While I was away the Hancho-san, the head of the neighborhood association, and our immediate neighbor, Maeda-san, appeared and introduced themselves. Iain with his wife and a view of their countryside idyll.Īs I drove back and forth from our old apartment with boxes, bikes and bedding, my wife and her parents cleaned the new house, hung curtains, and unpacked. It wasn’t as rural as we first imagined – we have neighbors, and it’s only a 20 minute drive to the nearest supermarket – but it’s a small community and we’re on the edge of it, surrounded by trees, seemingly cut off. Three years later, in May 2016, we got the keys to a house in Gifu Prefecture. “You know what? My job’s getting pretty boring. He threw his pen down in defeat, clearly a man who had never seen The Good Life. “You want to be farmers? Oh, in that case -” He put down his pen and looked at us, baffled by this un-Japanese concept. We contacted a fudo-san (an estate agent/realtor) and explained our plan. We both grew up in the countryside and the idea of space, of green-ness, of silence and solitude resonated like a temple bell. Sometime in 2013 my Japanese wife and I decided to decamp from our Aichi commuter town.
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