Similarly, each household is self-sufficient in energy. Shinichi’s household uses only the fuel it can gather, which is never more than a fair share of the village’s supply. It has its own water supply in the form of the well. The house and work yards are designed to take advantage of solar energy, and the agricultural process would be unthinkable without it. The house is designed and oriented in conjunction with plantings to maximize natural shade and cooling breezes. Water power is used on a modest scale for pressing oil, grinding grain, and pulverizing minerals, but except for a handful of draft animals in the village, humans power nearly everything.
Shinichi’s family makes most of their tools and implements and produces their own clothes—from spinning and weaving fabric all the way to actually cutting and assembling garments. But here an individual household may begin to rely upon the resources of the village as a whole: it may need to supplement its own cotton with some grown nearby; it may prefer to obtain more expertly woven and dyed fabric; it may need expert metalwork for a particular tool; it needs pottery, tatami mats, and paper for shoji. In all of these areas, while each family may not be truly self-sufficient, the village in general is. In fact, the only essential item likely to be obtainable only from outside the village is salt. Other items are imported, of course, and itinerant peddlers are allowed to sell an increasingly wide variety of items to peasants—seaweed, tea, oil, wooden water dippers, pans, rice pots, paper, fans, rulers. Luxuries and status items are available, like better sake, better cabinetry, finer pottery, ornaments, and accessories, and this attests to the peasants’ increasing standard of living and integration with the wider cash economy. But the essentials are all locally sourced.
There is an incredible amount of recycling going on as well. Agricultural waste—what little there is, since most plants, from root to stalk, are fully utilized in some way—becomes compost and mulch. Similarly, fireplace ash is recycled into the fertilizer mix, as are worn-out woven rush and straw items. Metal (predominantly iron) is successively reworked. A broken cooking pot may be converted into several sickle blades, for instance, and broken blades beaten into straps and hooks.
Wood has a particularly long life cycle: a broken plow frame can become an axe handle, a broken axe handle refitted to a scoop, a broken scoop added to the firewood pile (and its ashes finding their way to the fields again as fertilizer). Clothing can be endlessly reworked, taken apart, remade, with the most intact portions of a worn-out jacket, for example, being carefully salvaged and worked into another as patchwork, which is eventually recycled into carrying pouches, and then as cleaning cloths. Old cleaning cloths can be cut into narrow strips and woven into indoor sandals or small mats, and when these are worn out, they will find their way to the compost heap or end up helping to heat water. In the village, this recycling takes place mostly at the level of households like Shinichi’s, but, in fact, it has been institutionalized and commercialized throughout the country.
Beyond being self-sufficient, most households are able to generate a surplus of some nonagricultural items, which eventually evolve into cottage industries. Though raising food for the nation is their primary purpose and responsibility as mandated by Shogun Ieyasu at the beginning of the era in 1603, in 1649 the government decreed that after their day’s labor is done, peasants should spend their evenings industriously working at crafts that can supplement their income. This is seasonal work as well, much of it ideally suited to occupying the winter months. It also provides a way of efficiently utilizing labor, since all hands are not always required for every agricultural task, and some can be better employed at other industries.
Among the most common cottage industries are straw work, basketry, and textiles. Straw work is incredibly wide in application since the rice straw (wara) from the harvest is the most readily available material for a great number of household necessities and is a prolifically renewable resource From their own leftover straw. Shinichi’s family weaves mats of all sorts, from large floor mats to small ones for seating to “hot pads” and decorative items. Large mats require a specialized weaving frame, usually homemade, and the technique is really that of textile weaving. They also weave pouches and carrying bags from straw, either rough and open weave for heavy-duty work or close and finely woven with decorative patterns for more presentable occasions.
They weave a number of clothing items from straw as well, primarily foot-wear, aprons, and foul-weather gear. Straw footwear ranges from lightweight sandals to heavy snow boots, as well as gaiters and overshoes. In fact, straw overshoes are even made for horses. Straw aprons are mainly for outdoor use, and because they require flexibility, they are usually very finely and decoratively woven. Raincoats and cloaks are made thick and bulky to minimize the amount of moisture that can penetrate, but they are surprisingly lightweight; their collars and neck closures are comfortably thin and flexible. Many kinds of hoods and hats, as well as mittens, can be made from rice straw, and when twisted into rope, its uses are multiplied.
They make bales in which to package and transport rice, as well as brooms, brushes, and even toys from rice straw. It is durable enough to last a season or a year, but most straw items need to be replaced regularly. (There is a particularly high built-in demand for new footwear.) Finally, of course, Shinichi’s family can easily recycle straw items into mulch or fuel, resulting in a zero-waste cycle of use.
They use woven reeds and bamboo strips for more durable items such as basketry and hats. Because of its resiliency, bamboo is particularly appropriate where stiffness and flexibility are desired, and it is fashioned into a variety of implements such as strainers, sieves, funnels, lids, dividers, as well as boxes, tubs, and even ceilings—all using basket-weaving techniques. Bamboo is extremely hardy, prolific, and fast growing, and like straw is easily recycled. It is an irreplaceable feature of Japan’s technical and material culture.
green cottage industries
There are many kinds of textiles that lend themselves to cottage industry, and some have evolved into mass production. True textiles include bast fibers (hemp and ramie), cotton, and silk. Of these, hemp is technically the most ancient and also the easiest to produce, and Shinichi’s family produces enough for its own use. Silk was introduced from China in about 300 ad as a labor-intensive elite good, but Shinichi’s household does not produce it. Cotton, though introduced from Korea and China initially in the twelfth century, was not produced on a large scale until the late seventeenth century, making it the most recent textile fiber. Shinichi’s household does not grow cotton, but weaves and dyes cotton they obtain from relatives.
All of these cottage industries involve trade-offs between resource allocation, environmental impact and the value and utility of the finished products. Examined in this light, straw work represents a nearly ideal process, while devoting farmland to cotton instead of less-productive textile plants represents environmentally sound judgment. Until the dyeing step, the textile processes are nonpolluting in general, their products reusable and recyclable. The finishing