Next days is yet another discovery for us, as Akiko and her friend – Sakiko – bring us to a remote “village” in the mountains – Maki. It is more like a huge farm with many dependancies and not much of a village anymore… A community / association is keeping the place “alive” all year round. There are just a few permanents, but many volunteers passing by all the time.
Traditional houses with hatch roofs, all repairs and maintenance is made by volunteers (although usually professionals at the same time!). The community has several rice fields, vegetable garden (many pees) and a goat couple.
They are working on a sawmill powered by water, it would be based on a Norwegian model…
An active farm, with constraint to be as autonomous as possible (no access by road!)… always “en chantier!“
Time to go back to work and for us to give a hand…
Tea break …
They have a goat and a billy goat…
For the dry toilets they made an attempt to innovate …
pretty nice and clever when it works… but apparently a nightmare when it gets clogged!
We then went for an evening walk on our own…
Back to the farm a carpenter is preparing some wood slates for a roof… You need to be good at it and fast as just for the dry toilets he had to make over 13000 of them !
It was then time to go and leave the mountain village and join back Hikari. It was a very short visit, we don’t feel we have helped a lot and did not have time to real ask a lot about the activities and way of functioning in such close community.
