Janet Dwyer is currently in Japan as she is setting up the resources and planning for her new four-year project SATOCONN. The project, which will start in 2025 and is funded by the Research Institute for Humanities and Nature in Kyoto, will build a team of researchers in Europe and Japan working together on Satoyama and high-nature-value cultural landscapes. It will establish six living labs that aim to demonstrate ways to achieve more nature-positive and climate-resilient futures, based on respect for longstanding land management knowledge and culture, and participatory, action-oriented research and development.
Janet has been in Kyoto for a few weeks now and reflects on her time there in this blog.
For more information about RIHN and details about Janet’s project, please visit: https://www.chikyu.ac.jp/rihn_e/activities/project/detail/24/
My first challenge, having settled into my flat near the imperial palace, was to muster the courage to commit to cycling to and from the office every day. It’s a beautiful 6.5 km ride, much of it along the banks of the wide Kamogawa (apparently that translates as ‘duck river’, but it also has herons and egrets and cormorants and hawks), and part of it also along the edge of Kyoto Botanical gardens, and then I turn north, come to the edge of the city map and the road becomes winding, passing a large ‘pond’ with a lot of water plants growing across it and then finally turning steeply uphill for about ¼ mile, which is a bit of a killer, especially when it’s warm. There is an electronic temperature signal-post by the road just before the climb, and it has varied from 27 degrees on the hottest day to 10 degrees on the coldest morning, so I know what I’m letting myself in for, each time I start the climb! Once you reach the top, it’s an easy loop road around to RIHN, which has a large and striking building set into the very edge of the bowl of hills in which Kyoto sits, surrounded by woodland and very peaceful. Altogether it takes about 35 or 40 minutes, which is about the same time it would take me to do the journey on the subway and then the bus – and of course it’s a lot cheaper, and better for me 😊 I hired my trusty 3-gear sit-up and beg bike from a very nice man who runs a tiny shack of a shop called ‘bike labo’, which I found online, a couple of subway stops north of here, and it’s costing me just 5,000 Yen – about £25 – for the full month’s rental. Freedom! You can cycle anywhere in Kyoto, on pavements, the wrong way up one-way streets, and no-one complains, and everyone does it, so it’s much the best option – a kind of gentle chaos prevails.
Next challenge was finding good food to buy; for which a lot of exploring was needed. I’ve now located a small organic supermarket near the bus station at Kitaoji, which is about 10 minutes due north of my flat, so I can get decent dairy products and other stuff there on my way home from work. The flat has an induction double hob and a rice cooker and microwave, so the only challenge is toast: dry frying works best, I have discovered, so long as I don’t set off the smoke alarms…. There’s a good French-style bakery on my route to and from work, as well, so sourdough pain de campagne and speciality loaves are always on hand.
In my first week at work, I rattled around in my huge empty project space at RIHN – I have about six desks, a meeting table, a sofa and armchairs, a printer and loads of empty shelving in my area, and I was all alone, which felt weird. Then after my family holiday, Risa started working with me – she’s my research associate who is leading on all our comms materials for the Satoconn project, so although she’s only part-time, I do have someone else to share the space and the lunch break and an occasional cup of tea with. RIHN may be a spacious and beautiful building but it lacks any cafeteria or even vending machines, so there’s no central meeting place for break-times and each project team seems to keep rather to themselves, eating their packed lunches in their own territory, and it’s generally very quiet and library-like, most of the day.
My other main helper has been Maki-san, who is the PA to my program leader Mikitaro. She’s very kind and speaks good English as her husband is Egyptian so she lived in Egypt for a few years when her children were small. She’s helped me to get my residency registered with the Kyoto city ward office for the area where my flat is, and she came with me to open my bank account with the post office near RIHN, both of which would have been impossible without having a Japanese speaker with me. Nevertheless, I managed to survive my compulsory RIHN health check – at a special clinic in Kyoto – without anyone in attendance, which was quite a relief. It was pretty thorough but the staff were so respectful, calm and gentle that even giving three different blood samples felt perfectly comfortable: if only one could say the same for the general healthcare experience in England!
Mikitaro has been at RIHN for only three days since I started, as he’s had a lot of meetings, in Paris at the OECD and in Tokyo with various policy people. Still, we’ve had a good few discussions about our aspirations for the program and what we want to achieve, with it, which have been very positive. I imagine I will see him more next week as we have Faculty meetings and seminars to attend together. Like me, he finds some aspects of the Kyoto bureaucracy a bit challenging, but so far we are coping with it and trying to help each other out, wherever possible.
Lois Mansfield, my trusty second-in-command on Satoconn, arrived in Kyoto on recently and is staying for the week to enable us both to travel to Sado island and see the Satoconn case study area there, in which a living lab will be established as one of our six for the project. Jas Black (formerly of CCRI) and her boss Professor Mitsuyo Toyoda will be hosting us in Sado: should be exciting!! I will write about that for my next blog.
