The Caravan of Hope: Uncovering a Localising Japan

To many, Japan is a poster child of globalisation. With its commercial boom and bustling megacities, it’s a vision in neon, characterised by high technology, consumerism, and ruthless capitalist competition.

But fissures in the country’s modernising dream run deep: rising poverty, environmental decline, food insecurity, and, infamously, an epidemic of youth suicide and depression that is among the worst of any country.

What lies behind – or perhaps more accurately beyond – the façade of Japan’s meteoric ‘progress’?

Nestled away in quiet, misty valleys, or sprouting up between the cracks in the Tokyo concrete, another Japan is taking root. Driven by a desire to reconnect to place and to forge meaningful lives, a vibrant network of people is taking action towards localisation.

This June, my two adult children and I joined renowned activist Keibo Oiwa in a ‘Caravan of Hope’ to discover this Japan – in Keibo’s words, “the Japan we never knew”.

The Caravan of Hope commemorated two things. First, it marked the 25th anniversary of the Sloth Club, which is a not-for-profit group formed in Tokyo in 1999 to promote the movement for slow and sustainable living, a local economy, and fair trade. There’s a lot to celebrate – for a group which strives to ‘become the sloth’, they’ve done a surprising array of activities over 25 years!

Second, the Caravan invited groups and communities to mark ‘World Localisation Day’ wherever it went. Celebrated by community groups on every continent, the World Localisation Day campaign helped the grassroots activists in Japan feel part of an international movement for systemic change, while remaining true to their philosophies of small-scale, slow and local.

These occasions provided the perfect opportunity to exchange ideas, energy and inspiration between a wide diversity of local initiatives.

Loading guitars, surfboards and seed boxes into our van, we navigated our way across Japan, from Kyushu in the south to Hokkaido in the north. We participated in 25 events over 40 days, from mega cities to picturesque villages in the mountains and by the sea. We shared our songs of hope and activism, and spoke on themes ranging from local food and farming to resistance and public policy, while being guided by locals in learning about their projects, campaigns and community lifestyles.

Here’s a snapshot of the remarkable projects and people we visited on the Caravan of Hope, and a taste of the powerful lessons from a localising Japan that they shared:

The whirlwind tour began on the edge of the Pacific Ocean at Onjuku, Chiba prefecture. Naoka Iwasawa organised a farm tour and a local food potluck with a group that ranged from babies to great grandmothers. We ate wild ‘kyong’, a pest species of deer that is one of the environmental threats in the region. This was typical of the events and activities to come – wild-harvested foods and healthy produce from small-scale ecological farms, intergenerational communities, and welcoming celebrations of simplicity, accessibility and connection. 

This group included an 84-year-old traditional ‘Ama’ free-diver, Matsuda-san. The term Ama海女 means ‘woman of the sea’, and these highly skilled women bring home hauls of seaweed, abalone, shellfish, and sometimes pearls to support their communities. The wide array of occupations in the audience can be summed up in the traditional Japanese term for farmer, ‘Hyakusho’ 百姓 , which literally means ‘100 vocations’. To me, this word encapsulates the variety of life in a local economy. 

Our visit to Chiba also included a concert in the ‘Peace and Permaculture Dojo’ run by Kai Sawyer. Kai brought us to meet with Mr. Tezuka, who is one of the leading figures in the local, organic school lunch movement in Japan. This surprisingly powerful and growing political movement is active across the country. It is taking widespread concern for children’s health and mobilising it into activism targeting food and agricultural policy. 

We called past ‘Browns Fields’ – one of the original institutions of organic, eco-lifestyles – to visit a team of young farmers who had fled the big city of Tokyo. We brought out our magic treasure chest of non-hybrid, organic, local seeds and shared them around. At every stop along the way, this little box was received with great excitement, the seeds representing practical hope and cross-pollination. Opening the box felt like releasing a rainbow of optimism wherever we went!  

Mr Yoshioka at Cafe Slow

Then, it was time to pass through the belly of the beast – one of the world’s largest cities. Tokyo loomed into the sky, through the polluted haze, concrete towers like gravestones marked the tropical forests sacrificed in pursuit of modern ‘progress’. 

Even here, we found our oasis in the straw-bale renovated homeland of localisation in Japan, Cafe Slow. The three founders of the Sloth Club, Keibo Oiwa, Nakamura Ryuichi and myself, joined a lineup of jazz professionals, young climate activists and localisation luminaries, singing songs I remember from protests at the COP3 Summit in Kyoto, way back in 1997.

We set off to the south, to the island of Shikoku. On the road, we stopped at many ‘michinoeki’ roadside stations – a government sponsored network of convenient rest stops about every 100 km, offering local delicacies, fresh produce and craft along with guidance about the cultural and natural features of that particular area. To me, this is an interesting and all-too-rare example of government support for localisation.  

Local guides showed us around a kaleidoscope of initiatives in the picturesque villages of Kamiyama and Kamikatsu. These towns have attracted waves of young people and families fleeing the cities in pursuit of a local way of life. There’s the innovative Marugoto university, the famous Kamikatsu zero-waste centre, local seed exchanges, organic rice cultivation, alternative housing models, ‘free schools’, and a range of new businesses set up by young entrepreneurs, like local food cafes, traditional guesthouses and microbreweries. The stories we heard, from newcomers and the older residents alike, were all about the new connections and positive changes these initiatives bring, and their potential to grow and spread. 

Fukuoka

Arriving on the southern island of Kyushu, our friend and local leader Fujimon (one of the youngest ever councillors in the area), brought together some 20 local groups to celebrate localisation in an afternoon festival at an outdoor stage in a park high in the mountains overlooking the city of Fukuoka. With a range of stalls for local food, seed exchanges, timber products, free schools and activist groups, this was yet another inspiring, intergenerational gathering, where growing community, localised economies and envisioning the potential for a radical lifestyle shift took centre stage.

Our next stop introduced us to a different aspect of the localisation movement, the localisation of medicine and care. Nobutomo-san is a homebirth midwife and part of a nationwide network dedicated to empowering women to choose a birthing process that honours their deepest instincts and intuitions. 

“Especially around the time of Covid, hospitals became virtual prisons and separated loved ones in a vain attempt to keep people safe,” Nobutomo-san expressed. This gave rise to a poignant and profound discussion about how to bring the most elemental human experiences – birth and death – back home. 

The misguided attempt to control nature is ubiquitous in Japan – over 50% of the coastline is stabilised with concrete tetrapods, almost every river and stream bank has been edged with cement, and there are some 500,000 dams across the country. Local communities and indigenous groups have been resisting this destruction for generations, and our next stop was to visit a group of residents who have been protesting a dam construction for the past 50 years. The Ishiki river in Nagasaki is famous for its fireflies and diversity of fish species, but construction contracts have been in the pipeline for decades, and some residents have already accepted payouts to abandon their land. 

Seed exchange

We stayed in the local Buddhist temple – the heart of the protest movement. We danced and sang by the river bank with octogenarian local activists, shared a local food feast flavoured with laughter and joy. Whatever the outcome of this ongoing struggle, the families who hold strong are buoyed by a strong conviction of being on the right side of history. 

In Nagasaki, Keibo brought us to visit his favourite trees, survivors of the nuclear bomb blast. We prayed in gratitude for the resilience of nature and the knowledge that life will always prevail. This sense of hope was boosted in our visits to the Nagasaki University and Shimabara elementary schools, where hundreds of 10 to 12-year-olds explained their local heirloom seed projects. Their endeavours opened a path of understanding about the broken agricultural system – we had never met a more excited bunch of young people about growing food (and joining in our songs!). 

Art, creativity, freedom. These were keywords for our journey, and were perfectly expressed in Nonemu in Kumamoto prefecture, a mountaintop hamlet of whimsical yet practical ‘earthbag’ buildings. We had seen and stayed in several beautifully restored hundred year old plus traditional farm houses by this point, but, in Nonemu, people are learning how to build their own homes literally from the earth around them. From these awesome little buildings, we launched the online program of World Localisation Day Japan, a full day of interactive, online events. 

World Localisation Day celebrations continued at our next venue in the forest on the edge of the ancient volcano, Mt Aso. The ‘Tao’ cafe and macrobiotic healing retreat, founded by longterm Local Futures enthusiast Hatano-san, is a hotbed of the localisation movement. The evening celebration was attended by a whole throng of local activists.

On to the west coast of Kyushu, where we met with the Mayor of Saiki town. He is one of a growing number of city mayors declaring their jurisdiction an ‘organic city’. While the exact definition is a little vague, it does seem to signal a shift in values, especially in smaller cities where the population decline is starkly visible in the abandoned buildings and overgrown fields. The shift towards valuing organic food and wellbeing is a huge departure from the post-war fever for industrial production that peaked in the ‘bubble’ economy of the 80s. Saiki is part of this paradigm shift, encouraging newcomers to choose quality of life over a big income.

In Oita prefecture, we camped in the Takata biosphere park guided by Todaka-san, a legendary solo oxygen-free climber of K2, and one of the most gentle, humble humans I’d ever met. After a rock-jumping adventure through pristine, icy mountain waters, we warmed up and cooked dinner by campfire, singing along with the ukulele. We were transported back to the slow, simple pleasures of a truly local, natural life. Before we left, we asked him what gave him hope, and he answered, “young people who remember their connection with nature.”  

Free school

We headed south with an extra passenger on board. Perrin James, a ‘Patagonia’ photographer and storyteller, loaded us up with more surfboards and camera equipment to document the wonderful ‘ocean play’ initiative of Ichiki village in southern Miyazaki prefecture. 

In Ichiki, what began as an escape from Tokyo following the Fukushima nuclear disaster has become an enclave of alternative minds and progressive local projects, especially centred around children. They shared the story of harvesting a local cedar tree to hollow out with local children over several weeks into an ocean-going canoe. In a throng of laughing kids, we launched the canoe into the sea and crossed the short channel to Kushima monkey island, while mothers were cooking local organic rice on a campfire by the edge of the water. For this community, the gateway to reconnecting to nature and to the local community is through ocean play. 

Back on Japan’s main island, Honshu, our first stop was in Sasayama, another organic city, where we learned about many localisation initiatives, including natural dyeing on handwoven cotton material, free schools, and organic rice and soybean cultivation. A few hours drive north brought us to Miyazu, where local fisherwoman, Nocco-san, is leading a campaign to stop the gene-editing of fish – a frightening world-first techno experiment we dubbed ‘franken-fish’. Our visit also provided the occasion for a local seed march and exchange gathering, with one participant sharing that she had been saving her local seed varieties for the past 40 years, but had never had the opportunity to share them in this way. 

We celebrated the auspicious combination of summer solstice, full moon and World Localisation Day at an event by the shores of lake Biwa near Kyoto, at the strawbale cafe of the Seian Zoukei design university. The protection of this freshwater lake from toxic run-off has brought the local community together and has led to a wide range of local sustainable lifestyle initiatives. 

Our final few events were as all-encompassing as those that came before, combining celebration with learning and appreciation of the potential for radical lifestyle change. In Gujo Hachiman, famous for its pristine waters, we joined in a 400-year-old tradition that sees the entire community dance together from dusk to dawn. On Zushi beach, our spontaneous gig saw a hundred effervescent ocean-play kids and their parents singing together ‘We still have hope’. And in Yokohama, our final concert was held in the Seikatsu consumer cooperative club – heartland of urban sustainability. We spent our final few days on the island of Hokkaido, discovering inspiring examples of (small-scale) agricultural regeneration and reconnecting with the indigenous Ainu people and their ongoing struggle to protect their land and rights. 

Across Japan’s beautiful isles, our Caravan was an experience in collecting and sharing seeds of hope; to plant and nurture in hearts and minds, souls and soils. In our brief and fleeting encounters, we glimpsed incredible communities connected to a long history of lifestyles of sustainability and abundance, informed by centuries of knowledge and practice. They tend to diversified farms tucked away in endless, origami-folded hills and valleys, and practise unique skills that form a crucial part of the repertoire of our species. They stand up to the destruction wrought by globalisation and industrialisation, and follow their intuitive wisdom towards richer ways of living. Japan-wide, there is so much to be shown for how to live well, long, happy, healthy, community and nature-centred lives.

The paradox is, while the ‘big is better’ trajectory of techno-economic globalisation has made the world feel small, the ‘small is beautiful’ philosophy of localisation gives rise to a wondrous proliferation of initiatives that make the world feel endlessly creative and expansive. The understanding is deep, the networks are resilient. The world of localisation is big. 

To me, that’s how the world is meant to feel. Not homogenous and concrete and conforming to a centralised mainstream, but wide, diverse, ever-changing. Unique, and full of possibility. The Caravan experience, both exhilarating and exhausting, left us all with a sense of grounded hope.

My gratitude goes out to the Sloth Club, Keibo, Local Futures, and every project and person we met along the way. And I am grateful that, by committing my own life to the values of community, nature and place, I was able to experience the world in this particularly wondrous way, with my children at my side. 

May the Caravan of Hope continue! 

Follow the story via the instagram account: @caravanofhop3
For more information on World Localization Day, visit: https://worldlocalizationday.org/