It was a bit more complicated than that; I’ve got a place on my dream design course (more on that later), and I needed to resign in order to go back to London to take it up. But things are still a bit up in the air: I may yet not be able to do it, and I had been holding onto my secure, well paid, job as a safety net in case things didn’t work out.

And then it hit me that I didn’t know why.

I don’t need to keep this job, if things don’t work out and I find myself with a year to fill, I can take any old job, save up enough money for a flight to Peru and go learn Spanish for a few months. Sounds fun!

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that the safety net of a good job had been stopping me taking a risk on something I have desperately wanted to do for a very long time. Far from being there to save me if things went wrong, the net had become the very thing stopping me trying. Nets, I realised, are meant for catching things, and not only when we fall.

Is your safety net keeping you in a place you don’t really want to be?

This project from Jihyun Ryou takes a fresh look* at how we store our food. I love the way this set up looks great in your kitchen but also serves a purpose: your food will keep better and you can get by with a smaller fridge.

Sometimes we forget past wisdom or assume that because it’s old it’s somehow worse: it’s great to look back at some of these things and combine them with modern understanding and technology to create new solutions better than both worlds.

If you’re interested in learning more, she has a whole blog dedicated to collecting and sharing such tips.

*Darn, that’s two cliche points on my writer’s licence right there :/

Anyway, there is a story behind my learning to raise my right eyebrow. So, without further ado, I shall progress this plot device to the purpose of this post:

This weekend I disappeared into the rural Japan on Tokyo’s doorstep that is the Boso peninsular, Chiba:

View Bōsō-hantō in a larger map

Over the last few months I have learned that I adore being outside doing hard physical labour (more on that later), so when a friend suggested I join her on an organic farm in Chiba helping to plant rice I jumped at the chance. On a bus I hopped[2], across the aqualine and down to the Southern tip of the Boso peninsular, somewhere in the hills near Tateyama I think.

The farmer met me off the bus and before I knew it, planting rice I was. The weather was glorious, the surroundings stunning and the atmosphere both calming and healing:

Planting rice is pretty simple. You start by walking backwards across the field rolling a metal cylinder behind you. The cylinder marks the surface of the mud with a grid and small bundles of three of four shoots get planted at each intersection. This being organic rice, the farmer needs more space between the rows than usual for weed control so we only planted every other row.

At the end you get to look back at your work and appreciate the lovely clean lines of rice you have planted:

And your far from clean feet (the mud is quite deep):

The cool mud feels delicious between your toes and every time you take a step the warm water flows around your feet. This being an organic farm, there is also an abundance of wildlife and, as I planted, tadpoles skipped across the mud and water boatmen skittered over the water in front of me. The frogs serenaded us in a chorus that rose and fell and then sometimes climbed to an almost deafening crescendo before dying away almost to nothing[3]:

As we finished up, the moon rose over the field and the sun went down and we sat and drank in the atomosphere while we waiting for the farmer to collect us:

We went back to the house where we were staying, sat round the irori and talked and cooked and drank[4] into the evening. Finally I crashed into bed for what may be the best night’s sleep of my life.

In the morning, communal breakfast, more planting, lunch and then back on the bus for the trip home.

Which leaves us with one important question: where in all this does my right eyebrow fit in? Well, it seems I’m not the only person who thinks that the Boso peninsular is a good place to get away to for Golden Week and it seems a large part of Tokyo’s 9 million population picked 3.30 pm on Saturday to try and get back home across the aqualine. The result? 6 hours on a bus staring at my own reflection in the widow as I neglected to pack anything to do for what was supposed to be a 70min bus journey. What else is a girl to do under such circumstances?

1. I said “try”: I don’t necessarily succeed.
2. Amazing how I will cheerfully get up at 6am to travel 2 hours to a field to plant rice, but find it almost impossible to get up before 10am on a work day… a clue, perhaps? More on that later.
3. Which is what this video shows because, of course, expecting them to crescendo on cue is too much to ask.
4. Gonin Musume (“Five Daughters”) organic sake from the local brewery, Terada Honke. If I never drink another sake I will die happy. That stuff was GOOD.

1. Mind numbing dread and emptiness because I have no inspiration. None. None at all.

2. Excitement and glee as the germ of an idea appears and then sprouts.

3. Crushing dispair as I realise the idea I have invested so much time and energy in is actually impossible.

and 4. An ecstasy of relief when I realise I’m going to make it after all.

The most important step is from 2 to 3, because at 3 it always seems so easy to give up. The reason I very rarely do is because I have usually committed in some way that means I can’t. Most often, it’s that I have told people I will deliver an item on a certain date such that not giving it to them is unthinkable. So I power through the anguish in order to give them something, anything, even if it’s rubbish – which it occasionally is – but usually what happens is that I turn some crucial corner and realise it’s all going to be ok and all I have to do is keep going. And then it’s easy, the stress evaporates, the world around me recedes and I’m lost to the task until I can stand up, stiff-backed and desperate for a cuppa and a pee* and say “Yes. That’s it. It is done.”

So commit early, because if you don’t it’s too easy to give up when the going gets tough, and then you never make it to 4, and 4 is where the reward is.

*not in that order

Also, I have an end date for my time in Japan. For better or for worse, in 5 months time I will be back in Britain, if not for good, then certainly for the foreseeable future. It seems I’m about to close the door on one big adventure and open the door on another.

So watch this space: Bearhunt is back baby! Yeah!

Look! A new blog post! Crickey, that’s been a while then…

The last 9 months has been a real whirlwind roller-coaster (is that possible?). It contained some of the lowest lows of my life so far (seeing the destruction left by the tsunami of 11/03/11) and some of the highest highs (meeting so many wonderful people as a direct result of my volunteering there). It also marked a significant shift towards a much happier and healthier self, which I won’t bore you with here, but suffice to say the Nell of Jan 2012 is much more satisfied with her self and with her life than the Nell of Jan 2011. I feel… whole

Anyhow, you aren’t interested in that! You want to know about arseholes!

I have long been a proponent of Bob Sutton’s no asshole rule, which says (and I’m putting my own spin on it here) that arseholes do huge damage to teams and business, and even talented arseholes do more damage than good on aggregate and are best avoided. However, this post on Bob’s blog has me reevaluating that position somewhat. Only a little bit though.

It seems that Steve Jobs was an arsehole of such supreme talent that it really did counteract the loss in productivity brought about by an unpleasant working environment and resulted in, not only a very successful company, but one of the most successful of all time.  But (and such a large arsehole come with a very big “but” indeed), was there anything in his methods that the rest of us could benefit from?

To define a successful business, you must first define “success”. That may seem easy, surely a successful business is a profitable one and the most successful is the most profitable? Perhaps; if money is the most important thing to you. But I’d wager that it isn’t true for most. For almost everyone in the world being happy is far more important than cold hard cash. Not that I’d be naive enough to suggest that financial security doesn’t help with happiness, but even the most acquisitive creature only collects possessions because doing so makes them feel better.

I define “success” slightly differently. To me, when measuring the success of a company, we should take into account all of its impact across every aspect of its functioning. You can restrict that view to just the economic (whether it respects its environment and provides its staff with a decent pension or than expects the public purse to pick up the tab for care and cleanup) or include the wider social impact (whether they add value to the community and its wellbeing), but you must take into account the cost/benefit to society as well as to the company itself if you want to judge absolute value.

I don’t think Steve Jobs evaluated success in terms of cold hard cash, but I don’t think he worried about the wider social impact of his company overly either (although Apple’s green credentials are comparatively ok, the company’s bullish attitude to IP litigation is well known, amongst many other examples of a less than caring attitude). Rather, I suspect Steve Jobs cared about making the best product possible and he cared very little whether others agreed with him, as long as he was happy with what they made. It so happens that most of the time enough people agreed enough to pay Apple’s prices and so the company was successful by the more standard metric of profitability also.

So. Steve Jobs was successful by the standard metric and by his own, but not necessarily by mine. What can we learn from this? I think an all round happier society is better served by the John Lewis model of shared ownership and non-arseholery. It may not be as big or as profitable as Tesco, but it gives much more to the communities in which it resides and is more stable in times of financial hardship – it is a safer place to be employed.

But what if you don’t care about the wider community? First, I’d say that means you are well on your way to being a sizeable arsehole, but I’d also suggest that if you’re going to be an arsehole in control of a company, then you’d better be a supremely talented one. Because if not, you are more likely to fail in your endeavours in the long run than your more kindly neighbours. Steve Jobs was successful because he wasn’t just an arsehole, he was a one in 8 billion arsehole. If you want to emulate his methods, you’d better be certain you are too!

American banks invented really dodgy credit products, which they sold to people they knew couldn’t afford to pay them back, and then sold the liability on to other banks, many of which were in other countries. When we discovered just how dodgy the products were a large part of the house of cards came tumbling down and, because so much of the debt was held overseas, the US problem spread globally.

But initially, they had thought this was a really good idea, so a deade ago they (Goldman Sachs) taught the trick to the Greek Government, who’d asked for financial advice. The Greek government parcelled up all their toxic debt and sold it on to the rest of Europe (and used the profit to fund massive public spending, which is why Greeks are happier than Americans, or were, until the Government tried to take it all away).

The rest of Europe was apparently savy enough to sell the debt on again, just in case, and, because it’s entirely unregulated, no one knows who it is who’s watching the Greeks riot with their fist in their mouth, their blanky on their knee and their therapist on speed dial while the country circles the default drain.

Round and round and round it goes, where will it end? Nobody knows!

The smart money, however, is on those same American banks who created the whole mess in the first place… which would be some sort of poetic justice if it wasn’t for the fact that they will hurt a lot of innocent people if (when?) they fall.

On the other hand, it was the so called “smart money” that created the problem in the first place, so perhaps we should just wait and see.

Sorry the moblogging stopped abruptly after 3 days, it turned out my pathetic little solar charger was NOT man enough for the job of charging my phone and so after 3 days, that was that.

Reading back what I wrote at the time; it’s not very positive sounding. I strongly suspect that has far more to do with the time of day I was writing (before 6am, bleh) than any actual unhappiness because, looking back on it, the week I spent in Tohoku was, quite simply, the best week of my life so far. It’s too hot for me up there now so I won’t be going back for a couple of months, but come October and you just try and keep me away.

Here’s the story:

We boarded the night bus at 9.30 pm for the journey to Ishinomaki in Tohoku. I was expecting a miserable time as I don’t generally sleep well on buses, but as the bus was less than half full and we each had two seats I actually managed to pass most of the journey asleep. We stopped at a services about 45 mins from the disaster zone at 5am and, as we weren’t due in Ishinomaki until 7.30, we stopped there for a couple of hours. It is the unexpected moments of closeness that cement friendships and, as I sat in a park in the early morning light with my friend Erica just chatting and whiling away the hour until the bus would be leaving again, I suspected this week was probably going to forge ours into something a bit stronger that the usual ‘ladies that lunch’.

We arrived, had a quick orientation meeting and transfered to our final destination. We were staying in a clothing factory that had been cleared by previous groups of volunteers in the middle of a badly damaged residential area. The factory was just one huge room with a tarpaulin to give the girls a bit of privacy. No such luck for the boys, and some of them seemed to relish the fact. Certainly I caught myself more than once staring vacantly into the distance, only to realise I was staring fully at some guy getting changed. Still, they had a changing room and they chose not to use it, so I shan’t feel too guilty if I occasionally elected not to look immediately away from some of the adonis-esque abs I found myself accidentally gazing at.

We had time to unroll our bedding, change into our work gear and then we were straight into it. On the first day all the new arrivals were together clearing a plot of land for a family. Our team of 7 had a garage to clear:

Before:

During:

Team 10 and friends taking a break:

Nearly finished:

That’s a lot of hedoro (sludge):

A job well done:

By everybody (4 teams and the family):

We finished fairly early as it was our first day and we hadn’t had a full night’s sleep the night before and headed back to the factory. I don’t remember much about that first evening. Food was eaten and there was probably some chatting.

It’s strange looking back at those photos to think that, at that point, I’d barely spoken to the people in them. The work had been carried out with spirit and speed and pretty much all of our conversation on that day was dedicated to figuring out how to work together. I doubt we talked much that first night: we didn’t know each other yet. At some point I must have fallen, exhausted, into bed. The bed, however, was a yoga mat on the floor, so the quality of the sleep, even as exhausted as we were, shouldn’t be overestimated.

The next morning, we were up again by 6am. Coffee and porridge with almonds and cranberries set me up well for the day and Erica supplied both. I think I may have fallen a little bit in love with her at that point.

We geared up and presented ourselves for the daily morning meeting and rajio taiso session (radio exercise):

Equipment was loaded into wheelbarrows and we were off for day 2:

As I posted at the time, day 2 was somewhat uninspiring at first, but in the afternoon we were transfered to help with clearing a garden of mud and we felt better at the end of the day than we had at lunch. Still, even as difficult as we found that first lot, we cleared a lot of detritus, and the before and after pictures show that perhaps the day 2 blues were responsible for some, if not all, of our (my) feelings of frustration, because we did good work that morning:

Before:

After:

The concrete pole is a telegraph pole that had been ripped up by it’s base. The piece lying at an angle in the first picture is the base, you can just see it lying on the rest of the pole on the left hand side of the second picture as well. The pole is nearly 2 feet thick reinforced concrete and it has been snapped like a twig. You can’t get the magnitude of the destruction from the TV, and even on the ground it is too great to be comprehensible, but perhaps this, more than a km from the shore and quite far from the worst of the destruction, can give you the smallest sense of the power involved.

The area had suffered:

After day 2 we settled into a routine. We would get up very early, usually around 5.30, have a leisurely breakfast lasting an hour or more (these became the most important part of the day for me; I really treasured the peace and the conversation), gear up, do our rajio taiso, get our jobs for the day and get stuck in. Breaks were approximately every hour and lunch was 12.30 – 13.30. We carried debris and piled it for collection and we shovelled mud and sludge into bags and piled those up by the road too. In the evenings we would perhaps visit the one open convenience store, sit around chatting over dinner, read a book or play cards. We worked hard and in the evening we enjoyed each other’s company. We weren’t without the occasional point of friction, and I think everyone snapped at someone else at some point during the week, but on the whole, we got on with getting on and we made friends.

At some point, dressed in full PPE for shovelling toxic sludge, we ended up hauling debris in the full sun outside instead. Taped into our boots, the only solution for cooling down was… well… At this point we ceased to be Team 10 and became Team Pants Off! instead. Or Team Trousers Down! in British

Towards the end, I started to feel sad that it was coming to and end. I was dying for a shower and a night in a proper bed, but I had expected the week to be one of the hardest things I had ever done, physically and mentally, and, while there were definitely moments of sadness and fear, it was far from hard and it was also fantastically good fun.

I am so very grateful to the people I met and the friends I made and especially to Erica for her fantastic company and to Aki for leading our team so well, for putting up with us and for taking and sharing these photos. I hope to keep in touch with everyone and I will definitely be doing this again.

Gambappe Tohoku!