\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 The following is part one of my translation of a speech Savo gave at one of his art exhibitions. He has of course told variations of this story, of how he came to live a self-sufficient life, to his friends before, but only recently has he refined it to share publicly. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s filtered through my voice a bit\u00e2\u20ac\u201dI translated and edited it so that it flows a little better in print\u00e2\u20ac\u201dbut the story itself is his and I haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t embellished it in the slightest. If you prefer to hear it from him and have half an hour to spare, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll post a link to a subtitled YouTube video in the comments as soon as I finish it. <\/i><\/p>\n
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I was born in Tokyo and raised in rural Kyoto. I was a badly-behaved kid. In junior high, I smoked and I had terrible grades. But I was also captain of the table tennis club\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6. that was the one thing I loved. Studying was too challenging for me, so I spent most of my time playing, which frustrated my parents and teachers, so they were hard on me. I was very hard on myself too, for being such a bad student. Low self-esteem plagued my entire adolescence.<\/p>\n In the summers during junior high there were no club meetings. I couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t do the one thing I enjoyed doing, so I decided to take a trip. It was pretty incredible of my parents to let me, such a bratty kid, go off on my own, but I had relatives in Sapporo they could send me to. I emptied my savings and bought a Seishun-18 ticket, and travelled all the way from Kyoto to Sapporo on local trains, stopping off at youth hostels at the end of each day\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s leg. After one night with my relatives, I went off on my own to explore Hokkaido. This was in the 1980s in the latter part of the railway boom, so the youth hostels were bustling with lodgers. These clearly well-seasoned travelers were shocked to see a young kid traveling alone, and praised my bravery. It was one of the happiest times of my life up to that point.<\/p>\n But of course, eventually I had to go back to school, where that terrible feeling of ineptitude came creeping back. The experience in Hokkaido stuck with me though, and from high school on, I traveled every chance I had, hitchhiking to avoid train fares and sleeping outside so I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to pay for lodging. I went abroad to countries where people live self-sufficiently, like Nepal and India, and when I came back to Japan at about age 24, I decided to try the camping life for a while. For a year and a half, I lived with no electricity, gas or plumbing on Ishigaki Island, just west of Okinawa.<\/p>\n One day, about a year into my time on Ishigaki, I woke up one morning unable to move. My body was like a rock. If I tried to move even a little, pain shot through my body. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153What is this? Why is this happening,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I thought to myself. I was writhing around in my tent unable to get out of it when finally, people living nearby came to my aid. Seeing my condition, they suggested that I try traditional medicine and adjusting my diet instead of going to the hospital. I started a treatment regimen with my uncle, who is an acupressurist, and when I felt better, I returned to camping life. \u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Eventually I came back to Kyoto to work at the part time job that allowed me to earn money for my travels, but soon I was in severe pain again and couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even do that. When I was so worried that I finally did go to a hospital, all of my test results were inconclusive, so I was diagnosed with lumbar pain. But the thing was\u00e2\u20ac\u201dit wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just my back. Be it my back or ankles or whatever, some part of my body was always hurting, and not in a normal way. Up until this started happening, my health was so good that if I wanted to climb a mountain, I could throw a loaded backpack on and go, but now the pain practically prevented me from living.<\/p>\n When I was 26, I took a turn for the worse. I was emaciated\u00e2\u20ac\u201dmuch thinner than I am now, listless, and when I started finding blood in the toilet, I knew something was really wrong. I went to a doctor of traditional medicine who had a great reputation, and he performed an O-Ring test<\/a> on me. Shockingly, the test showed that I had pancreatic cancer. Seeing my initial sadness, the doctor scolded me, saying, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re going to die if you keep this up!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d As the days went on, I went to the library and read up on pancreatic cancer to find out just what kind of disease it was. For two years, I was sure I could die at any moment. I continued treatments with that doctor\u00e2\u20ac\u201dfasting, thermotherapy, cleansing diets. My life was far from normal.<\/p>\n You write the kanji for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153cancer\u00e2\u20ac\u009d like this: \u00e7\u2122\u0152. Within the radical for illness, there are three mouths over a mountain, so some people used to say, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153If you eat mountains of food and bad-mouth a lot, you end up with cancer.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I thought, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Oh, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what must have done it.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d When I was traveling with very little money, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d sometimes eat what I found lying around outside, which included a lot of instant meals and junk food.<\/p>\n![\"1\"](\"http:\/\/www.hyogoajet.net\/hyogotimes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/1-300x225.jpg\")
<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 My name is Savotem Fujiwara. I live in Tanto-cho in Toyooka with my wife and two children, and we live with the aim of being completely self-sufficient. We typically get our food from fields on our 0.37-acre plot. Throughout the year, we grow 50 varieties of vegetables. In the winter though, the snow is waist-high in the fields, so I take a break from working outside, and work on making seasonings. From the koji<\/i> I cultivate every week, I make miso, shoyu, mirin, vinegar, pickles, doburoku<\/i> (a kind of unrefined sake), and more. I also draw and carve.<\/p>\n![\"2\"](\"http:\/\/www.hyogoajet.net\/hyogotimes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/2-140x140.jpg\")
<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no gas supply at our house. When I first moved in, there was propane, but knowing I was planning to live sustainably, I returned the gadgets to the gas company. Instead, we heat our water for cooking and bathing with firewood. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no TV, either. I have a young daughter, but she doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mind. She seems content to help us work the fields, gather the vegetables, cook miso soup and serve it to us. Occasionally, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll find an unpeeled mikan<\/i> in our soup , but I think it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s good for her to grow up surrounded by nature. Our livelihood depends on these kinds of routines.<\/p>\n![\"6\"](\"http:\/\/www.hyogoajet.net\/hyogotimes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/6-300x225.jpg\")
<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 During my treatments, there were many days when I thought, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153If my pancreas starts to hurt, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a chance that I could die tomorrow. If that happens, I should do what I want to do today.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The things I had always wanted to do suddenly became my priority, but I was still poor and in no condition to travel, so I turned to drawing. The only things I could really draw were jizo <\/i>(boddhisatva statues), and I drew tons of them\u00e2\u20ac\u201djizo<\/i> that seemed to convey, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s okay, everything will go well, everything will be great.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Drawing became very therapeutic.
\nLater, I thought about the three mouths in the kanji for cancer again. I had been eating much better than before, so I wondered why I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t improving. Then I had the realization that the mouths, in my case, must have represented stress. The stress I had put on myself growing up for not being a model student had to be what had damaged my body. But by doing what I wanted, by drawing, and not bothering to interact with unpleasant people who I quite literally didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have time for, I finally came to love myself. It didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t matter that I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a model student in my youth. If people made fun of me, I could just laugh it off. The three mouths of the cancer turned into smiles. But I still bore this illness, regardless of my new attitude.<\/p>\n
![\"3\"](\"http:\/\/www.hyogoajet.net\/hyogotimes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/3-512x341.jpg\")
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