【英語の記事】life at the peace and permaculture dojo by rapper Mio

イギリスでイベントをしているから
久しぶりに英語のブログをアップデートしてみた

英語が読める方はcheck it out
この前、アップしたMioのyoutubeに英語の字幕がついた（by Mio)

Below is a video of life at the Peace and Permaculture Dojo (the Dojo)


道場 (dojo) means a place (場）of/for the path (道）also known to the West as "dao".  The Dojo is in the early stages of development as a place of practice, and a place of nonviolent/peace activists to gather near Tokyo, but just far enough to be surrounded by rice paddies and the ocean.

In 2018, we experimented with our first residential internship program for Japanese. We had three spots that were filled up with nine people, including a family of five (and two goats). As everything is quite unstructured and organic at the Dojo, it was quite a challenging experiment for all of us, but the learning and growth was priceless.

Things we explored (a sample)

• simple living e.g. building your own dwelling, cooking with fire and sun, washing by hand (including cloth diapers for two), eating almost completely locally, etc

• community dynamics and nonviolent communication: how to be authentic, empathetic, and live harmoniously with those who have different perspectives (vegan/non-vegan, toddler/children/20s/30s/40s, single/family, urban/rural, etc)

• systems thinking and design: community is a system and operates differently than individuals

• permaculture, natural farming, and ecological regeneration: how to heal the land (and ourselves) and live as part of the ecosystem

• mindfulness: living in the present moment, engaging with the internal landscape

• gift economy: living in service, being in alignment with the ecosystem, and having awareness of when things are not a "gift" (like feeling we are pressured to give). Exploring the difference with capitalism through our head, heart, and hands

•  social change: our relationship to the larger society and our cultural inheritance, roles, and possible contributions in a time of instability

It was an extremely challenging process, especially in the realm of emotions, but I feel such experiences are invaluable and help us grow in ways that modern society rarely offer. AND extremely rewarding (although its not for the rewards that we do this work).

This year (2019) we are doing a five month internship with four residents.

We also have more and more people moving to the area (Isumi, Chiba) involved in running the Dojo and using the Dojo.

Slowly, we will grow our capacity to support more people in their practice.

BELOW are previous articles on the Dojo

Peace and Permaculture Dojo in Japan part 1

Peace and Permaculture Dojo Tour and Culture (April 2017)

Peace and Permaculture Dojo update part 3: Earthen Wall workshop 

Peace and Permaculture Dojo UPDATE 4 Spring 2018

7.4.2018 【ロンドン】Circle of Sharing event@London

７月４日にロンドンでお話会（英語）をやるよ
ギフトの仲間達が開催してくれる

SERVICE SPACEのギフトネットワークは
とにかく凄い！

Circle of Sharing: Friends from Peace and Permaculture Dojo in Japan

WHEN:

July 4, 2018, 8:30pm

WHAT:

You're invited to join us for a post-dinner Circle of Sharing in Harrow with friends from a Peace and Permaculture Dojo in Japan on Wednesday, July 4th from 8:30-10pm!  Kai Sawyer and his friend are joining us in London en route to Schumacher College to spend time with Satish Kumar.  Our dear friend Zilong, who many of you will remember meeting this time last year on his cycling pilgrimage, was with Kai a few weeks ago and shared this: Kai has been a major inspiration for many young people in Japan, bringing together mindfulness, nonviolent communication, Gandhian principles, and permaculture. Here is a TED talk from him a few years back. He has also been translating many ServiceSpace values and practices into Japanese, such as gift economy, Awakin Circles, etc and he recently completed a Laddership Circle. He and his brother (who was my roommate at Casa de Paz) are both Vipassana meditators. He has a lovely 7-month old daughter, and is deepening his practice in the household life. The format for this post-dinner circle will be as follows...   8:30PM A few minutes of silence followed by Kai and Akane sharing about their journeys 8:45PM Circle of sharing reflections, stories and/or questions for our guests 9:30PM Tea and fruits There is no cost to attend and there is no proposed agenda. It is simply an offering in the spirit of service. About our Guests... Kai was a student in the Graduate Program in Sustainability Sciences and Global Leadership Initiative. He was born in Tokyo, and raised in Niigata, Hawaii, and Osaka. He attended the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) where he was heavily involved in student activism and organic gardening. At UCSC, he co-chaired the Education for Sustainable Living Program where he taught and trained students on student-centered education and sustainability activism. While living in the forest of Costa Rica without running water or electricity, he immersed himself in permaculture and mindful living. He and Akane work at the Peace and Permaculture Dojo in Tokyo and teach urban permaculture and compassionate community-building in Tokyo. They are passionate advocates for a culture of non-violence and coexistence with nature. Kai's dream is to cultivate a culture of peace and compassion with all people.

To attend RSVP here（申し込みはこのリンク先で）

【英語】Peace and Permaculture Dojo update part 3: Earthen Wall workshop

日本語で書いた【TUP道場】土壁塗りワークショップのレポート（写真と動画）の英語版をようやくLIVING PERMACULTUREってブログ（初めてのブログ）にアップした。

ハーバード大学の博士号を取得中のMAXっていう知り合いが、イスミライフスタイルラボのためにその日のレポートも英語で書いてくれた。＊＊＊＊＊の下がその記事の前半。全文読みたい方は Isumi Life Style Laboratoryで！

英語に挑戦したい人、
英語圏に知り合いがいて
日本の面白い話を紹介したい人、
ご活用くだせ〜

Update on the Peace and Permaculture Dojo project Part 3

This is the third piece on the Dojo project (see below for context and previous articles)

Peace and Permaculture Dojo in Japan part 1

Peace and Permaculture Dojo Tour and Culture (April 2017)

We’ve been working on designing and redesigning (its always dynamic) the human ecology of the Dojo project and Tokyo Urban Permaculture, so the physical progress has been limited as planned. The social permaculture aspect of this project is really quite fascinating, and that is my particular interest, but I won’t get into that right now.

We are now working on the earthen walls tsuchikabe. We’re also trying to figure out where to put showers and the grey water system, and I’m super slowly working on another compost toilet.

Below is a bilingual video of our first tsuchikabe workshop facilitated by Kyle who is super awesome and thorough. My explanation on the other hand is not perfect/accurate, but I think you’ll get the gist of it. My aim is to get 60% of what I say right!


Also, below that is a wonderful write up by one of the participants Max Durayappah-Harrison, who is a PhD student in anthropology studying about Japanese agriculture. Copied from Isumi Life Style Laboratory

＊＊＊＊＊

Since late last year there has been much activity taking place in one particular corner of Chōjamachi, Isumi.

Renovations were begun on a kominka (a traditional-style, wooden-built Japanese home), with the plan to eventually make it the center of a retreat at which peace activists can explore permaculture and other practices aimed at achieving positive change in the world.
One of the core objectives of the project is the building of community through working with and for the benefit of others.

The process of repairing and reconstructing the Permaculture and Peace Dōjo (as the kominka is known) therefore incorporates events at which members of the general public are able to participate in the renovation, learn about the project and meet others.

In early May, I was lucky enough to be a part of the earthen plaster workshop held at the Dōjo. In this post, I’d like to explain just a little about what we got up to.

The day began at 10am under brilliant sunshine with participants making their way down the tree-lined path that leads to the secluded Dōjo, entering the building and seating themselves on the newly-laid wooden floor that provides an inviting meeting and greeting place.

The coordinators of the Permaculture and Peace Dōjo project, Kai and Nao, had invited Kyle Holzhueter, a ‘straw bale builder’ and earthen plasterer, to lead the day’s activities.

Kyle began things with a short lecture on the history and intricacies of plastering in Japan. This included an account of how many of the motivations for particular design choices in Japanese building are founded in the nation’s geology (the prevalence of earthquakes necessitating ease of repair, for example) and culture.

He also introduced us to some of the properties of the material that make it practical and efficient as a resource in construction. This was brought home to me particularly clearly when he revealed that the plaster we would be using had as a primary constituent the decades-old plaster that had been stripped from the very walls that surrounded us.

Click here for the whole article

【TUP道場】Peace and Permaculture Dojo Tour and Culture (April 2017)

道場の英語の紹介もやっとできた！
（オリジナルは Living Permacultureのブログより）

BELOW IS AN ARTICLE THAT I POSTED ON MY OTHER BLOG CALLED  LIVING PERMACULTURE

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Come join me on a tour of the sprouting Peace and Permaculture Dojo!

This is where we are at six months into the project (here is the first English article about the Dojo). I just got back from a three month Asia and Australia tour so my friends have been moving things along. We have had an amazing daiku (carpenter) who has been intensely building a relationship with the kominka (old Japanese house). The 100 year-old wooden house is tilted, so everything that he fixed is fixed to the angle of the tilt. WOW! The building rests on stones as a foundation, and after so many years, some of the stones have sank, and the wooden building has tilted.



What we are growing here is peace culture. Japan is rapidly shifting from a pacifist country toward a more robust aggressive military power. US pressure on Japan to increase military capacity has been increasing and the Japanese military industries have probably been lobbying pretty hard for revamping their industry. This is a historic shift since the Japanese Military Empire was A-bombed by the US Military Empire. Our hope is that, like Gandhi's ashrams, the Possibility Alliance in Missouri, Casa De Paz in California, Plum Village, and many other places to practice peace, this can be part of the global peace infrastructure during the Great Turning.

Even without that, we are facing consistent high rates of suicide, school/business bullying, sexual harassment, depression, apathy, depopulation of rural areas (ghost-towning of Japanese villages), exponential growth of national debt, an unprecedented nuclear meltdown and growing hibakusha population, super-aging society, and loss of traditional skills and wisdom to name some of the big ones. Not a very hopeful time to be born in Japan....or the world. So, we're here to change that. I mean come on, is this the best we can do after thousands of years of human evolution?!!

It's also important for us to remember and renew interest in Japanese wisdom and design. There is something quite strange about spreading permaculture in a country that has had thousands of years of practicing it. At the same time, I can get more young people excited about self-sufficient (village
-scale) ecological living if I call it permaculture than if I call it "traditional Japanese living." There are lots of other reasons for calling what we do permaculture, but I won't go into that for now. What I will say is that, we are developing a culture that is strongly influenced by the values and worldviews of the liberal West Coast (USA), and the beautiful relationship-based culture of rural Japan.

Below is a video of the traditional community dance ritual called bon odori practice session we did at the Dojo. A group from the "Bay Area of Japan" (shonan, Kanagawa prefecture) reclaimed this tradition, made original music and movements based on peace and ecology, and have been spreading it throughout Japan. The group is called imajin bonbu (Imagine Dance Group ← Imagine is from John Lennon). We just finished the floors of the Dojo, so as a celebration event, we had a bon odori practice session and the founding of a local bon odori dance group.

*the video is in Japanese but toward the middle you can watch people practice/dance. The dance is not a performance dance, so practicing and dancing is pretty much the same. Anyone can join and leave at any time, and some communities will continue dancing for days. I heard that people go into a trance.



VISITING / HELPING
We're still no ready to officially receive guests, but if you have time and skills that we need, and we happen to be able to respond to your email/message, then something could happen. All we have right now is a roof and floor, compost toilet is almost done, and a rocket stove. Unfortunately, we don't have enough committed people on the ground to receive guests at the moment, and nobody lives at the Dojo yet. I want to say YES to everyone but we don't have the capacity to comfortably host yet....and every once in a while things work out so its not a definite NO either. I guess its always a MAYBE.


The IDEAL characteristics of a volunteer at the moment are

• can speak basic Japanese: most of my team and the locals can only speak Japanese
• patient: our response time is slow, and we aren't always able to respond (feel free to remind us)
• self-sufficient: can take initiative and do a project, we also can't feed people yet like a WWOOF host, and it's basically like camping.
• friendly: as in likes people, because we have lots of people coming through!
• low or no expectations: the key to happiness
• can stay about a week: it takes energy and time to orient people so realistically, a week is about how much time it takes for someone to "help" us. If you can commit for months that would be amazing, and if you can commit for life.....now we're talking!

Next year (2018), we will hopefully have more structure (social and physical), and be able to host people!

Love you all, may we all embody peace in every aspect of our lives

For most recent events and picture check out the Dojo FB page

【TUP道場】Peace and Permaculture Dojo Tour (Spring 2017)

This video is in English!

英語で道場ツアー