CLARA: This is Story Behind the Story. I'm Clara Sherley-Appel and my guest today is local author and writing instructor Andy Couturier. Andy's work has appeared in a slew of publications, including the Adbusters, The Japan Times, the Oakland Tribune, Creative Nonfiction magazine, the North American Review, and Fiber Arts Magazine -- to name just a few. He's also published three books, including The Abundance of Less: Lessons in Simple Living from Rural Japan, in which he profiles 10 men and women who have chosen to live a different sort of life than most of us envision. It is that book that's the topic of our discussion today. Andy, welcome to Story Behind the Story.

ANDY: I'm glad to be here, thank you.

CLARA: The people you profile live with less in a lot of different ways, less money, less reliance on technology, less impact on the environment. I thought I'd start by asking you what does "less" mean to you?

ANDY: Well, that's a great question because sometimes I look at my own life and I think, "Well, I have a lot of books or a lot of clutter on my desk. Am I living the message of this book?" But I do have a lot of time. I think that's the key one, is that you have time for what you actually really care about. You're not constantly overwhelmed by a to-do list. Sometimes that involves minimalism, but sometimes it's just time to actually engage. One of the people in the book, he loves flowers, and he's a collector of all these different kinds of flowers, so he has hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. It's not that being hard and rigid about numbers of less but that he doesn't run around trying to just cram more and more different kinds of things into his life and have no time to do what he really cares about.

CLARA: It's purposeful, it's thoughtful.

ANDY: Yeah.

CLARA: In some ways it sounds like it's less is less about less than making room for other types of things.

ANDY: Yeah, that's part of the message, absolutely.

CLARA: How did you come to know the people that you profiled? I'm also interested in how they knew each other because it seems like a lot of them do have preexisting relationships.

ANDY: It was serendipity, and I believe more and more in serendipity. The reason that I moved to Japan originally, with my partner, Cynthia, in 1989, was we wanted to work and save some money so that we could buy our own piece of property back in California. We had heard that you could teach English in Japan. We didn't want to take a job that abrogated our values, or at that time, and probably now, a lot of jobs that involve working for large corporations would not just work for us, let's just put it that way. We went over there to teach English, and we were able to save money, and we're very interested in rural life and people doing for themselves. Along the way we met, doing some environmental activism and also just looking for organic food in the small town, we wanted to live in a rural area, we met a very dynamic and engaging woman.

ANDY: Her name is Atsuko Watanabe, and she's profiled in chapter three of the book and she's an antinuclear activist primarily and a mother. She also paints pottery, her husband's pottery for her living. She also is now a council member at the town council, so she's working as a local politician. She's an activist and grows a lot of her own food, and I happened to meet her and we hit it off immediately. I really liked her, she was very forthright, she challenged me immediately. So she invited us up to her incredibly beautiful farmstead up in the mountains of Shikoku, which is before, the smallest of the four main islands, which is where we were living. We had no idea, I mean, at that time our frame was back to the land and that goes very far back to Emerson and Throw and probably before that. But the idea of people returning to a rural life. But it's not really going back at all, it's really a very much forward.

CLARA: That's something that comes up a few times with the people you profiled.

ANDY: Yeah.

CLARA: You talk to them about this return to the traditional methods and they correct you.

ANDY: Right, exactly. To answer your second question, and this is what really intrigued me, but one of the things that really intrigued me about them is they had known each other, many of them, not all of them. Because when they were in their 20s and early 30s, they had lived on the subcontinent in India, Tibet, and Nepal and they were very interested in Nepali culture. Nepali Buddhism, Nepali cooking, Nepali woodblock carving, and they had gathered around a lodge where other Japanese people were living and doing cultural preservation projects. It was like many people dropped in, there was backpacker culture, but was when people spent six months or 12 months or 18 months traveling in India as opposed to just going over there for a short period of time. They got to know each other. As I interviewed Atsuko and the people who live near her, she introduced me to more and more people and it's mostly through that network that I got to meet each of the 10 people in the book.

CLARA: Tell me a little bit about that relationship with India. Were they traveling there at the same time, or was it just a network of people who had the similar experience?

ANDY: Mostly, they overlapped at different times. But, to me, what was particularly interesting at the time and still now, is that these were Asian people who were looking at another Asian culture, it was pan-Asian culture. They were integrating different things from Gandhi's emphasis on handwork and handcrafts to Nepali Buddhist culture. Nepal is primarily a Hindu country and there's an area where there's a Nepali Buddhist minority. The connection between Japanese Buddhism and Nepali Buddhism, so it was like a non-Western and a non-white gaze... or not even gaze, or interaction and real connection with this other Asian culture. That was also particularly interesting to me.

CLARA: Yeah, I'm interested in that too, in part, because, as you said, it's a non-Western gaze but I'm not sure that I agree that it would not be a gaze, right? Like they have an interpretation of the ways of living that the people that they encounter have. I think you questioned a few of them on this in the book. You question them on, well, poverty isn't a choice for some of the people who you're talking about but it is for you. How do you understand that? How do you feel they understood it? What's their engagement with that kind of set of issues?

ANDY: I think poverty is a very loaded word, so I've avoided it because I think it really encompasses a lot of oppression and, basically, your decades, centuries of colonialism and exploitation that is contextualized by, in that case, British colonialism. The reason I backed off on the word gaze is when we think about the white Western gaze and we think about the European Eurocentric view, and often that is either helicoptering in as a reporter in Afghanistan or taking various colonial stances where you are basically photographing. Where you're actually photographing, you're not in engagement with people and culture rights.

CLARA: More tourism.

ANDY: Even if you're there, you might just be viewing from the outside, so gaze to me implies being far away and not being in interaction. I think I backed away from that because I think a lot of them they learned with, they studied with. Just to use one small example, but I think it encapsulates a lot of the ways that people that I interviewed interact is they learn... There was a man named Akira Ito, he was a big block carver in Japan, he was a craftsperson in Japan, he met craft people there. He was interested in helping them resist the tide of industrial, in their case, paper making, and woodblock carving and printing, which was taking over the lives of craftspeople. They went and lived with them, they documented their lives, they, many times, lived in their villages for five, 10 years. He produced a book using supporters, both financial and otherwise from Japan, that not only profiled and saved their woodblock and paper making culture.

ANDY: But it showed them that people around the world were interested in the craftspeople, and financially paid them. There was an interaction with it, can people from a wealthier nation interact in a perfectly clean way with people from a poor nation? I question that but we're still always stuck in what we have and how can we act as ethically as we believe in? The question of choosing to live with less versus being forced to live with less is one question I asked several of the and I was very surprised by their answer. I should mention that I was in there as a person who speaks fluent Japanese, but not perfect Japanese, who is a friend, became friends with these people. It's always my view on what they said and how I was able to pull things out of them. But Gufu Watanabe, who was profiled in chapter eight, he said, "Yeah, sure, there's lots of people in India who are poor and just they're just desperate and they don't have enough to eat. That's not what anybody is talking about as an ideal life."

ANDY: But to him, and I think this is born out of my experiences, there's plenty of people all over the world, and in his case, India, who are not choosing to strive and rise as high as possible on a corporate ladder or try to get the most amount of money and try to cram the most into their days than other things. Perhaps, in his example, their spiritual life or their craft life is more important to them and-

CLARA: Or their values.

ANDY: And their values and I think, personally, we need that. There's a difference between dire desperate privation and being at a level where you have your basic needs met and perhaps a little bit of extra time and money. But as Amemiya-san, who is in chapter five, said, "Why was Gandhi so popular there?" You have to ask yourself that question, "Why did millions of people say this is I believe in your way of thinking?" That's because they probably did share his values that simplicity, living with less material affluence is a richer way to live.

CLARA: The subtitle of her chapter I think speaks to that, too. I'm trying to remember exactly what it is.

ANDY: Yeah, sure. It is "Breaking the Trance of The Next Better Thing." She just talks about the next thing and the next thing, you get a computer and it's got all these great features, right? So you want it and so you buy it, right? But then another one comes out and it's even better. It's got these new features-

CLARA: A planned obsolescence.

ANDY: Well, that, too, but also just the new thing and the new thing and it's a trance that we get into and I start the chapter with her quote that the system, the economic system, depends upon everybody being dissatisfied and that dissatisfied people just ruin capitalism.

CLARA: I think the conversation we were just having about India also raises some questions for you because, of course, though you have obviously spent a great deal of time in Japan and with these people, you are not yourself Japanese. I'm curious how you did and how you do navigate your status as an outsider when you're telling these stories and trying to bring them to an audience that is largely also outsiders?

ANDY: Yeah, well, a number of different ways. One way is to highlight that and say it regularly and not try to hide that. I think I learned that years ago at UCSC when I was taking some film classes just like reminding people that they're watching a movie. That this is a made object. There's a number of times where I made the narrator just a little different than me, Andy, less knowledgeable and maybe a little more dunderheaded or sick than I am or that I, at least, I hope I am for a number of reasons. One was just to make it easier for people who are less knowledgeable, say about Japan or as a foil, as a kind of foil for like-

CLARA: Yeah.

ANDY: Sometimes to provoke the interviewer, interviewees to be like explain things explicitly that are often left implicit in conversations among Japanese people where there's a lot of tacit agreements. I think that many linguists of Japanese would agree that there's a lot less explicitness and even my friends who are simultaneous interpreters they are constantly struggling with that. At first, so the book actually has two iterations, and the first one I specifically did not want to write about my life here in the United States. There's just too many books that are unnauseatingly like white guy goes to Asia, meets a bunch of people, and it's all about him and what he learns. These people are just background. I try to avoid that and when the book went out of print with the first publisher they couldn't financially keep it in print. I got a new publisher and they said, "You have to write about yourself." I said, "I really don't want to." They said, "Well, then you won't have your book contract." I did put in the extra chapter.

CLARA: It was motivated by something external?

ANDY: Yeah, but actually, and it's funny, because I teach writing classes, and so I had to write a little autobiography. A lot of people write memoirs and I've taught memoir classes, but I've never actually written a serious piece so I'm like, "Okay, this is how I represent myself." I did add that but it's in the, afterward, it's at the end. It's the, perhaps, the least important thing. But I think it was great to actually write, to really struggle with how did I integrate it and not integrate what I learned from them in the book.

CLARA: Well, I think there's something to the choice to make it not just the last chapter but explicitly an afterward, right?

ANDY: Yes.

CLARA: Part of what you're talking about, making it a little less about you?

ANDY: Yeah.

CLARA: Yeah. You raised another point that I was really interested in reading this, which is your approach to translation. Japanese and English are very, very different languages in a lot of ways, not just in terms of the politeness strategies and what's explicit or implicit. But they have very drastically different grammars in a lot of ways. Of course, you translated not just to the essays and other writings from the people who you profiled but presumably the actual interviews themselves.

ANDY: Yep, almost all the interviews are in Japanese.

CLARA: Yeah, so what was that process like and what challenges did you face or concerns that you have going into it?

ANDY: Well, first of all, I took a lot of time doing it, I did it very slowly and sometimes I would take days and days of writing to work out a single paragraph. I recorded a lot of the interviews, so I listened to them again and again trying to really listen to the tonality and the timbre of the voice and where the pauses were. I also, as a writer and a writing teacher, I am so fascinated with the actual texture of syllables and word sounds. So really trying to render a word like inchki which basically means deceptiveness by government officials. I found a word in English after a lot of work, chicanery, but had that sign inchiki, chicanery, it had that same texture to it. Now, that's not something that someone reading the book casually would necessarily know. But it was something I took a lot of pleasure in, is just trying to get the texture of the work there. The second strategy I used was that dunderhead strategy like pretending I didn't understand provoking the person into clarifying some things that I thought I understood.

CLARA: There's a couple places where you say that about a particular word.

ANDY: Yeah, and then I forwarded, fore fronted that there's a sense of not knowing certain words and using a pause to be like, "Okay, hold on, I'm looking it up in my little dictionary as we're driving along in the truck," and its kiseki. This is rough and tumble working class guy, and he's talking about the kiseki of life and I'm like, "What the heck is kiseki?" I look in this tiny little print and it says miracle. I'm surprised to see him use this word but it also puts a focus on that particular word. Those are some of the strategies but I could talk the whole time about just those translation strategies and I found it very fascinating.

CLARA: Were there things you worried about going into that translation?

ANDY: Yes, pretty much everything. I am a worrier, but I think that's good, and I'm careful, I try to be very careful. Yeah, I've made mistakes and I showed it to the people there and in the second edition I corrected some of the mistakes. But I also know just from some study of, frankly, French post-structuralist, postmodernist linguistics and those great philosophers that gave us that work in the 60s and 70s that even English to English is just rife with misunderstandings and rife with many possibilities. That's one of the powers and delights of language so that when you cross the boundary of translation, that there's many possibilities that are being created and many possibilities that are being missed. That that's one of the richnesses is of human communication.

CLARA: One of the things I wonder about, in particular, based on... I have a fairly limited knowledge of Japanese but I do have a degree in linguistics, and one of the things I know about Japanese is that even more so than English and more so than a lot of languages, there are different registers that men and women typically speak in. My impression is that many of the women in this book do not fit into my conception of a typical woman here much less in Japan. I wondered if that's reflected in the way they speak in Japanese. Are they manipulating register?

ANDY: That's a great question. Yeah, I chose who was going to be in the book and I am, particularly, think it's great not to say anybody's personality is better than any other person's personality, but very forthright people. People who are ready to challenge me, the demureness, especially, when I feel imagine perhaps an oppression in it. I was less dynamized personally by that. I think that they were also modulating their Japanese as I do when I'm speaking to second language. People in English as a writing teacher and as an ESL teacher. I think the woman in chapter seven, Wakako Oe, has probably the most, I don't know, "feminine," way of talking. I tried as much as possible to render that whereas the woman in chapter five is real tough.

CLARA: She's very direct.

ANDY: She's very direct, "your questions are stupid" kind of whereas so-

CLARA: You got me 60% right.

ANDY: Yes, you got me 60% right. That wasn't really what I was focusing on so much in terms of how to write the book or really making this a study of gender fluidity or distance, although, that's something I'm quite interested in. The book has plenty in it without me going too deeply into that. Again, yeah, it's really about that.

CLARA: One of the things I'm struck by is the way that the people you speak to sometimes correct your impressions of them. We were just talking about Asha Amemiya, she says you get her 60% or 70% right and she also says in her update that she tells you to remove everything where you say she's living a spiritual life. Then there are a few people, we talked about this a little bit earlier, who you initially characterize as returning to traditional methods and they say, "Oh, it's not a return or it's not traditional in the way that you're thinking of." What do you make of these kinds of corrections and what do you think the people who you're talking to are trying to convey?

ANDY: Well, I certainly I'm encouraging them to correct me as I'm going along. I think in many ways, well, I will say, I won't even hedge it, I'm an anarchist and I really dislike hierarchies of all kinds. As a writing teacher people are like, "Oh, how should I fix this?" I'm like, "I can help you try to figure that out for yourself. I can certainly give you my opinion but I really want to, in any way, deflect the authority of the author, the authoritarianism of the author." I think every time I was corrected and I encouraged it, I wanted to not just erase that and then put it in the right thing. I wanted to implicate myself and it is also a Buddhist teaching to not make yourself grandiose. I'm saying I do make mistakes, especially, because even in Japan, and maybe even especially in Japan, people who live out in the country are growing their own food, living with old tools, not a lot of technology. It's pretty unusual.

ANDY: They occasionally get media people coming in and saying, "Oh, so why are you a weirdo? Or why are you doing this traditional thing?" If they live in a traditional, in a house that was built a long time ago and they use wood to heat their house or cook their food, someone might come in and say, "Oh, you're living a traditional life." It's like, "Well, actually, the stove I'm using is a Nepali design and my father's traditional life was incredibly hierarchical and he was forced to be a doctor and he was the first son," and we don't do any of that stuff. It's just wrong, and I chose people who were ready to correct misconceptions and that's probably part of them not just going along with the herd in the first place. I just didn't want to hide that.

CLARA: You said that they are used to people coming in and with these patent narratives they're trying to impose. Do you think it's just a rejection of that and just a response to that, or is there something else they're trying to tell you?

ANDY: I don't know. Do you have an idea of what they might be trying to tell me?

CLARA: I don't know. I think about it a lot because I thought it was so interesting, and to me, I was talking to Linear about this yesterday... And Linear is my husband, for the radio people. I was talking to Linear about this yesterday, and it's one of the things that made me more interested in the book because I think I, going into this, wondered if it was going to be another Western person going into Japan and having these conversations. The inclusion of all of those corrections really made me think about it differently. But I don't know that I know what they were trying to tell you. I think some of it just is what you said that many of them seem to be very direct people and they want to tell you when you're wrong. Some of them I think also are probably a little contrarian.

ANDY: Yeah.

CLARA: I'm thinking, especially, of the man in chapter one who's--

ANDY: Oizumi-san, San Oizumi, yeah.

CLARA: Right, Oizumi-san, he definitely strikes me as someone who's pretty contrarian-

ANDY: Absolutely.

CLARA: ... and he corrects almost everything you say. You just can't get a sentence out without some correction. Some of it, I think, is probably just personality that, yeah--

ANDY: Well, I mean, okay, so I can't quite say I'm bicultural but I did live there for a long time, I just came back last month, I go to there every two or three years now and I feel very at ease and uncomfortable there. I'll make a generalization that as all cultural generalizations are lies in some sense. But have hopefully some congruency with the actual, that accuracy is highly valued even in mainstream culture. Now it's actually, as an English teacher there, it's one of the things that makes it difficult for Japanese people to learn English is just getting it exactly right, getting it perfect. It makes a Sony product work really well, or a train to run on time or Toyota be a car that runs for 30 years.

CLARA: It makes it hard to have a conversation.

ANDY: Yeah, but I mean, if you do get things inaccurate, especially, they know I'm going to be representing them and I think people want to be represented accurately. I think the more that people who are being interviewed, in any case, in any situation, Western or Tanzanian or in the Seychelles or wherever, understand that there's a relationship when someone comes in there wanting information out of them. That there's a sense of let me get something from you, and so I want to be as mutual as I possibly can and then navigating more of a gift economy than a rapacious mining economy. To the extent that people are like, "I know you're trying to find out this thing but at least get me right."

CLARA: We'll move to something a little different now.

ANDY: Yeah.

CLARA: There's a tension in the way that you present many of these stories between, I think, individual choices, a lot of these people describe their choice to live this way in very individual terms and not as something that they would impose on anyone else. Sometimes something that would be bad if everyone else took it up in some extremes. Attention between that on the one hand and the communal or social responsibility. A lot of them live far from their neighbors, definitely, far from the city like they are out of the country. They've made choices that really separate them from modern Japanese society. There's one guy who doesn't ever read the newspaper because he just doesn't like to or he finds it engages him in a way that makes him unhappy. And, still, a lot of these people participate in larger movements for social good, right, the antinuclear movements, other environmentalist movements. How do they reconcile those opposing impulses? How does the guy who doesn't ever read the newspapers stay engaged with the broader needs of the world that he's part of? And how do you having chosen a similar way of life for yourself?

ANDY: Let's start with that there's 10 people in the book, so there's a lot of books on like simplicity, on the Japanese minimalism, which are like one size fits all and mono cropping. Really like this is the way you do it and so there are people who don't have a telephone or a car and there's one person who uses email all the time.

CLARA: Right, for activism.

ANDY: For activism. The man in chapter 10 lives an incredibly simple life and grows all of his own food with his partner, Makako, and yet he was the person who brought the first Whole Earth Catalog to Japan. He was the person who translated all of or a lot of Ramana Maharshi and Milarepa, and all of these Indian sages as well as bringing awareness to the Native American struggles in the southwest. Politically, bringing international progressive leftist issues to the world, and so he's very politically and socially engaged. I think one distinction is it's not between individualism and social responsibility. Again, just this is my opinion.

CLARA: Yeah, absolutely.

ANDY: It's not me speaking as a mouthpiece for them, that there's an individual responsibility, and not in the right wing sense of individual responsibility but just, like, "How am I impacting people around me? How can I minimize the negative impact?" One person, I don't think he thinks about it this way, that he's doing an environment life, he just wants to live with very little money. So he tries to not use it, and he's tried to figure out a life so he is not engaged in having to go work for a living. Now, what's the result of that? I think it's profoundly environmental, but he's not trying to grab the bullhorn and say, "Everybody should live this way." Far from it, he will always say, "I'm never trying to do that, this is just my way of trying to live a rich life." But I see him, and so this is my interpretation, as somebody who has very little consumption and very little production.

ANDY: If I think really hard about our profound environmental crisis right now, I definitely think that's a huge part of it, for all of us, produce less, consume less. If he inspires people which, in fact, he has over 30 years all over the world, not just through my book, but through articles and from television shows and through people moving to his village to actually start doing that less. Is he being a social activist? No, but he's actually having a huge impact on people by inspiring them that they could actually live a much richer life and have a lot better time without burning through tons of plastic and getting on airplanes every week, and basically destroying the entire planet.

CLARA: Do you think that urgency we're seeing in environmental movements in the US and in Europe and probably globally on some level, does that impact someone like... I'm sorry, I can't remember which of the people you profiled that was, what was his name?

ANDY: The one I was just talking about?

CLARA: Yeah.

ANDY: Nakamura-san.

CLARA: Nakamura-san. Do you think that impacts someone like Nakamura-san? Does he feel that urgency or is the-

ANDY: I don't think so, I think I would be pretty correct. I want to answer your question about the guy who doesn't read the newspaper. I just put it in there directly because he's like, "I'm just not a political kind of person." I know that when he's in his village he is helping all of the elder villages around, villagers around, he is highly engaged in his community. But it's interesting with the newspaper, I've been a bit revolutionized, not by the people in this book on this. I met a woman at a poetry reading here in Santa Cruz and she was Scottish and Brexit had just happened and I said, "Oh, what's your opinion because you are very leftist woman, I can tell from listening to your poem on Brexit."

ANDY: She's like, "Pay no attention to that, there is enough problems right here in Santa Cruz to use up an entire lifetime. Why are we thinking that there's so many things that we could address right now. and right here? It doesn't mean that we won't participate in international movements or try to make political change." Also the capacity to make political change in Japan, it's not as bad as China, but it's pretty damn limited.

CLARA: Tell me about that, because I don't know anything about it really.

ANDY: Well, it's not really the focus of the book, but I just think that being with a bunch of leftist activists and see... The Sierra Club or something here in the United States will have a lawsuit or they'll try to shut down on a coal power plant, and sometimes they'll succeed. It's incredibly rare for citizens movements to make any headway. From what I've seen, I'm not a sociologist of Japan, I'm not reading the Japanese politics every day, but from what I saw of social movements, even after Fukushima, one of the worst nuclear disasters in the world. People in Japan loaded in the pro nuclear party again, and a lot of those plants are starting up and there's vigorous movements to keep those plants shut and they get opened up anyway.

ANDY: So you can could say, not that Murata says this, but, "Okay, I could read newspapers until I'm blue in the face and get apoplectic about how incredibly frustrating it is." But how much does that actually change what's going on? As he says, "It's better to get to the rice paddy and grow rice." I think-

CLARA: Focus on what you can control.

ANDY: Yeah, I think that's part of, I think that might be a little bit of a simpler way to say it, than I think you just keep it as a metaphor.

CLARA: Okay.

ANDY: Better to get the rice paddy than to get angry about the Liberal Democratic Party has passed a new resolution to change Article 9 in the Constitution, such that arm sales can be made to more countries or something like that. Which just in many ways they don't have any capacity to change.

CLARA: This seems like a good time to have you do a reading of the book.

ANDY: Okay. It's not always in me, just to give you a little context on it. He is a potter, he is an anarchist, he rides around on a motorbike. He's grew up in a slum, he is incredibly brilliant with his antinuclear strategies and a lot of really interesting activist ideas, only a small percentage of which I put into the book. He invited me to a tea ceremony and I was like, "Oh God, another Japanese tea ceremony." Which I had experienced up until that point is highly formalized and highly uptight and not really meditative in any way. It's just like, "Oh, I'm sitting with my legs in the wrong position or I'm not turning the teacup the right direction and it was totally different than that. He said, before we went in there, that the tea house functions also as a nuclear fallout shelter, which was like what? Indeed, he had dug into the side of the hill with him and his son with shovels and pickaxes, 10 or 15 feet back into the hill and then created this dome shaped underground tea house like under the earth. That's the context.

ANDY: All right, so after we have finished the tea, we lean back against the smooth earthen wall and, in this timeless world, I fall into a true peacefulness. Yet Oizumi's purpose in digging out this fallout shelter by hand is not to encourage any kind of complacency. He reminds me, "As I said before, I don't expect to live a long life. The world is too dangerous." It seems to me an odd statement to make here in this quiet grotto deep in the earth. I ask him what he means, "Well," he asks me half-quizzical, half-testing tone, "Can you tell the pattern in the wood here?" He points to the floorboards and then to the door, raising his eyebrows, tilting his head, "Can you see the connection to Chernobyl?" I admit to him that I can't. "Look at the pegs here," as he points out the wooden nails that he has used to fasten the boards together.

ANDY: I noticed there an irregular but somehow not random groupings, 4-2-6. April 26th was the day of the meltdown of the reactor core. Then he points out the same 4-2-6 theme in the punched holes of the large bell-shaped clay lanterns that illuminate the room. "You see, it seems beautiful," he continues, "but it's also a warning to all of us not to forget, all of this beauty is sitting right on top of a tremendous amount of danger." He looks at me, "At any time, another Chernobyl could happen." He's right, of course, and I, like most people, prefer not to think about it. Oizumi, however, doesn't let this forgetting happen to him. Maybe the tearoom is a way for him to remember, or maybe it is evidence of his refusal to forget. He says, "A national TV network came to my house once to do a segment on this unusual tearoom but," he says with a smile, half cynical, half knowing, "they left out any reference to it being a fallout shelter or of nuclear power."

ANDY: While I suspect I know why the network would have edited that detail out, I can also see how easy it would be for anyone to forget. I too allowed myself to become enraptured with the spirit of the ceremony and the protected feeling in here. "Nuclear Power," Oizumi continues, "is inconsistent with the Way of Tea." He lets the statements sit there for some time until I ask him what he means. "The Way of Tea is one of humility and poetic sentiments, not of grandiosity and gorgeousness. The ideal behind nuclear energy is a limitless amount of free electricity lighting up every part of the planet. Also, the Way of Tea requires that one must never bring weapons into the tearoom, or anything that might be used as a weapon. Not only nuclear fuel, but even nuclear waste, as you know, can be used to make weapons. Although," he says with an absolutely deadpan look on his face, "I've often thought that the cockpit of a tank would probably be just perfect size for a tea ceremony room."

ANDY: "After all, we shouldn't be using them for war. We ought to put these items to good use, and they're even mobile." I laugh out loud. He continues, "Just think of all the money that is spent on the so called Japan Self-Defense Forces. With much a dough, we could build a glass tube all the way across the Pacific Ocean, and then next weekend, you and I, could jump on our motorcycles and ride across to America." I catch the tiniest glint of mischief in his eye before he turns his head away. Oizumi's wife, Yuriko, smiles at his joke and then stands up to take her leave. I thank her stumblingly trying to indicate how different this experience has been from my previous encounters with the tea ceremony. She bows politely to me and leaves us to our discussion. I look back to Oizumi and I remember something I heard him say. "Your friend, Atsuko, told me you're an anarchist." "Yeah, I am," he replies looking at me and tilting his head as if to say, "What of it?"

ANDY: "Well, there are so many definitions of that word, does it mean to be an anarchist in Japan?" "Of course you don't understand Japanese anarchism. That's because each anarchist, not just in Japan, each one anywhere is different." Then he takes the conversation without warning to France. "A few years ago, I was invited to Europe to speak at a rally. I talked about the nuclear issue here in Japan. When I finished, there were 5000 people there, everyone started cheering wildly and making noise. It was disturbing. You have to be careful with that kind of thing. I felt like some kind of demagogue with all those people cheering for me." Like a lot of what Oizumi says, this statement holds the curious power to get one to think about one's own behavior. How would I act in a similar situation? Would I bask in the cheering? Would I feel smug that others thought I was right?

ANDY: He continues, back to Japan, "In this village, during the elections, all kinds of people in the leftist groups came to see me to get my support. There's always discord in those radical groups, people who are in the Marxist party and those who are not. My father was an anarchist too, and during the war, he supported neither side. When the Japanese militarists came to him he said, 'I don't know you.' When the Americans came he said, 'I don't know you.' If the Marxist party people come to talk to me, that's okay, and they have the right to exist, but I cannot support them 100%. Likewise, if the ruling conservative party says something good and I say, 'That's good, isn't it?' Though, of course, most of what they say is bad, and if it is bad I say there's something wrong. But I don't read books about anarchism or any such thing. What I do is was simple, I read and write about the current problem, the nuclear waste dump."

ANDY: For Oizumi, any kind of group has the same problems, any kind of group. "You know, potters often form associations, I don't join those. People in groups get together and do things the same way as everyone else in order to avoid anxiety, even if those things have no meaning at all. For example, wearing your necktie has no meaning. If wearing your necktie would prevent you from getting a cold, I'd wear one. If you join some kind of association, your own true way of thinking gets shackled. You do things just to give yourself that feeling of ease." The word in Japanese that Oizumi uses here, anshin, literally translated means peace-heart an-shin. But is used every day in Japan to mean the absence of worry, of relief from fear. As Oizumi uses the term, however, it's almost as if anshin is a cowardly place people retreat to, and it's definitely something he doesn't want to control his life.

ANDY: He continues, "In a group, just saying hello and greeting people can become unnatural, especially, if someone in the group has some high rank. You start to speak to them in a way that's completely fake. It's not like he's actually that amazing, it's just his position in the company or group. The reason people give high ranking people respect is because they have a problem with their own self-valuation. It's probably why they joined a group in the first place, that and their own pride. They want to look good as a member of an important group, a group with such important members. This pressure is incredibly strong in Japanese society." Listening to him, I think to myself, "That's sure true here in Japan, this group-oriented society." But as if he has read my mind Oizumi says, "If you state it extremely, it's like the way people are about the Japanese Emperor. They think he's a great person. America has the same tendency as well, they don't have an emperor but a lot of people want one."

ANDY: I have to laugh, he continues, "The problems get worse the bigger the group is. In a small group, if some mistake is happening, it's quickly recognized. But if it's a big group, people just say, 'Well, that person is a great person, and he said to do it.' And even if it's a mistake, even if it starts to taste bad, they do." It is characteristic of Oizumi's storytelling that he uses different voices for each of the characters, rendering in hilarious ballooning inflections, "That person is such a great person." Simply by using the tone of his voice he can recreate how certain they are in their error and how they mock those who disagree with them as idiots. "Political parties are like this too, even the left wing parties. That's why I'm an anarchist."

CLARA: So you said earlier that you also see yourself as an anarchist.

ANDY: Yeah, I'm also a Marxist too. Many anarchists and many Marxists say you can't be both, but I think you can.

CLARA: Yeah, I was going to ask you the same question you asked Oizumi-san, what does that mean to you? What does it mean to be an anarchist?

ANDY: Well, let's be like direct. Okay, I'm being interviewed on the radio right now by you, so maybe certain ways of thinking would be like, "Oh, so great to meet you. Great Clara, can you please help me sell my book." If it was Terry Gross, I'd really kiss up to that thing. I don't think that's a natural way for people to be with each other. As I said, in my writing classes, I think this is such a deep, deep thing in writing classes, "Oh, this person's a published writer, or that person's really famous, or this person's the real expert, or I don't write well." All of this hierarchy forces people into real suffering, I think. In the course of writing, in the case of writing class, it tends to make people write poorly because they're twisting themselves over to sound important or you see Joey Cavalieri trying to impress people. I also just think that this whole relationship of the President of the United States of America, Barack Obama.

ANDY: We got snookered by that whole thing that we swelled with pride, and I just think it led to a lot of problems then and now. I think from all these levels in which we take one person and elevate them above others, and whether that's a child being hurt by a parent because a parent just has more power, physical power, economic power. To friends who one person gets famous, and all of a sudden, everyone's either kissing their boots or they're too famous to talk to each other. Just all these distinctions with people. Anarchism is something that's, I think, quite worthy to read about and to think about. That word has been taken over like, "Okay, it's this violent thing where everyone wears black and tears each other down." But almost all the anarchists I know are incredibly playful and community oriented and friendly, they just don't see the need for human beings to arrange themselves in hierarchical ways.

ANDY: Whether it's boot-licking or ass-kissing or whatever, it's just an unnatural way to be. I think it leads to a lot of, a lot of real suffering, where we start to whether it's any of the -isms, homophobia or racism or sexism, it's all about hierarchy. It's just one person being better or worse than the other and I'm totally opposed to it.

CLARA: I liked a word you used earlier, playful because I think that describes Oizumi-san very well is that he comes across in the book. There's this playful challenge, we talked about it earlier, that he's correcting almost every sentence you say. It feels like this play for him. Is that would you say that, that is right? How would you correct me?

ANDY: Nobody is one personality all the time, certainly, not you or me I don't think. Oizumi can be quite serious and quite heavy. This is something that's not in the book and I just heard it, so I'll share it. I was just with him. It's not a playful story at all, he said, "Yeah, Notre Dame Cathedral just burned. When they built that, how many hundreds of years ago was that? 800 years ago," this is -- I'm quoting him, so he's like, "I'm not sure what it is but that was before maybe they even had guns and now we have weapon system where with a touch of a button we could kill two million people. That's the advanced that's happened in weaponry. But they weren't able to put the fire out, even though the river, hundreds of millions of gallons of water, was all around it. That being able to, human beings, being able to put a fire out, that's a very basic thing about protecting ourselves. We weren't able to put a fire out, that's the way our world has become."

ANDY: That's not at all playful, it's a very heavy metaphor but it's the way he can see through things. Which is another big benefit of not being too busy all the time is you can really sit and think about things and not just be flooded with facts, data, ideas, things to do, and tasks. You can really think through things and I think that's a great metaphor. He just repeated it at the end, he's like, "800 years ago, not even guns, now we can kill two million people with a button and we are not able to put out a fire with water all around." That's the kind of, he says, "that's the kind of idiots human beings are." I don't think he meant it in a laughing way. So, yeah, he's got all kinds of sides to him.

CLARA: Going back to the passage and to that room, that tea house that is a fallout shelter, reading about it, reading about the relationship to Chernobyl, maybe in part, because I just watched the HBO miniseries and have been reading Midnight in Chernobyl. About that, I imagine sitting there, had emotional resonance that maybe since it's not the focus of the book as much doesn't come through. Can you tell me a little bit about that emotional experience?

ANDY: Oh, that I had in being in the-

CLARA: Yeah. What does it feel like to sit in that room and learn that it's out?

ANDY: Well, I think the best thing to do is to go to the painting. Each tearoom, traditionally, will have a scroll painting. It might be birds or flowers in a normal tea house. Well, he had a black and white ink painting of a child's face, and the child had a tear coming out of its eyes, very realistic. The thing about the painting is it's part of a conversation, so a tea house is actually a place for framing a conversation or framing a way to discuss things. So that the host who's serving the tea is not just giving you tea, but creating a situation where a good conversation can happen, which is quite valuable. This child, he pointed out, was actually a child from Belarus, who has thyroid cancer. And soon after the painting was made this child died. There's something about sadness, which is silent, there's something where there's nothing to say, you're just sitting there with the grief or with the loss of a loved one.

ANDY: Where both people are in the presence of that death, of the ridiculousness of producing that much electricity. In the case of Japan, for hundreds of thousands of vending machines and they're literally everywhere that use up two nuclear power stations worth of energy, just the vending machines in Japan or the Pachinko parlors or the shopping districts lit up all around the clock, 24 hours a day, and they were willing to risk the life not only of our own generations but generations in the future for that ridiculous thing. To be there and to be in the presence of that and to have the quietness and to not be interrupted by 20 other things, that's going to bring us away from that reality and to truly feel. I think that's part of being fully human is to be in the presence of that grief. That's one of the things that I felt but it is again, at the same time, that contradiction of it like it was an incredibly beautiful cup of tea and was incredibly gorgeous tea cup.

ANDY: And the flower arrangement and the exquisiteness of Yuriko, his wife's presentation of the tea ceremony and the incredible gratitude I had to be able to be with your friend and someone who was so wise and to give me that time. All of those feelings were happening at the same time.

CLARA: What do you want people to take away from this book?

ANDY: Well, there's a lot of ways to live a really good life and you can figure that out yourself. We are in a society of like what's the takeaway? I really just really say get a chance to read the book, The Abundance of Less, it's just spend some time and open up to these people's wisdom, and you can actually create a good life. That's a very first line in the whole book. I think I've always believed it's possible to live a really great life. Of course, society and economics and ecological disaster and war and everything else that's going to push back, but it's a conundrum each of us can work out imperfectly and continually and to stay with it. Don't give up and to keep trying to find your own way, and I think there's a lot of many, many different channels of wisdom that these people brought.

ANDY: That's why I devoted 20 years of my life to writing this book is that I think these are truly valuable lessons. Not by Native American elders, who've maybe never left the reservation or Tibetan Rinpoches who live in seclusion but people are living very much in society and grew up in the suburbs, maybe in a working class district, maybe in a fishing village. But a society not that different than ours, that there really is a lot of different ways to live better. And that when you do that, you're actually bringing a lot of benefit to other people because you have the time for friendships and you have the time for caring for each other. You have time for contemplation, which is I think one of the reasons we should be here, and time to go to a protest against a horrible policy of family separation. If you're too busy, you don't have time for that so make the time.

CLARA: Andy Couturier, thank you so much for joining me today.

ANDY: That's great.

CLARA: You can find Andy's book, Abundance of Less, at your local library or anywhere books are sold. You can learn more about Andy's writing classes at his website, theopening.org Next time, I'll talk to poet and former Santa Cruz resident, Lauren Eggert-Crowe, about her work. The Story Behind the Story is produced for KSQD 90.7 FM by me, Clara Sherley-Appel. Our sound engineer is Lanier Sammons. He also wrote our theme.