether to thank them or not."
	"But," I ask her, "don't you think it might be perceived as a little rude to not thank the teachers? After all, they did work all those years."
	She raises her eyebrows, "They received their salary, didn't they? I personally don't think they did anything beyond the minimum that might be expected. And anyway, I don't like such formulaic ceremonies in which school officials pressure parents into saying 'thank you' when the parents might not feel it. In our case, a lot of the parents felt just like I did: those teachers did at best an average job. But none of the other parents would even consider saying such a thing. I, however, have no problem in that regard, so the fact that I was chosen to say so was just perfect."
	It occurs to me that her ability to break with the ritual practice of saying what's expected exhibits the kind of inner fortitude that has allowed her to create the kind of richly satisfying life that she has, despite all the pressures to do otherwise.
	As the old wooden clock strikes its resonant brass tones and we finish the plum wine, I say to her that maybe more people would live this way if only they knew how much fun it could be.
	Never hesitant to correct a misconception, she replies that she didn't make the choices she did based on ideas of enjoyment.
	"People of the modern age are focused on 'having fun.' I think that's a totally modern concept. Before, humans did what they needed to do, and if pleasure came their way they welcomed it. But enjoyment was not the purpose of life then. Now we need everything to be entertaining. When it ceases to be entertaining, then we stop doing it. I didn't choose this life for the pleasure of it, but because it seemed to be the right way to spend the life that I was given."
	I smile to myself hearing this. Atsuko is one of the most buoyant and lively people I know. Her life is full of laughter. Yet this happens, so she says, without her actively trying to pursue it, without it being her goal.
	"It's the same way with comfort," she continues, "as I told you before. In Nepal and India, I could see that millions of people were living without a lot of material things that we have in Japan. And, for me, living alongside such people, I knew that the purpose of this life was not to live in the maximum amount of comfort."
	Again the seeming contradiction causes me to smile. For the life that she leads is, to me, suffused in the tranquility that can be found only in nature--breathing crisp mountain air early in the morning, listening to the gentle calls of the night insects on a warm summer's night, resting one's eyes on the colors and textures of an old wooden farmhouse, or going swimming with the children in the clear flowing river, or, in winter, gazing out on the snow clinging to the boughs of the dark green cedars. It is as though through her practice of not grasping for either pleasure or comfort, she has both in abundance. Though she and her family don't have much money (and use very little of what they do have), they spend their days making and painting pottery, pursuing the study of the things that fascinate them, growing unusual and tasty vegetables in their tangled green gardens, and cooking delicious seven-course meals. Sometimes, like this evening, the pleasure is just that of sitting and talking deep into the night.
	It is, now I think of it, just another kind of comfort, and--incidentally--one that we humans could practice in perpetuity for tens of thousands of years.

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