Living Simply in an Old House In the Japanese Countryside

When I first wanted to live in an old house, I thought it was all about the house and I wanted the oldest house possible and I wanted it to be perfect. And then in the end I got to thinking like, well what if I got it all perfect, I'm just going to sit in the room and then that's it and just look around. So I've evolved into the practical side and just living like the past Well this is our engawa, translates as a balcony. Got quite a beautiful garden going here. You can tell we're in an old house because the floorboards are stretching from you to the toilet door so that's like, how many meters is that? It's quite quite long. Don't have cats and all toilets in Japan, they lock from the outside. That's kind of strange. Yeah I mean our philosophy for this house is just recycle everything. There's just so much wood you can reuse. These panels are old, it's like a mix of old planks and old chests and the barrel, yeah that was in the in the storehouse. I think it was for shoyu, soya sauce before. I thought that'd make a perfect stand. Yeah one of the things that attracted me to this house is these amazing old beams, they're all hand cut back in the day. Persimmon stain, kakishibu, probably bengara, but like generations of it layered on top so it's got really nice condition. They'll keep the insects away. The good way to test wood is my carpenter's always doing doing this. That's pretty healthy. So how much was this first house of yours? This one, 80, is a lucky number really, 88, 880,000 hachijyu hachiman, so that's eight thousand dollars at the time. This was one of the first houses built in the valley, 1870 something, 145 years. So they were tea farmers, tea and rice. Yeah and we really get mist, sometimes you get like, you can't see that that field, it's like rolls in, it's amazing atmosphere. I love it when it snows as well. We get, it goes to about minus 12, so it's quite cold in winter, a bit cold inside. It's about minus five inside if it's minus 12 outside. From Yorkshire, love the cold. There's no insects which helps, and you're too busy chopping wood you don't get cold. I've never done so much chopping of logs. Yep, I got chestnuts, ume, plum wood, sakura, sakura is really good for the wood fire, and also good to smoke fish with, and all for free because I help do forest maintenance at a park in town. Our dishwashing water, any water just comes out and goes in these drains, so you really have to natural life in these houses because any pollutant just goes into nature. When you watch Japanese TV, it's brainwashing, selling you, you know, like dishwashing liquid or shampoo or anything, all these things we don't use, I haven't, we wash our hair in baking soda. You can actually date certain renovations to this house because this wall here, when I was, I pulled off some plywood, I don't know what, and then under it was like newspaper from the Sino-Japanese war, 1937. So it's all these guys with guns, prisoners of war. And looking around at this house, the dust and natural dirt, you'd think maybe you'd get ill. I've never been healthier. I used to get asthma in Fukuoka city. I'm doing fine here. Oh, we got these stairs for free. I think it was like an hour's drive to get it. We got, in fact, we got three sets of stairs in one go. So we've got the storehouse, the barn, and here we've got three stairs. But you've got to be careful climbing them because I fell down once. When we got the house, this was, up until the stairs, this was an enclosed separate room with plywood covering the whole ceiling. So we took down everything and got a nice, exposed this beautiful blackened wood roof. And all my clothes, I don't buy and bought clothes for years. And we acquired clothes in the big chests from like hundreds of years ago. So I've got clothes for the rest of my life now. I think these were an old lady's. We've acquired over the years, so many of these, Nagamachi it's called. So it's a storage chest and made of, it's made of either pine or hinoki, I think. So it's sterilizing. So whatever you store inside it will stay intact for hundreds of years. Amazing what you find in these chests. So I was just rummaging, I found, I thought, oh, some old newspapers, maybe I can light the stove with them. And they're from 1945. It's like the entire history, or I should say, propaganda of World War II. So it's kind of an interesting read. I think government, 1955, they brought out a law that kominka are old fashioned, out of date architecture and everyone should live in danchi, these concrete apartments. They totally said that they're dangerous to live in, unfit for humans. I didn't buy it because it's beautiful, because it's not. We saw it as a project. I mean, it's in nature. And just to learn all the traditional techniques, which we can apply on any house. If you see every wall here, we rebuilt natural walls. And I learned from our carpenter all about tsuchikabe, the natural earthen walls made from bamboo latticework frame. And then you just paste the earth mixed with rice straw onto it. For me, it's important what goes in my lungs. I don't use air conditioning. So in summer, these walls, they breathe, they absorb the humidity and then release it. This wall is about an inch thick in total. That's thick enough. The storehouse I really like. This is 120 years and it's actually dated. We've only just started renovating this Kura storehouse. We don't have any walls. We added another hashira here to reinforce the building because it is rotten. And then we built this hisashi, small roof, to deflect rain so it doesn't go inside. And we use wood from the temple. Recycled it, this long circular piece from the temple. All the roof tiles are recycled. You can glamorize it. I can post some beautiful photos and especially on my personal page, people are going, wow, look at this. It's not easy. Quite hardcore, where it's bugs and snakes, danger and flooding and landslides and earthquakes. So you can get this beautiful house and you might lose it overnight. So you have to have an open mind. For me, an open mind to losing everything.