By Yoichi Kosukegawa
Kyodo News
Feb 17, 2010
The lifestyle of people in Japan around 200 years ago, which was guided by the principle of consuming less, would help to create a sustainable society in the 21st century, an American expert on Japanese architecture said.
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| Backward glance: Azby Brown, an associate professor at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology and director at the Future Design Institute, is interviewed at his office in Tokyo on Feb. 2. KYODO PHOTO |
Just before Japan opened up to the West for modernization and industrialization, there was an "ideal recycling society" in the late Edo Period, where even night soil was traded as fertilizer, said Azby Brown, an associate professor at Kanazawa Institute of Technology and director of the Future Design Institute in Tokyo.
"We think Edo was a kind of static and nonprogressive era, but in fact it was constant innovation in almost every aspect of life, certainly material, culture and technology, and certainly design," said Brown, who published a book in Japan in October about the way of life in the late Edo Period.
The book, "Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan," provides a close look at how people lived at the time using the rural setting of the rice farmer, the downtown setting of an urban carpenter and the elite setting of the urban samurai.
The book, published by Kodansha International Ltd. and made available in the United States in January, contains hundreds of detailed sketches by the author about the methods and technology of the time, as well as a number of tips for environmentally friendly living today.
"I think the goal was to give an example, not specific things like you should plant rice this way, or you should cut wood this way, but more about the state of mind, a way of thinking and a way of looking at the environment," Brown said of the book.
He said people in the Edo Period overcame many of the same problems confronting present-day society — issues of energy, water, materials, food and population — in unique ways.
For example, trading in human waste was big business, with farmers going to great lengths to secure contracts to collect and transport night soil from cities for use in their fields, at a time when in Europe such waste was being dumped in rivers, polluting the water supply and leading to outbreaks of cholera, Brown said.
Japan's geography, its mountainous terrain with little arable land, combined with a high population density and limited natural resources, led people to create a waste-free society, he said...
Read full story in Japan Times here.
