15 Dec 2014
A couple of weeks ago the Western Morning News asked me to write something for a new feature they were starting called ‘If I Ruled the World’. “Feel free”, they wrote, “not to take it too seriously – after all (unless you know something we don’t) no one is really about to make you ruler of the world”. So here is my (admittedly south west England-oriented) piece:
“In the highly unlikely event that I ruled the world (well, the UK anyway), the first law I would pass would be to nationalise the railways and make all short to medium distance public transport free of charge, so as to give people a real alternative to cars. I would legislate to ensure that it is powered by renewable energy or biogas.
I would move the capital city to Bristol, bringing more influence to the southwest, allowing London to declare independence as its own nation state and allowing the rest of us to get on with it. Bristol is next year’s European Green Capital and looks as if it might be about to leap ahead in modelling what a sustainable city might look like. Its Mayor takes his full salary in the city’s own currency, the Bristol Pound!
In my Cabinet would be Pam Warhurst of Incredible Edible Todmorden in Yorkshire as my Food Minister. I would create a special post for Simon Cowell just so I could have the pleasure of sacking him again. I would put Peter Capener of Bath & West Community Energy, who recently won the Community Energy Organisation of the Year, in charge of energy policy. I would create a cabinet of vibrant, solutions-focused people, with lots of younger people in there too. Saying “that’s impossible” would be outlawed around the cabinet table.
My Community Empowerment Bill would give communities the right to compulsorily purchase assets they felt key to their future development. I’d bring in the supermarket tax being considered by Derby City Council to give local economies more protection. For me, local economies, which we do so brilliantly here in the South West, are the foundation of the economy of the future, not just expendable in the face of the onward march of identikit High Streets.
Among my advisers would be the brilliant Camila Batmanghelidjh, founder of Kids Company, George Monbiot, one of the sharpest thinkers I know, and Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre. I’d put solar panels on all government buildings. I would outlaw the influence of fossil fuel companies, defence companies and mining companies within government. I would declare Goldman Sachs a rogue organisation and not award them any government contracts or employ any of its former staff.
MPs would earn the average national salary (currently £26,500). I would stop blaming our problems on migration and on the EU and instead focus attention on the real crises we are facing, climate change (recently described by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as “severe, widespread and irreversible”) and the widening gap between the richest and poorest in this country.
I would outlaw zero hours contracts. I’d set real and ambitious climate targets and argue passionately that our economic future lies in addressing climate change, not putting it off until we see economic growth again. Any brownfield sites unused for more than 2 years would have to be gifted to a Community Development Trust.
I’d roll back much of the legislation that enables surveillance of our phone calls, emails and so on, reintroducing genuine privacy in our online lives. I’d lower the voting age to 16. I would make it illegal for Oasis to reform, given how unforgivably dreadful their last 3 albums were.
I would ensure that each NHS Trust, rather than tendering its services to companies like Serco, would set up co-operatives to do those things: laundry; catering; cleaning and so on. This would keep money local and bring more empowerment to local communities. Zero carbon homes would be the norm, where possible using local materials so that any new housing built would have the maximum beneficial impact on local communities. I would ban new out-of-town retail. I would ensure that every child leaving school is not only able to read and write but also grow at least 10 different vegetables to a basic level of proficiency. I would ban advertising in public places and any advertising aimed at under 16s.
How would I pay for all this? I’d introduce a National Maximum Wage (set at 10:1 in relation to a raised Living Wage). I would outlaw tax havens and introduce a Land Value Tax. I would scrap Trident, and use the money instead to roll out a programme to insulate every home in the UK by 2025.
It would be a government of the long term, not the short term. It would be straight with people. It would usher in a new culture of co-operation, inclusion and entrepreneurialism. It would be a lot of fun too.
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11 Dec 2014
So how did you set about researching the book?
I was really fortunate because there are quite a few excellent researchers in Japan who have done a lot of the groundwork, and researchers overseas as well. Of course a lot of it was academic research. And again, the specialisation was interesting, because I met people who knew everything there is to know about forestry and timber transport for instance, but who didn’t necessarily know about other issues, agriculture, water, etc. I found people who knew everything there is to know about public baths but who didn’t necessarily think about the use of metal or charcoal etc. So none of them were linking up their knowledge with other specialists. I approached it specifically looking at the connections.
I have been in Japan for quite a long time and particularly as a traditional architecture specialist I already was very familiar with how buildings were built, how the materials were used, and how cities were built. So from one standpoint it involved following the traces. I knew how timbers were shaped and used in a building but I said – but where did they get the timber from, and how did that whole system work? And then looked on the downstream side – what did they do when the building was being demolished? Where did all that wood and tile and other materials go?
It was really interesting simply expanding this network of the stream of materials and energy through the system in order to illustrate the overall connections.
How has the book been received in Japan?
It’s very interesting because the Japanese edition was published just a couple of weeks before the disaster of March 2011. It was very well received. I was asked to write articles in some very high profile Japanese magazines about these ideas. There was an incredible new receptivity towards this kind of thinking, a very common perception that the way that Japanese society had been doing things, certainly since the Modern period, that there was something fundamentally wrong.
We read stories of people in the Tohoku area that was affected by the tsunami that there had been stone markers set there centuries ago saying that tsunami came this far. Don’t build below this point. And they were warned. Their forebears warned them not to build on these low lying vulnerable areas, but that was ignored. So there’s a sense that there was an incredible amount of knowledge and information that was bequeathed to current generations by their ancestors that had been ignored. And why have we ignored all this stuff – is it a crisis of thinking?
I really felt that that society was ready to turn a corner on things like energy policy, environmental policy. And I think it sparked quite a lot of discussions and quite a lot of networking. But I hate to say it, we are 3½ years past this disaster and I feel that I was naïve in expecting changes to happen as quickly as I did.
So I’m very happy that the ideas that I talk about in the book have gained much more currency. There’s much more of a grassroots understanding, lots of people in the rural regions of Japan are trying to integrate a lot of this kind of thinking into their own lifestyles. But overall, the direction that economic and industrial policy and energy policy has not changed, and I don’t know what it will take to change it.
At the moment the economy has gone into downturn again in Japan after a period of quantitative easing that seems to have made the rich richer and not really helped anybody else very much. Do you see any conscious degrowth movement emerging in Japan that is inspired by these kind of ideas?
There are people, colleagues of mine who talk about this a lot. Interestingly, another researcher called Yuko Tanaka, who has approached the Edo period through literature and writing; she and another colleague called Kebo Oiwa have discussed the implications of the conscious economic degrowth policy and the successes of that during the Edo period.
In terms of what we can learn from it now and how it might have important lessons for us, there are people, very good scholars, writers, thinkers, activists who are talking about this. It is a very alien idea to people, however. A very foreign idea. Our assumptions are that constant growth is necessary. The idea that we can have an economic cycle that is very vital and positive, that does not require the kinds of interpretations of growth, of constantly utilising more resources, new markets, this is something that is so alien to people’s way of thinking that it’s hard to really talk to people about it.
But there are lots of grassroots movements. There are even alternate currency movements in Japan. There are lots of places, and again these tend to be rural areas, where people have gone back to small towns, to be farmers, to be more self-sufficient, to live closer with the natural environment. This is a network but really it is a small minority within this society, as these things often are.
One of the questions I often get asked about Transition and the idea of intentional localisation is “surely we need everybody to be trading with each other?” and I say – well, up to a degree, but when different communities are more able to meet their own needs, and have an economy when they’re more self-reliant, not self-sufficient, but there is that cultural sense that people are able to turn their hands to address issues that arise rather than each community, each settlement being completely unskilled and dependant on imports for absolutely everything. Then the quality of the relationship between those two settlements is very different. When two people meet each other and they’re both very skilled, adaptable, resilient, can turn their hands to anything, it’s a very different relationship to two people meeting each other who don’t have those skills. I wonder what your sense is from your study of the Edo period in terms of how that was. What was the quality of the relationships between neighbouring settlements and how they maybe differ from today?
They were overall very self-sufficient to begin with. Of course, there’s variations in the natural topography and what resources their particular local environment may have provided. There were not many things that villagers needed to buy from the outside. One, interestingly, was salt. Another was metal ore for making iron implements etc. Other than that, there was the conscious desire to make do with what was naturally provided and to set limits on the consumption of these resources. Among other things that this led to was an incredible recycling, reuse and the design of things for recycling and reuse.
Politically, it’s difficult to talk about the political and economic situation because on the one hand, it was a very advanced system in terms of information. This was largely based on the literacy that I mentioned. You had peasants who were very well educated and certainly the leadership of the villages were well educated. They had economic systems with their neighbouring villages that were actually very lively, trading goods, trading farm goods etc. with each other. Not that it was necessary, so much.
And then a large part of the farm economy was based on providing things for the cities. So the urban-rural interchange was really the engine for a lot of the economic activity and particular regions. For instance, if your area was very well suited for growing peaches then you would have a concerted effort by local leadership to maximise that and to find the markets and the shipping etc. to provide these to the cities.
The cities were very, very large. The city of Edo had 1.3-1.4 million people. This made it one of the largest cities in the world, if not the largest, until it was probably overtaken by London at some point. They needed everything, particularly food. This was an interesting relationship. The peasants knew they were needed. They were heavily taxed by the feudal lords, and yet the feudal lords did everything they could do to keep them content, happy and to provide them with an improving quality of life. Again, this is one of the remarkable aspects of this.
Despite this conscious, constant effort not to over consume, quality of life did improve steadily. This seems to be an oxymoron to us – how is it possible to have a better quality of life without consuming more? It was a question of consuming more intelligently based on a good understanding of the environment, of what was available, of what was changing and of how to utilise it as optimally as possible.
Are you able to in any way infer or suggest that people were happier than they are in Japan today?
This is one of those great questions and again this is where we might run the risk of over-romanticising. If there was a happiness index then I think that Japanese peasants would probably have ranked fairly high. There were occasional famines. We mentioned that there was no real mobility. The feudal government allowed a certain amount of expression of discontent, of petitioning for reform and for redress, but they drew a firm line when it came to armed uprising and were very harsh on this.
So it’s as if you’d say – well as long as they didn’t overstep their boundaries, they were allowed to do pretty much anything they wanted. This seems very, very clear. In terms of free time, in terms of things that we tend to evaluate for our own happiness, they had that in abundance. The merchant class in the cities, again if their life was about business and business opportunity then it was a very business-oriented society as well.
The cities were fantastically dynamic, lots of entertainment, lots of food. Pretty much everyone had what they needed in terms of food and a place to live. Some people were able to have a lot of luxuries and there was a lot of social mobility, economic mobility for the merchant class and the craftsman classes who lived primarily in the cities.
The people who suffered the most, ironically, were the Samurai. The Samurai were technically at the top of the pyramid. But the system was rigid. Their incomes were set on stipends based on the situation generations previously. They were not able to get more income except by somehow advancing in rank and there were limited opportunities for that. So ultimately you had, in effect, a horrific inflation that affected the Samurai classes, who were unable to make ends meet with their government stipends.
They were trained as warriors, but with centuries of no war they ultimately became salaried workers. They would go to an office somewhere and do some paperwork a few times a week, but they really could not better their lot and they were prohibited from doing business or from selling things. One of the fascinating results of this was that gradually they converted their ornamental gardens. Every Samurai really needed to have a garden for formal reasons when they were receiving people ranking above them, they needed to be able to receive them in an appropriate way. They gradually converted their ornamental gardens to vegetable plots.
We saw during this period a tremendous amount of urban farming, primarily for the Samurai to feed themselves. This led to an exchange economy. Again, because they were prohibited from participating in the cash economy, if you grew a lot of apples or aubergines, you were welcome to share those or trade them with your family, with your neighbours, and this was a very lively sharing economy that was happening at the same time. So you had the cash economy and within this was the sharing economy and it continued for well over a century and eventually fell apart when the nation opened itself to the global economy.
You mentioned that your background is in architecture, and in building. There’s a quote from the book I was really taken by, where you say “we’ve become accustomed to living in spaces that are bound by characterless materials with neither sensual richness nor history.” Given the quality of most modern industrialised buildings, what do you think we’ve lost by moving away from the kind of construction rooted in local materials, local culture that you set out so beautifully in the book, and can we get it back?
This is an area that I am conflicted about for a lot of reasons, because I am interested in wooden building, I do love wooden building. I think in many places in the world it has an unparalleled sensual quality, physical quality, environmental qualities. And yet sometimes I feel that because of our deforestation, our poor management of our forests, maybe we should decrease the use of wood in construction. So I’m really torn about this.
What I do see that the Japanese building of this period had and gave to its society was a sense of time, primarily. A sense of connection, a sense of ageing, a sense of continuity. The buildings lent themselves, particularly the way they were designed in Japan, to being modified, to growth, to adapting, being adapted as needs changed without changing the fundamental character or quality of the buildings or the towns. This is a property that towns or buildings and cities have always had, we could even say they still do even if they’re built with industrial materials to some degree. But it’s not really recognised as a fundamental need for buildings.
We basically assume that buildings will be used for a certain number of decades. In Japan, it’s currently assumed that a building will be used for 20 or 30 years and then will be demolished, scrapped and something else built. So we have lost buildings that speak to our society, that speak to ourselves about who we are, where we came from, what we have valued, what we care about.
I grew up in New Orleans, in the United States, which is one of the oldest cities in North America, where this was valued. No matter what neighbourhood you would walk through, you could see how people lived 100 years ago and how we still appreciate some of the same things they appreciated, and how, if we value that and take care of it, it really beautifies and enhances our lives and enhances our identity.
And I realise in the United States there’s not a lot of places where you can say that. In Japan, I think people understood that. There’s still some kernel of understanding about it. But they feel that newer is better, that the older buildings were somehow inadequate. They were dark, they were gloomy. They don’t understand how in the West, certainly the United States and I believe in the UK, when people wanted to reuse old buildings, when they started to want to go back to the city centres in the 1960s and 70s, people said “hey, we need to find ways to bring electricity into this old building, we need to improve the plumbing, we need to find ways to improve the insulation”. The market demanded it, and industry responded. And this has not yet happened in Japan. People just assume older houses will be cold and draughty. It’s really a lack of imagination and I think they’ve been sold a false set of ideas by industry and advertising.
The Japanese love their old buildings, they just don’t think that they are appropriate for their life today. They have not seen what I have seen, which are examples all over the country of people taking old buildings, renovating them, upgrading them, retrofitting them to be more comfortable, to be safer, more structurally secure for earthquakes etc. This is a fantastic movement and it’s been happening for decades here in Japan. It’s just not widely recognised by people throughout most of society.
The last question I wanted to ask you was this. Our theme this month is ‘Less is More’ This was a culture, a time that clearly lived with much less than today in terms of energy demand and resources and so on. In what sense could it be argued that they had more than we have today?
Often the kind of things that people possess, the kind of things that we enjoy, that we benefit from, that enhance our life, are the ones that go unremarked because they are so common and so pervasive and form the connective tissue of our daily lives. The Japanese people of this period possessed a remarkably sophisticated knowledge and understanding of their environment, of how to use things, of how to get things done in a very efficient and beautiful way – which if they would stop and look and compare, if they had been able to compare to European cities at the time, they might have realised how special what they had was.
But in fact, they were living it from day to day, it was emerging from internal needs, from what they wanted to do and how they liked doing it. I think they didn’t notice what they had. This made them very vulnerable to images of Western superiority in the mid-19th century when the American warships showed up with steam engines and they saw images and models of the railroads and fantastic large buildings. They were vulnerable to regarding Western culture, particularly material culture, as somehow superior and more desirable. This is when they started to throw these things away and discard them in an attempt to match the West.
If I had been a leader in Japan at the time, I don’t know that I would have done it differently. They managed to avoid being colonised, they managed to integrate and adapt the best of Western technology, and for a long time managed to preserve a lot of the traditional ways as well. But ultimately the shift in value, the shift in energy sources particularly, the shift towards using coal, fossil fuels as prime energy sources instead of these carefully husbanded forest supplies was one of the main drivers of the shift away from traditional practices.
But their lives probably were quite poetic. Constantly reminded of what they considered beautiful, what they considered desirable. A lot of their knowledge was quantified literally in poetry and in song. If you went into a Japanese person’s house, if they were above the poverty line, of course there were some poor people as well, there was a visual harmony to everything they had in terms of colour and texture and material. Their life was filled with gardens, not just in terms of the Samurai and their vegetable gardens but the cities were full of very extensive tree canopies throughout the entire city. They benefited from a very comfortable and environmentally harmonious and visually harmonious lifestyle which they probably were not aware of, except maybe artists who would highlight these things for them.
At the same time, daily life depended upon a lot of physical effort. They walked everywhere. They did not use draught animals very much at all. They did not have lots of carriages and things. People walked, they pushed handcarts, they used boats in the cities a lot. But it was assumed that there was a lot of physical effort that would go into your life. They were not seeking leisure. Leisure seeking in itself was considered morally and ethically suspect. It’s a fascinating set of values. If you have two ways to do things, one is to invent a machine to do it and one is simply to employ people who will do the work. They would just employ the people to do the hand labour.
If we think of comfortable life as meaning a life of leisure, well, they might not have had it so much in the sense of free time. But if you think of a comfortable life as meaning one when you’re well embedded in your very communicative and supportive community of likeminded people, of people who celebrate who they are, where they came from, people who celebrate the gifts of their environment through their festivals and their shrines, then it was an incredibly rich society by any means.
If you would like to hear the interview in full, the podcast is below:
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9 Dec 2014
On Friday, at St John’s Church in Bridgetown, Totnes, I was the subject of a rather unusual version of Desert Island Discs. The Winter Concert, organised by 2 local choirs, Glorious Chorus and Viva, and by The Bogg Boys, invites a local person to choose 8 tracks which are then performed interspersed with stories from that person’s life. It was a real honour to be chosen for this year’s, and to have my somewhat eclectic choices reinterpreted by choirs and a band. Sadly though, ‘Shut’em Down’ by Public Enemy wasn’t chosen from my original longer list of choices: the choral reworking of that will have to wait for another occasion.
The event raised £1,800 for the Atmos Totnes project. Local poet and performer Matt Harvey chaired the event, and the whole thing was a magical evening, very moving. I’d like to thank everyone who contributed to it, especially the choristers who got their heads round my trickier choices, it was very special. Thanks.
Here is my recording of the evening. My stand-out track was Song to the Siren, which you’ll find at 35:50, but the whole thing is fantastic.
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8 Dec 2014
One of the most extraordinary books I have read in recent years is Just Enough: lessons in living green from traditional Japan by Azby Brown. Brown is director of the Konazawa Institute of Technologies Future Design Institute and has lived in Japan for the last 30 years. It is a beautiful analysis of the integrated, mindful and design-driven way in which one traditional society worked and embodied the principles of sustainability. Here is a TEDxTokyo talk he gave about this:
His analysis of the Edo period is the perfect example of the ‘Less is More’ that is our theme for this month. I talked to Azby by Skype from his home in Tokyo. I began by asking him when the Edo period was, and what it is that he finds so fascinating about it:
“The Edo period began in the first decade of the 17th century and lasted until the country opened to the West in the 1860s. That was a period of a little over 250 years. It was remarkable in many respects culturally, technically and economically because it was preceded by centuries of civil war and also of economic and military expansion overseas. The country basically had exhausted itself, had exhausted its resources. It had deforested most of the country, it had damaged its capability for agricultural production, the population had increased and the country was on the verge of environmental collapse, mainly caused by the deforestation.
![17th century stone basin from a temple in Kyoto, whose characters translate as "I know what 'just enough' is".](https://www.transitionculture.org/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/d215dae0de_bent-by-the-sun-1-270x240.jpg "17th century stone basin from a temple in Kyoto, whose characters translate as "I know what 'just enough' is".")
But over the course of the first few generations of that period, through very wise policy making and the ability to use people’s traditional knowledge, their understanding of their local environments to apply these new policies, this was reversed. The environmental degradation was largely reversed, regenerative forestry practices were introduced and means were found to introduce agricultural production to support a growing population which was then kept stable. The rest of the period had a steadily increasing quality of life by all our current measures in terms of lifespan, health issues, education, housing and so on.
It was a period when the country was isolated. The regime, the Shoguns, had a strict policy of isolation, of not having much economic or political interchange with the outside world at all. It was a conscious turning inward and a conscious degrowth period in terms of the economy, and had very many positive benefits for the society. It was considered to be the period where most of what we consider to be traditional Japan, the great arts, the great woodblock prints and architecture, this is considered to be the period where that was born and when that became very common.
At the root of this was a great store of traditional environmental practices which were very well utilised at this time. This was something that I spent a lot of time learning about and trying to communicate in my book Just Enough.
You argue that that period gives insight into what it’s like to live in a sustainable society. In what way?
This is really one of the big problems that I saw. That we don’t have many models for what a successfully run sustainable society might look like and how it might work. The Edo period of Japan was one and it’s certainly not the only. I’m sure in other Asian countries there are very many similar practices, but because of its peculiar lack of resources for instance, the specifics of the situation in Japan, an island nation with not a lot of arable land for agriculture. There were quite a lot of pressures that they went through that have great parallels with our own period.
So, diminishing energy sources, in their case it was primarily wood for burning and charcoal. A growing population, difficulty having enough agricultural land, the pressure between how much land you allow for agriculture and how much for cities. Lots of the issues that we’re facing now were things that they faced.
They did not have climate change/global warming – fortunately. They had very abundant and good fresh water, which we are now facing a very great difficulty with globally. So there are some cases where the parallels don’t fit, but otherwise it was a very good match. When I set about to write the book I thought one of the best ways to do it would be as a travelogue, as if we were visiting people in rural villages for instance, in cities, a visit to a workman or a samurai in the city, and see how they worked and how they lived and how the interconnected systems that they had developed for maximising the use of their environmental resources without degrading them.
You mentioned that the Edo period came about as a response to the near collapse of society due to degradation and the environmental crisis. How did they turn that around? And perhaps most relevant to our current predicament in terms of climate change, how did they mobilise people to do that?
It’s really interesting. We can divide it into the technical steps that were taken, the social steps that were taken, the political steps that were taken. They’re all connected. The first thing was to reverse deforestation and this was done by some very strict forest protection laws. There were laws on the books that stipulated the death penalty for anyone entering a protected forest with an axe or a cutting tool. We don’t really know how often this penalty was enacted but the fact is that was how carefully they wanted to protect these forests.
The populace was involved in monitoring their environment and had always been actually, through something called the satoyama which is a set of practices of utilising and monitoring the surrounding environment. Japan is very mountainous. Most villages are in the valleys, and they were using the surrounding forests in the mountains for their fuel, for supplementing their diet with mountain vegetables and mushrooms and fruits and things like that. They were constantly monitoring and taking care of this environment. For instance, in the case of fuel, this was an ethical issue that’s always been part of the society, the strong ethics of not wasting things and being careful to leave enough for the future.
In the case of fuel, people were not allowed to cut down trees to burn for fuel. They were only allowed to use what had fallen naturally, the fallen branches and so on. And if a community was living in the same place for centuries, for generations, they knew what the normal carrying capacity of that environment was in terms of things like fuel. They would limit their fuel consumption to their known supply and this preserved the forest from being unnecessarily cut and basically this was not necessarily such a legal restriction as it was an ethical and social one.
So these kinds of tie ups between the overall necessities that were recognised and somehow documented and quantified by the government, and the traditional ethical, moral and knowledge based practices of the communities themselves were very well unified and served on the whole to preserve the environmental resources.
Reading ‘Just Enough’ with a background in permaculture and having been a permaculture teacher for a long time, I look at a lot of what you have in there and think – it’s design. That everyday life was underpinned by an incredible amount of sensible, common sense design, it was a design project. That everyday common sense design that underpinned so much of what you document in the book, did people learn that consciously? Did they absorb it mostly by osmosis? How was that culture infused with good design?
It’s a really interesting question, because design ultimately means making decisions about how to make, build, shape, use, transform things. I would like to argue that for the most part these were very consciously and continuously evaluated decisions. How do we bring the water to our fields without disrupting the natural ecological functioning of the places we’re bringing this through? Let’s use gravity, let’s use the natural watershed as much as possible. Ok, we get to a certain point and we need to dig channels for the irrigation water. How do we do that in the best way?
They are conscious decisions, and yet they are also techniques that are tested over time and handed down through generations. It helped that Japan was a very literate society at that point. A higher literacy rate than any European country, certainly higher than North America even though it was socially stratified. It was a caste-based society and some of the lower ranks may not have had a high literacy rate.
There were lots of things that were written and analysed and put into books, and the books were fabulously well illustrated so that even people who couldn’t read could look at the illustrations like a comic and say – oh, this is how we dig an irrigation ditch or build a trellis for these fruit trees. It was a wonderful combination of educated analysis and handing things down through the oral traditions.
Design was everything. And it was reflected, I think, in both the overall large-scale infrastructural urban planning, town planning, architectural planning aspects as well as the design of small things used in everyday life, the cups, bowls, boxes, furnishings etc.
Was it a more equal society than today? It looks like it was very caste-based and stratified, but was there much potential for social mobility? How does it compare to today, do you think?
This is probably the one area where we would find it the most wanting. It was clearly a caste based-society. Several classes of people, the military class, the Samurai, were at the top maybe 10% of the population, but they dominated most of the wealth and property as in any feudal society. Interestingly, the second ranking class were the farmers. Farmers were considered to be more of an elite and important part of the society than merchants were. Merchants were on the lowest rung of society.
Economically, they ended up making a lot of money and becoming very powerful instead of that, so the social structure placed value on the role of peasants, of farmers, of the people who actually provide the food and who form the bulk of society. There was very little mobility. It was purely hereditary, and as in many societies like this, this ultimately became one of the reasons why it was unsustainable and led to this catastrophic and dramatic collapse in the 19th century. We would say definitely it was not an egalitarian society, and yet the fact that farmers were considered to be ethically, morally, socially superior to businessmen is really an inversion of our current value system.
Margaret Thatcher had a press secretary called Sir Bernard Ingham who once famously said “I have one word for environmentalists who would take us back to the 18th century – dentistry”. I wonder whether you’ve been accused of over-romanticising a time that we’ve progressed from and is best consigned to history?
Of course, as anyone who’s promoting these ideas probably has, and yet I try to be careful to point out that I am not advocating returning to the specific practices, to these specific ways of farming or of building or of doing anything. But for understanding how they perceived their environment, how they addressed problems, and I use the expression ‘a multiform solution’ because in any situation during that period it seems if they were thinking about how to address something like let’s say the water problem, they would look at the connections – at how the issue of water is integrated with others.
One example would be – if they want to provide hot water, for instance for bathing, then they could do this in a way that did not damage the water supply itself and that also made optimum use of the fuel available, then they were effectively addressing what we would perceive as two different spheres of interest with one solution. They did this constantly. Another prime example involves the use of human waste for agriculture. Again, we can find lots of reasons to oppose this these days, in hygienic terms, which in fact is probably not necessarily the case. Whereas in the West, in European cities and North American cities, human waste was eventually collected in these horrible cess pools which as we know led to cholera and other diseases. In the 19th century when we developed indoor plumbing and flush toilets, it helped with the hygiene but then this stuff is being dumped into our rivers where it’s polluting them. It was really not a very good solution.
The Japanese solution during the Edo period was that farmers would use human waste for fertiliser for their agricultural fields. Before this they were only using what’s called green fertiliser, organic matter, leaves etc, the nitrogen-rich things that they would put on the fields as fertiliser. There were also other fertilisers available like the remains of sardines that had been pressed for oil or rapeseed that had been pressed for oil. These things were good fertilisers. But using human waste increased agricultural productivity many fold.
Having farmers go into the cities and empty out the latrines increased the hygiene levels of the cities themselves. There were no reported outbreaks of cholera in Japan until the Modern period in fact. This also became a market where if you were a landowner in the city and you had lots of rental properties and those renters used a set of latrines on your property, initially you would have to pay someone to clean it out but as time progressed they were paying you to cart the stuff off, it was so valuable.
This was providing several benefits. One specific technique provides benefits in terms of agriculture, in terms of health, in terms of economy, and also others. These are the kinds of solutions that Japan of the Edo period found everywhere. How to reuse things, how to recycle things. How to transform what they have into everything they need. They always looked at it as the big picture of how these things could provide many benefits at once. It’s the opposite of our specialised viewpoint, I think, where one person knows how to do one thing and that’s it.
I loved the bit about how people were paid for their sewage. It’s just so beautifully counter-intuitive to how we do things today.
It really is – you’ve looked at composting toilets, bio-toilets and these have been developed for decades. If you look at our situation, because we do pollute our fresh water system with our waste then we need to purify the water. And we need to use the energy and have infrastructure for this and use chemicals etc. It’s crazy.
During the Edo period, the main river of Edo, which was the town that was eventually renamed Tokyo, they said the water was clean enough, if not to drink, to make tea from. As if you were in the Thames in the 18th century and dipped a teapot into that muck and make tea from it! It was clean enough to do that.
In terms of this idea of being paid for your compost, so to speak, you had a composting toilet in your house and once a month someone came to clean it out and gave you $5 or $10 for it. It’s crazy to think of this now.
Part Two will be published on Wednesday. If you would like to hear the interview in full, the podcast is below:
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5 Dec 2014
Exactly a year ago today I wrote a piece on this blog called The day I closed my Amazon account. It set out why, and how, I had decided that Amazon was so at odds with my values that I was withdrawing my support for good. It turned out to be the most popular thing I wrote that year. It was even translated into German and put on YouTube. I thought it might be useful to offer some reflections on how a year free of Amazon has been. (Spoiler Alert: it’s been great).
At the end of that article, I wrote:
“It feels surprisingly unsettling, as one does after ending a relationship, but it was the right thing to do. It may be a drop in the ocean, but if enough people do it….”
It appears that a year later I’m not the only one deliberately crossing the road to avoid that great behemoth of an online retailer. A campaign called Amazon Anonymous has invited people to pledge to not support Amazon this Christmas, because they:
“don’t pay their workers a living wage. They dodge their tax. They take money away from our local shops”.
Indeed. So far signatories have pledged to not spend just over £3 million with Amazon. Of course in the big picture of Christmas spending, £3 million is but a drop in Amazon’s vast ocean, they probably wouldn’t stop to pick it up if they dropped it, but it’s a powerful statement nonetheless that has generated a lot of press coverage.
Amazon Anonymous also offer a great list of alternatives for an Amazon Free Christmas. I would really recommend it if you are looking for alternatives. So how has it been, going ‘clean’ of Amazon for a year? I can honestly say that it’s been great, the detox didn’t take very long, and I don’t miss it at all. I don’t wake up in the night in a cold sweat longing, aching, for the ‘Featured Recommendations’ or dreaming of my cursor hovering tantalisingly over that enticing ‘Place Your Order’ button. Here are some the insights I have gleaned over the last 12 months:
- Local bookstores can be faster: If I let my local bookstore know that I want something before lunchtime they will have it for me the following afternoon. Personally speaking I don’t actually need it any faster than that. While some might yearn for the day when a minimum-wage paid student might actually run round to your house with your purchase, handing it over to you while panting furiously, leaning on your doorframe and dripping with sweat, or when a remote controlled drone might drop it into your lap within an hour of ordering it, actually a day is fine for me. I recognise that waiting for things is actually part of just how things are. Of course it’s nice to get things quickly, but not instantly!
- I do a lot less impulse purchases: in my Amazon days I was a bit of a sucker for “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” stuff. Especially the special deals and the delights of just clicking on stuff because it was so easy. Often that stuff wasn’t actually that good. I find now that any purchases I make are much more considered, I buy less, but I buy better.
I value good curation: Amazon would be just as happy to sell me a CD as it would a barbecue set or a pack of nappies. It doesn’t love what it sells. While people’s comments on books, for example, can be illuminating, I have increasingly come to value the recommendations of good curators, people whose taste I admire and respect. Drift Records in Totnes do a great job of that. Every year they do a brilliant ‘Best of the Year’ booklet, beautifully designed, with interviews and what they consider to be the year’s best releases. I can listen to a track of new releases on their website, or pop in the shop and they’ll play it for me. And they love it. And they don’t sell any One Direction records or SatNav systems. I buy less music, whether CD or vinyl, than in my Amazon days, but I love what I have bought so much more. - I go straight to the publisher: I have discovered the joy of looking for the website of the publisher of the book and going straight to them. In terms of music, going straight to the band’s website is great too, you get much more of a sense of them and what else they do, and when you order straight from them they often chuck other goodies in too. I have also a couple of times bought books via Unbound, contributing to a book being published, and then when you do get your copy, you’re listed in the credits! How cool is that?!
- I love second hand books: Some Oxfam shops have become great second hand record shops, and their very well-curated book sections are a revelation. As good as any bookshop!
In short, I buy less, but I buy better. I value what I have bought more than I did. An article in the Guardian about Amazon Anonymous state “the campaigners acknowledge that ‘going cold turkey is hard’”. But is it? Do I miss Amazon? Not a bit. I do sometimes use it as a reference tool, when I want to find out who published something, but that’s it. It’s no great loss, in fact it has opened up other, far richer options. Options where people are paid a Living Wage, where they re-inforce local economies, where the company pays its tax, where staff aren’t exposed to alarming levels of mental stress or sacked if they are sick more than three times in three months.
So this Christmas there will be no smiley Amazon boxes arriving at Hopkins Towers. Once again I am choosing to spend my money in ways that reflect my values. Amazon is bereft of any of those values, and I personally think the world would be far improved if Amazon ceased to exist in the morning. The fact that it is quick and easy is no longer sufficient justification.
So my message to you is “come on in, the water’s lovely”. There is life beyond Amazon, a life where less is more, and where thinking about where things come from is a valuable and rewarding experience, and where new horizons open up in ways that the perceived ease of using Amazon shuts down.
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I would move the capital city to Bristol, bringing more influence to the southwest, allowing London to declare independence as its own nation state and allowing the rest of us to get on with it. Bristol is next year’s European Green Capital and looks as if it might be about to leap ahead in modelling what a sustainable city might look like. Its Mayor takes his full salary in the city’s own currency, the Bristol Pound! 
![17th century stone basin from a temple in Kyoto, whose characters translate as "I know what 'just enough' is".](http://www.transitionnetwork.org/sites/www.transitionnetwork.org/files/uploaded/u4740/bent_by_the_sun_1.jpg "17th century stone basin from a temple in Kyoto, whose characters translate as "I know what 'just enough' is".")
