Japan Scenarios towards Low-Carbon Society

The Japanese Ministry of the Environment sponsored this report (PDF) entitled Japan Scenarios towards Low-Carbon Society (LCS).

According to the report, a 70-percent reduction in emissions can be achieved by reducing energy demand by 40 to 45 percent and by introducing low-carbon energy supplies. The energy demand-side emission reduction can be accomplished by a decrease in demand due to a shrinking population scenario, smarter energy use, and improvements in energy efficiency, while allowing energy demand to grow in some sectors.

I found it a very interesting read, since it accurately captures the current state of Japanese society and the problems the country faces. A large percentage of my translation work is for companies that are heavily engaged in trying to eke out a living with more expensive energy costs and tightening emissions regimes.

The divide between the Fast Life (Scenario A) and Slow Life (Scenario B) can be seen developing rapidly in actual fact, as I expect it will in other countries. It appears that we're in the vanguard of Scenario B;

More people migrate from urban to rural areas due to increasing attractiveness of agriculture, forestry and fisheries industries. In addition to permanent farmers, increasing numbers of families enjoy secure food supply and healthy life-styles in rural areas while pursuing businesses in the pattern of Small Office Home Office (SOHO).

Scenario B seems to be the better one as it reduces CO2 emissions faster, uses less concrete of which Japan has already poured enough if appearances are anything to go by, and is obviously more fun.

Pond

Although we dug the pond some time before we moved house, it refused to fill up. I read that wallowing pigs do a sterling job of sealing the bottoms of ponds, but I don't have any pigs so I tried stomping about in the little puddle that formed in the bottom myself, poking with a stick to simulate busy little trotters. To no avail, alas. Although the trottered places held water longer than parts that didn't get the treatment, the essential ingredient 'pig wax' was obviously missing.

So at the suggestion of our dermatologist friend, we tried the trusty 'blue sheet' (if blue sheets were removed from Japan, the society would collapse within a week). We had a big ole blue sheet with some holes in it which the young master was very keen to tape up with trusty gum tape.

The effect is not lovely, and the blue sheet may need to be hidden by some means, but we should probably wait until the pond fills (or not) before we attempt cosmetic measures.

Blueberries! June Berries!

This is the view from my office porthole. One of Chiba-san's crew is laboring away planting 10 blueberry bushes in three varieties, and one juneberry. What's a juneberry? Damned if I know, really. But it has very pretty foliage, and the makings of some juicy red berries. Chiba-san seems to be able get 2 m tall shrubs and plant them in bark compost for cheaper than you can buy 10 cm sticks in a plastic pot. This is good wizardry.

Net vendor of electricity

So our first chits from the evil electricity utility company Yonden (Shikoku Denryoku) came today, the top one for our sale of clean, renewable power to them, and the bottom one for our purchase of nuclear power from them (from our friendly neighbourhood nuclear plant, Ikata).

In terms of pricing, ours commands a higher price because most of the electricity we use is cheap night power. For April we used 442 kWh and generated 315 kWh. We realized a profit of 215 yen (a tinny of beer's worth - I'll drink this tonight to celebrate).

I'm fairly pleased with this result. Now we'll have to see if we can cut down our usage to the same level as our generation. Or get that windmill...

This is the data box for the solar (top unit).

Purple light: Good - selling juice
Orange light: Bad- buying juice

Perhaps at some stage I'll lose the habit of glancing nervously at the light and cursing inwardly when it's orange.

Seismic testing

A house in Japan isn't good for much if it can't stand a bit of shaking from a major earthquake. Considering that Japan is entering a 'seismically active period', having a house that doesn't wobble too much is desirable.

As if on cue, we were treated to a couple of decent jolts numbering 4 on the Japanese scale of intensity. This is not a killer quake by any means, but the house didn't sway about for minutes afterwards as our last one did after a tremblor, so I'm reasonably confident that we won't fare too badly in something bigger.

This earthquake struck a good distance to the east of Matsuyama, and was felt over a wide area of south western Japan.

Hedge and 'symbol tree'

I wanted every last tree and shrub in the garden to be productive in some way, and I hoped for a hedge of fruit bushes, or olives. But the trouble is, if you want to have privacy from your hedge, you have to keep it trimmed to encourage growth, and trimming cuts off the parts that produce fruit. (Did you know that the shrub privet takes its name from French for 'private'? No, I didn't either, but I suppose I might have guessed.) Our first candidate for gardener, Senba-san, let us (me) run away with our ideas of what might be nice, saying yes, yes, let's do that. When we got a second opinion from another gardener, Chiba-san, he told us, no, you can't do that because, a,b, and c. We chose Chiba-san to advise us on our plants, and put them in, and he and his crew did a very good job.

The city very kindly pays half the cost of trees planted alongside a road, so we'll be taking advantage of this particular subsidy (there are lots of these kinds of subsidies available, but you need somebody to tell you about them.) We chose Quercus myrsinifolia, or 'shirakashi' in Japanese.

The greenery wouldn't be complete without what is known as a 'symbol tree' in front of the house. Quite what it symbolizes I'd be hard put to say, but there it is. It is a Benthamidia japonica, or 'yamaboushi' in Japanese. The other trees that we plan to plant around the side of the house to hide the laundry won't be symbolic of anything, apparently.

As a sop to me (and to keep out neighbourhood dogs), there's a Prunus tomentosa, or 'yusura-ume' planted under the letter box. It's some sort of edible berry bush.

Interior

I like our stair lights, niche, and bronze cat from Bali. They go well with the super-bumpy walls.

Natural light

At night

Party for the builders

On Saturday we held a party for the people involved in building our house. Unfortunately the carpenters who did a large part of the work were busy on yet another house and couldn't attend, but the architects and the earthworks people, and a neighbour who happens to know everybody else all were present. The highlight was a big, bloody bag of wild boar meat, which the missus turned into a tasty 'nabe' with miso.

As beer goes down hatches much as rainwater goes down drains, we learn about the features of our new neighbourhood. The extra-big mosquitoes, and the defeaning chorus of frogs on summer nights are something we will soon experience.


The kids also partied heavily, yea unto 12 o'clock when they really should have been in bed. Having children from six to eleven running around the new house playing tag tests one's sang froid when it comes to concern for the integrity of decor and furnishings.

A real antique

The living room looked rather bare and was cyring out for a sideboard. So we bought an English sideboard from the 30s, of oak. Considering how many antiques of this kind are available in Matsuyama alone, I wonder if there can be any left in England.

Car park and gate

Our car parking space and gateway was possibly the subject of more intense discussion and revision than the house itself, especially as there was an inclination to scrimp on it. Here is Hidaka-san of Hidaka Planning ... planning. The gateway looks quite nice, even if the people who actually built it didn't exactly follow Hidaka-san's plan to the letter.

The concrete was 'washed out' to make the little stones stand out for a 'natural' look.

The bricks that were left over from coating the house were broken and laid in cement as the path between the gate and the front door.

And apropos of nothing in particular, another beautiful sunset.

Moving house

So at last, on March 24, we moved into our new house.

The long-lasting pattern of fine weather on weekdays and miserable weather at the weekend held true, and Friday's sunshine gave way to squalls of rain and wind. We chose a cheap and cheerful mover who boasted a lot of experience at moving pianos, and everything went smoothly. Even the rain cooperated by not falling when the important things were being moved.

Moving house is a tiresome business, with frantic tidying and arranging at both ends, followed by days of not really knowing where anything is. I shoved my camera-PC cable into a running shoe for safe-keeping at the last minute, and couldn't find it again for two weeks.

But taking a bath in the evening made it all seem worthwhile. The water stayed warm right to the end, rather than palpably losing a degree of heat every minute in the old house. And when we got out, there was no running in a desperate naked crouch to get in front of the smelly kitchen stove. Instead, we could stroll about in comfort, remarking on how pleasant it all seemed.

Open day

Today Selco Home held an open day at our house the weekend before we move in next week, to show the public the finished item. But it's not really finished. The kitchen lacks a cooker, the solar hasn't been connected, and the balcony is still just a steel frame.

The wooden parts around the ground floor roof are being stained white to match the top roof.

The cardboard is finally off the front door. It's a Tostem aluminium door made to look like wood. And indeed, it looks like wood.

The protective boards have been taken off the floor, and the pine wood flooring has been waxed. We were surprised at the brightness of the interior, with the light reflecting off the floor and walls. The colours are very easy on the eyes.


The lights have also been installed. We choose lights with an antique, Taisho-ero look. The light manufacturers have only a limited selection of types that accept fluorescent bulbs, so our choices involved some compromise. I'm satisfied with them. The missus says they look cheap. I reckon that when they get some dust sitting on them, they'll look just dandy.

One of the problems with building and furnishing a house in the Provinces is that the makers don't really care about the requirements of yokels for style. If you want something, you have to pick it out of a catalogue, and you have to judge by just one small photograph. The lights on the stairs looked odd to me in the picture, and in fact, they are a bit odd. Myself, the missus, the young master, and Kawabe-san the builder spent many minutes figuring out whether they looked best facing up or facing down. The jury is still out.

"Antiques"

We've been looking for nice furniture to replace some of our heavily worn and frankly broken sticks. We put up with our kitchen chairs while they were still spattered with breast milk, but when the backs broke and I glued them together as best I could ... we still put up with them, although we took care not to lean back too hard and get impaled on the broken stumps. But up with that we will no longer put.

There is a nice antique shop at the bottom of the hill that specializes in English 'antiques'. Most of it is stuff from the 60s of the kind that I was brought up with, although they do have some older things. The owners are very engaging and talkative folks and the master of the shop frankly told me, "We make our living from other people's rubbish". I was quite taken with some of their rubbish and purchased a piece.


I don't think they are quite as familiar with English furniture as me, nor as aware of the history of materials. This item they reckoned was '1930s'. But it cries out '1970s!' (or thereabouts). The wooden frame is held together with hex head nuts which weren't used in furniture until fairly recently. And that 'leather' has a distinctly composite look. Indeed, where its slightly ripped, it has a fabric backing that says 'leatherette' to me. Also, to clean it up, I used some Redwing boot fluid on it, and it didn't drink it up like real leather does. Oh, and the leatherette cushion is attached with Velcro, invented in 1941.


Still, it's an exceedingly comfy slouch chair, especially with a slouchy off-center posture, with one leg cast over the side. I'm not sure that 1930s furniture was built to allow slouching quite like that.

We were also looking to replace our battered kitchen chairs, and looked at some real antiques. But most of them were ricketty, especially when they were in sets. Today we bought a fake antique oak chair at a big discount in a sale, and we're hoping to round out the set with three more (a bargain, even at the full price).

Moving the compost

By the simple expedient of throwing all our kitchen waste into a palisade of bamboo and waste fencewood, we reduced our weekly rubbish output by more than half. I believe the Medievals called these 'middens', but nowadays we call it 'the compost'. I built the enclosure one afternoon to the undemanding ISO Good Enough gardening standard, and it served very well for several years.


Over more than two years, it never actually produced any compost that I could use regularly, even though I chucked in huge quantities of food waste, autumn tomato vines, fallen leaves, and Special Lignin Breakdown Fluid. However, when it came time to dismantle the midden, the bottom half was nearly-black organic matter with worms holding little orgies in pockets here and there. They all went into my plastic bags for transfer to Hojo. Besides worms, there were fruit flies, and soldier flies, earwigs, and woodlice were well represented. I regret to say that in the summer, there were also mosquitoes. There were also a number of spiders, slugs, milipedes, and great big white beetle lavae.


The dark composty bits at the bottom of the heap are now gracing the tops of my beds in Hojo. Carrying really big bags of compost up and down steps is a little bit knackering.

Sweet liberation

Ever since I came to Japan, we have had to rely on kerosene for heating and sometimes for hot water. You either have to go and get it, or wait around for somebody to bring it to you. And it stinks, as liquid and as exhaust. It is a very un-ideal heat source. And we're going to be free of it in two weeks' time.

In our current house, we have two jerry cans for decanting into kerosene fan heaters, and a tank round the back of the house for hot water. The tank has to be kept filled, which means going behind the house and checking the kero level gauge. Forget about it and your water will suddenly go cold on you (we never let this happen, primarily because the compost heap which I visit daily is located next to the tank, so it was easy to check it). When somebody is using hot water, the metal boiler emits a stinky exhaust which blows in through any open window. Nice!


Every Saturday, a smelly kerosene truck comes round playing a loud, obnoxious jingle with a child singing about huddling around the bonfire. A very obsequious young man pumps out the Devil's Tea into your jerry cans and boiler tank while you stand around shivering. If you happen to want to be somewhere else between 10 and 11 am on Saturday morning, well, too bad.

The first of several bird boxes

Today we made our first bird box out of wood scraps from the house. The young master cut the wood in a somewhat unmasterly fashion, and I hammered the bits together. The result is reminiscent of a Normandy pillbox, but I hope the little birds won't be bothered by its stark lines.

We stuffed some straw inside in the confident expectation that birds who are happy with a jerry-built home also have no objection to pre-installed straw.

We'll have to find somewhere a bit higher than this stump to install it.

It occurred to me that a free bird-box with every home purchased would be a surefire, environmentally-sensitive marketing tool for any builder, so I took the liberty of branding our box.

Something with a nice sloped roof and a cute little round hole would obviously be better suited as a sales draw. And it would probably appeal to more customers if it didn't have the root of a thornbush nailed crudely to the side of it as a perch.

Inside the house, the carpenters have done an excellent job with the built-in fixtures. (Although I'm sure I heard one of them snort when they saw our bird-box...)

My office. A huge slab of wood for a desk, with holes for cables, a slot for two computers, and a raised dais for my monitor. The architect seems to believe that I consult a lot of books in my daily work, so generous provision has been made for a library.

The young master's room. This one isn't half bad either. It faces south and seems to be the sunniest room on the ground floor.

I keep showing pictures of this. I guess I'm just really pleased to have a chin-up bar in my house - I can't fathom why every house doesn't have such an obviously essential feature. Now I'm especially tickled by the fact that my head-slot has elegant casing running round it. This is the view from the little shoes 'n coat room next to the entrance. I'm sure it'll become a habit just to bang off a few chin-ups when entering and leaving the house.

We have the power

Solar's up now. Unlike Al Gore, we have gone to the expense of putting some panels on our house.


The advertisement for Sharp will have to come off, as it's our house and not Sharp's.


While the panels aren't exactly in keeping with the Georgian style, they do blend in with the roof a little better than I'd expected

Talking of Georgian style, the brickies have been busy grouting between the bricks to make it look reely reely authentic.

Inside, the plaster board is now on everywhere, and the carpenters have been burning the midnight oil to put up shelves and casing. They also put in a very nice piece of pipe for me to do pull-ups on, with a little niche for my head to fit into in case I get muscular enough to bang my skull on the ceiling. Great stuff.


When I climbed up the scaffolding to look at the solar, I was struck by what a mess my garden plot looks like. It looks like landscaping care of early humankind.