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foreword

just enough

This is a book of stories.

They are not fables. They are depictions of vanished ways of life told from the point of view of a contemporary observer, based on extensive research and presented as narrative. The stories tell how people lived in Japan some two hundred years ago during the late Edo period (1603–1868), a period when traditional technology and culture were at the peak of development and realization, just before the country opened itself to the West and joined the ranks of the industrialized nations. They tell of a people who overcame many of the identical problems that confront us today—issues of energy, water, materials, food, and population—and who forged from these formidable challenges a society that was conservation-minded, waste-free, well-housed and well-fed, and economically robust, and that has bequeathed to us admirable and enduring standards of design and beauty.

I hope that from these stories readers will gain insight into what it is like to live in a sustainable society, not so much in terms of specific technical approaches, but in how larger concerns can guide daily decisions and how social and environmental contexts shape our courses of action. These stories are intended to illustrate the environmentally related problems that the people in both rural and urban areas faced, the conceptual frameworks in which they viewed these problems, and how they went about finding solutions. More than anything else, this book is about a mentality that pervaded Japanese society then and that can serve as a beacon for our own efforts to achieve sustainability now.

This book was prompted in equal part by large questions and promising answers. The large questions concern our environmental crisis—global warming being the most threatening, of course. But realizing that the mechanisms that propel global warming are enmeshed with those of deforestation, the degradation of the watershed, the looming possibility of global famine, and the impending exhaustion of limited material and energy resources, the most pressing question became, “How are these problems connected?”

As for answers, the point at which a sense of hopelessness gave way to glimmers of hope for me, personally, came when I attended the Sun Valley Sustainability Conference in the autumn of 2006, and realized that the quiet and continued efforts of individuals and organizations around the world had begun to coalesce, and that their combined body of knowledge and experience was reaching the sort of critical mass necessary for igniting widespread change. A shared language was developing as practitioners of diverse specialties found their own work extending into new areas. Urban planners wanted to know what farmers knew about soil, architects wanted to know what hydrologists knew about purifying rain runoff, foresters wanted to know what waste specialists knew about naturally treated sewage, and everybody wanted to find out how to power everything from the sun. In every field, people were bringing answers to the table and walking away with a sense of partnership. Among the specialists in any area of green, sustainable, or environmentally sensitive design, no one underestimated the enormity of the tasks ahead. But everyone agreed that the necessary change is doable.

Still people shrug and ask, “Is it worth the effort? Won’t the sustainable life be annoying at best?” The problem is that none of us has ever lived in a sustainable society, so it’s hard to imagine what it will be like. Will we have cars? Will we have air-conditioning? Will my neighbors report me for not composting my table scraps? What if I want mangoes in December? Answers to questions like these depend upon how well the best recommendations for environmental remediation are implemented, and how quickly.

In the most optimistic scenarios, our power infrastructure is rapidly overhauled to eliminate the use of most fossil fuels, and we are able to use electricity much as we do today. Plug-in hybrid autos become the norm. Reuse and recycling, along with improved product design, allow us to approach the goal of zero-waste while still buying and selling huge quantities of products. Deforestation is halted and reversed by massive replanting, and sustainable forestry insures a continued supply of wood for building and other uses. Freshwater is available but is conserved, and people enjoy what they’re eating. In short, in this scenario it is possible to make the transition into a new way of providing for our needs so that our future life closely resembles our present one.

However, we have nearly lost the race against time. As government and industry dither, as individuals delay making crucial changes in how they travel, eat, and use household energy, as inertia and denial continue to overcome pro-active decision making, our margin for avoiding unpleasantness has largely evaporated. We should all be prepared for social disruption, for shortages, for being forced to accept unpalatable changes and lack of choice in areas where, even today, we can choose how and when to change. Sustainable society will come, because the alternative is no society at all. The bleak prospect of the collapse of our civilization may seem fantastic to many, but in fact most environmental specialists are forced to concede that their less-optimistic scenarios point to exactly that.

Japanese society once faced the prospect of collapse due to environmental degradation, and the fact that it did not is what makes it such an instructive example. Japan entered the Edo period in 1603 facing extreme difficulties in obtaining building timber, suffering erosion and watershed damage due to having clear-cut so many of its mountains for lumber, and virtually unable to expand agricultural production to the degree necessary to feed a growing population. The needs of the urban population, particularly those of the capital city of Edo, but also those of Osaka, Nagoya, and numerous other growing cities, conflicted with those of the rural areas, and the life of farmers was made all the more difficult by their legal obligation to surrender one-third or more of their harvest to support the warrior classes.

In terms of environment and natural resources, Japan was both challenged and blessed. The archipelago is extremely mountainous, and arable land is limited to a handful of broad coastal plains and many narrow mountain valleys, amounting to only about one-fourth of the nation’s land area. At the start of the Edo period, nearly all of the potentially arable land had already been opened to cultivation and was feeding, just barely, a population of about twelve million. Agricultural land in many areas was showing signs of exhaustion and degradation, and output was declining. But the country benefits from a temperate climate and warm ocean currents, and it is blessed with abundant rainfall and a long growing season. Freshwater from snowmelt is generous and fast-flowing, and the extensive watersheds drain into innumerable fertile river valleys and wetlands. The virgin forest that originally covered the mountains of the archipelago was extensive and diverse in both broadleaf and coniferous species, and it provided an extremely rich habitat in which all manner of flora and fauna flourished. Nature itself had endowed Japan well for human habitation, but by the early 1600s the land was suffering from overexploitation by the large population.

All the more remarkable, then, that two hundred years later the same land was supporting thirty million people—two and a half times the population—with little sign of environmental degradation. Deforestation had been halted and reversed, farmland improved and made more productive, and conservation implemented in all sectors of society, both urban and rural. Overall living standards had increased, and the people were better fed, housed, and clothed, and they were healthier. By any objective standard, it was a remarkable feat, arguably unequalled anywhere else, before or since.

This success can be credited partly to technological advances and partly to government direction. Agricultural breeding played a part, as did improved hydrology. Design was crucial, as was the timely collection and distribution of information. But more than anything else, this success was due to a pervasive mentality that propelled all of the other mechanisms of improvement. This mentality drew on an understanding of the functioning and inherent limits of natural systems. It encouraged humility, considered waste taboo, suggested cooperative solutions, and found meaning and satisfaction in a beautiful life in which the individual took just enough from the world and not more. The stories in this book describe many of the more remarkable technical aspects of life during this period, as well as relevant social, political, and economic factors, but their real purpose is to convey this mentality of “just enough” as it guided the daily life of millions throughout the society.

How do we know how the people of Edo Japan lived and what they thought? For one, we have surviving material culture in the form of houses, clothing, and the implements of daily life. Archaeology has literally dug up the old infrastructure and clarified its design and workings. We have been left with a wealth of writings, both printed sources and the handwritten records of individuals and families. The number, variety, and quality of pictorial sources that have come down to us—mainly woodblock prints, but also drawings and paintings—are astounding. All of these sources have undergone decades of collection, curation, commentary, and analysis both in Japan and overseas, with the result that a rich body of knowledge exists within reach of anyone who seeks it.

There has never been a better time to study Edo-period Japan, and the discoveries and observations of many specialists are finding such a ready audience at home that the country can be said to be experiencing an “Edo Boom.” Museums of Edo life and culture in Tokyo and elsewhere are packed most days, and the era’s approach to various problems is presented frequently in the mass media. The appeal of Edo is quite broad in Japan, but in the hands of successive generations of specialists—in architecture, agriculture, industry, and economy, as well as in environmental history, to name a few areas—information and understanding is reaching a great depth as well. We know a lot about the price of fertilizer in certain regions, and the literacy rates of farmers. We know quite a bit about the lumber industry, how wood was cut and transported, the uses to which it was put and the prices it brought. We can reconstruct networks of paper recycling and estimate the extent of the used-clothing market. And we can describe how energy was used and not used.

Many sources were drawn on in writing this book: observation and examination of what exists, written sources in both Japanese and English, pictorial sources, museums, archives, and consultation with experts. The result could easily have been a volume or two of academic research, which in itself could have been quite gratifying. But as I immersed myself in the project I soon realized that, although superb commentary by specialists in many fields existed, each illuminating a small corner of the subject, as did books for popular readership, most in the form of illustrated anecdotes about food, homes, and clothing, there was very little that described how everything fit together—urban and rural, food and waste, making and recycling, nature and the manmade—and how we might learn from it today. This “fitting together” became the overall theme of this book. Being something of a generalist myself, I felt prepared to take a stab at it, but how well I have succeeded in making the interrelationships and interconnectedness clear is something readers must decide.

Though confronted with a wealth of material from which to draw, I also gradually became aware of gaps in the existing body of knowledge of Edo life. For instance, hundreds of farmhouses from the period have survived throughout the country, and probably an equal number of urban townhouses originally built for commoners; quite a few of the best examples have been thoroughly researched, dismantled and rebuilt, and carefully preserved both in situ and in the country’s several excellent open-air architecture museums. But very few samurai houses survive anywhere, and none to speak of in what was formerly Edo, today’s Tokyo.

There are a few extant examples, however, in places like Kanazawa, as well as quite a few pictorial sources and a handful of written accounts describing the daily life of samurai. In constructing my depiction I have availed myself of as much research material as I could find on the subject. Very little of anything from the Edo period survives in Tokyo, victim to successive fires, earthquakes, bombing, and sadly, disinterest, but we have excellent detailed maps of the old city, many pictures, and lots of written commentary.

More significant perhaps is that, although actual buildings from the period and entire neighborhoods have vanished without a trace, anyone who knows how to read the townscape can still find blocks in which the scale and pattern of use that once characterized Edo, with its two-story shopfronts and back alleys, can be discerned. Many farming villages have survived with only superficial changes, however, and occupy their valleys much as they did two hundred years ago. But yet, all in all, whether one speaks of buildings or natural environments or ways of thinking and of behavior, very little of Edo survives anywhere in Japan. The change since industrialization began in the mid-nineteenth century has been too great.

Though Japan today must be credited with admirable efforts in reducing its pollution, improving the efficiency with which it uses energy, and maintaining its forest cover through regenerative forestry, and though it has high rates of public transportation use, strong standards for recycling, and excellent designs for small, resource- and energy-efficient homes, no serious observer would ever suggest that it is a model for sustainability. Though efforts are being made and things are improving little by little in many areas, there is now far too much that is done wrongly, or left undone. Though in comparison with China, Japan comes out looking pretty good, the country continues to destroy its environment in innumerable ways. What Edo Japan did well and beautifully, modern Japan either undervalues or fails to understand entirely. This is why instead of being able to illustrate valuable principles by showing how things are done now, this book tells stories about how they were once done.

Is it accurate to describe the Japan of that period as “sustainable”? Though some might say any comparison between then and now is inherently misleading, given the radically different contexts, I say emphatically: “Yes. By most of our most accepted current definitions, theirs was a sustainable society.”

According to the report of the UN’s Bruntlandt Commission of 1987, which might be credited with first popularizing the term, sustainable development is “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” While admittedly vague, this describes what Edo accomplished quite succinctly. More specifically, the widely acclaimed Hanover Principles for sustainable design, drafted by William McDonough and Michael Braungart in preparation for the Hanover Expo of 2000, can be summarized as follows:

• Insist on human rights and sustainability

• Recognize the interaction of design with the environment

• Consider the social and spiritual aspects of buildings and designed objects

• Be responsible for the effect of design decisions

• Insure that objects have long-term value

• Eliminate waste and consider the entire life cycle of designed objects

• Make use of “natural energy flows,” such as solar power and its derivatives

• Be humble, and use nature as a model for design

• Share knowledge, strive for continuous improvement, and encourage open communication among stakeholders

As this book illustrates, Edo-period Japan met all of these objectives, taking into account the different conception of human rights that prevailed. It achieved sustainable and renewable forestry, sustainable agriculture, sustainable architecture, sustainable city planning, sustainable transportation, and sustainable use of energy and materials. At this time, Japan lacked a global perspective, but it operated locally with no negative environmental effects beyond its borders. It sustained its high population of thirty million and kept it very stable for two hundred years.

Its technical solutions bore all of the characteristics now most sought in new designs, including low-impact materials, quality and durability, renewability, design for reuse and recycling, energy efficiency, and reducing consumption by providing group services wherever possible, as in public baths and the prepared food market. Its designs and techniques depended upon natural biological processes and solar energy wherever possible, and they closely mimicked natural processes elsewhere.

E. F. Schumaker, author of the groundbreaking Small is Beautiful of 1973, would undoubtedly have held traditional Japan up as a example of a “Buddhist economy” that values well-being over consumption. As he put it, instead of assuming that someone who consumes more is necessarily better off than one who consumes less, “since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption.” Again, this accurately describes the mindset of the people of that era.

From time to time others have recognized the importance of what Japan accomplished in doing so much with few resources and with traditional means, particularly in agriculture. As far back as 1911, in Farmers of Forty Centuries, or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan, American agronomist E. F. King wrote glowingly about Japanese multicropping and interplanting, use of night soil for fertilizer, rice paddy hydraulics, and the general efficiency of farm production, which was still being carried out largely along traditional lines. The author stressed that in Japan, as well as in China and Korea, traditional methods had allowed the same farm plots to remain productive for centuries, whereas American farms were wearing out after only a few generations of use.

King’s book is now considered an early bible of organic farming, and it greatly influenced the thinking behind the permaculture movement formulated in the late 1970s by Australians Bill Molison and David Holmgren, which takes many of its primary principles from traditional Japanese agricultural and gardening practice. Many other aspects of traditional Japanese culture have been singled out for praise and have influenced design in the West. Its wooden architecture has long been held up as a standard of environmentally sensitive use of materials and space, and the compact and economical design of household goods such as boxes, trays, cabinets, and other furnishings has been a strong influence on the things we use today. From the garden to the dinner table, Japanese ways of doing things have been hailed and emulated, but rarely does anyone look at the overall conditions and systemic responses that made these achievements possible, even necessary, in the first place. We should recognize that almost everything we have learned to value from traditional Japan emerged during the Edo period in response to scarcity.

That the carefully nurtured sustainable systems that had been so painstakingly put together during the Edo period broke apart so completely later under the impact of industrialization should strike us all as tragic, for it represented the sudden evaporation of generations of know-how of the sort we desperately need now. The Edo solutions were inherently local ones, arrived at with almost no input from beyond Japan other than what the ocean and atmosphere brought directly. After the country opened its doors to trade and industrialization in the 1860s, the self-sufficiency imperative gave way to an import-export economy tied to the production and surpluses of the world at large, which soon affected every aspect of life.

Though the conservation ethic persisted well into the twentieth century, perhaps even until the beginning of the postwar period, and though the nation still strives to maintain its self-sufficiency in rice, for over a century it has basically shared the production and consumption patterns of the developed West, and to revert to Edo ways on a significant scale now would be impossible.

But just as in retrospect it is possible to outline scenarios in which Japan might have developed globally competitive industries while maintaining its overall sustainability one hundred years ago, it is possible for us to profit, perhaps vastly, from the experience of Edo even at this late date. The challenge that faces us now is to redesign our production and our consumption so that they share the virtues of their Edo-period counterparts, to link our sophisticated technical systems to the kind of mentality that those prescient forebears displayed.

We will need to learn again what it means to use “just enough,” and to allow our choices to be guided by a deeper appreciation of the limits of the world we have been bequeathed as well as a determination to leave future generations with better possibilities than what we have given ourselves.