Hello from Japan. Start Writing a Blog in My Second Language.

I've been writing another blog (Chinmyo Zakki Cho) in Japanese for about one and half year. I update it almost everyday and the articles are about natural farming, natural recipes which uses vegetables grown in my field and wild plants, shops and restaurants of my favorite, columns about work style and life, and so on.

It was not long after I started blogging in Japanese that I also wanted to write a blog in English. There will be much more people that I can communicate with if I write in English. Also, I wanted to see what I could write when I change languages from the one I use everyday into another which could reach broader and more far-away places in the world. What one can write depends on who would read it to some extent. When I write my Japanese blog, I assume my readers would be mainly the Japanese living mainly in Japan.

It's interesting for me to start writing a new blog even without knowing who will read it from where in the world.

Some of the articles will be rewrited from my Japanese blog, and in addition to this I will write original articles for this English blog.

I think the key to keep blogging is to enjoy it. I just want to start writing what I really want to write.

Grow Happy Hill (rice made by Masanobu Fukuoka), starting with making a seed bed

I've been growing Happy Hill ―a rice breed made by Masanobu Fukuoka, Japanese farmer and philosopher famous for his natural farming and re-vegetation of desertified lands― for three years. Happy Hill is said to be strong against illness and damages from insects. They grew healthily for three consecutive years without pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, or any other chemical substances. And even without irrigation. As for water, they could grow only with rain water (and some little water which seeped from a neighboring rice paddy). My rice growing starts at the end of April. I had soaked rice seeds and waited until they their tiny roots started to appear. The above picture is a seed bed I started to make at the center of the paddy. Roots of perennial plants should be removed. Sowed seeds on the ground and covered with soil. I made arches from bamboos for covering with nets in order to keep off birds such as sparrows. In the first year of rice grow...

Life Without Common Electric Household Appliances

I used to love electrical appliances. In my childhood, I liked to see advertising inserts of electronics stores which were delivered with newspaper. After becoming aware of the comfort of life with less electrical appliances, however, I started to get rid of them in my home one by one. Life Without TV Sets In my student days, TV was often on when I had meals or spent time with my family at home. There were some programs which I liked to watch, but it was a problem that even boring programs attracted my attention and wasted my precious time. Now it's been more than 10 years since I started the life without TV. No problem at all without such a time consumer. I can catch up with news on the Internet, and as a matter of fact there are very few programs which really attract me. When I want to watch a program, my car navigation or mobile phone do it ―although their displays are very small, they suffice for me. I'm sometimes told that I must have a plenty of time after dinner ...

How I became a vegetarian

I became a vegetarian about 10 years ago. My partner stopped eating meat before I did, and I started to wonder if meat was really necessary for my diet. At first, I tried eating soy meat instead of animal meat. I soon found that soy meat was tastier than animal food. In those times, I began to eat organically grown vegetables and avoid chemical condiments. I think my sense of taste was getting delicate. When I started eating soy meat, I realized that I didn't like the taste of animal meat so much. When eating vegetables, I chewed a lot to get a good taste of them; on the other hand, I started not to want to chew animal meat for many times. When I was chewing animal meat, I sensed vividly that I was eating part of the body of an animal. I sometimes made a sketch of dabbling ducks when I went for a walk in a park near my apartment in Tokyo. They looked cute, and as I got to feel more affinity with them, I started to think that birds are not for eating (at least for me). Some people ...

What a Curious World

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