Why I started my blog: for my friend and someone who may be interested in what we are trying.

I originally started this blog to prepare for my mother's blog:
http://tsunoshimareborn.blogspot.jp/
(Sorry, but it's all in Japanese.)

We have been uploading cooking videos since my father passed away over an year ago.
The latest video, which we took when I went back home, is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTBCyiaeA6Y

This project was mainly started off just because she would be living all by herself and we thought we needed to have more time together, but just by calling up each other we would have had less and less time without we have topics we would be focusing on together.

Since then, we kept uploading videos once a week for about an year, and this summer, I decided to go back home for 10 days to gather sea urchin like I used to do when I was little. My ancestor had been fishermen probably for more than 150 years, and the video above is how to preserve Uni (or urchin) which I gathered.

While I went to dive in the ocean and gather urchin, abalone and turban shells, I found our barn was almost invaded by bamboo trees breaking through the ceilings. A part of the barn was surrounded by small rooms which my grand father himself constructed, and that sealed the path around the barn, and in turn, let the bamboo trees to grow whichever way they wanted.

The small rooms and trees together shaded the whole barn and I thought this may have been shading our home history, so I decided to break them down to get the paths around the barn.

After three days of fighting back to bamboo trees and rotten air accumulated over years, we got back our barn all free from invader bamboos and took back the fresh air running through the whole house history, or at least I thought so.

I don't quite remember when she started to talk about this, but she kept talking how other people in my hometown do not do anything to stop people from going out from the town and just getting old altogether, and she was worried our fields were already abandoned for so long (below is a picture that our fields lay).


The picture is taken from the red circle in the following map toward the red line:


After taking down the invaded rooms, I said to her that nobody would want to go ahead and break through the rough paths, and that if she really wanted to make that come true, she herself had to start breaking through the paths.

I remember my grand father used to keep cows in the barn, so I thought if she wanted to take back the path to our field in the abandoned area, it may be a good idea to keep goats to maintain the paths after cutting down trees and long grasses.

So I said that to her, and, she started breaking through the paths.

Her blog in the beginning is mostly about her cutting down trees and grasses, just to bring a economic renewal, or probably a renewal of how well we live as human beings in our small hometown.

Recently she says she has a dream, to take back the land where fireflies could light up our paths, like once it used to be. And, the following pictures are the paths she made so far toward her dream.












She is now 67 years old. And, she is still fighting back to the abandoned area to make her dream come true.

And this is why I started my blog to help her a little toward her dream.