This article was published on Financial Times Chinese website
Getting on the Shinkansen and heading out of Tokyo, the view immediately opens up. The mountains are far away and the plains are near. As winter is still young, most of the vegetation in the plains is green, and the mountains are changing from yellow to red, as if they were on fire. Our destination was Nasu-Shiohara City in Tochigi Prefecture. Our friend V, a veteran education specialist who had spent half her life working in East Asia and North America, had chosen to make her home in Nasu, having settled in Songzhuang as a neighbor until changes in the education industry and the epidemic in China changed her plans. We didn’t expect to meet again in another country after less than a year of separation, so it was fate. Of course, we also wondered how she chose Nasu.
It seems that there are two types of settlements in Japan, either on the coast, where there are plains impacted by large rivers, or in the flat valleys of the mountains. Nasu Salt Plain belongs to the latter category. Its location reminds me of the small towns in the mountains around the east and west of the Jingwei Plain, which guarded the way to Chang’an, easily defensible, and defended the capital.
The Tokyo area is very efficient in terms of space utilization and high population density. But Nasu is the opposite of Tokyo. Outside the train station, houses are sparse, and buildings with more than three floors are rare. There are no eye-catching signs or neon signs on the streets, except for some warning and promotional flags. When I passed by a convenience store and a gas station, I noticed that the “7-11” sign had been changed to a darker brown color, as if it was too conspicuous to disturb the pedestrians passing by.
Our first stop was a farmers’ market specializing in local specialties. Next to the market was the villa of Japanese Foreign Minister Chozo Aoki over 100 years ago, with a large European-style lawn and flowers in front. Aoki was the ambassador to Germany and the United States, and was said to be the German ambassador in Japan at the time, so it’s not surprising that his villa and garden were full of German flavor. I wondered why he chose to build his home here, and also wondered if there were any similar sites left behind by Chinese foreign ministers in the late Qing Dynasty.
The market is small in size, the bulk of two or three private houses, about the size of a vegetable market in our village of Songzhuang. Tochigi Prefecture is famous for its agriculture, and the local vegetables are fresh and high-quality, and crucially, cheap. My wife picked up a cabbage and didn’t seem to be worried at all about how she would get it back to Tokyo. I was wandering around the market when I came across a sign on an eggplant stand. On the sign were the words “Producer Direct Delivery” and the head of a producer on the side. It appeared to be a young man, dressed in an eggplant-colored Mizuno sweatshirt and baseball cap of the same style, with long narrow glasses, and a face similar to that of the main character in the Hong Kong drama “I Have a Date with a Zombie” back in the day. The sign also has an eggplant instruction manual, which can be recognized roughly with Google Translate. It means that these eggplants produced by Mr. Ko Yohei are representative of Nasu’s agricultural products and are sold all over Japan. The quality of these eggplants is excellent, they are firm, they don’t go bad when stored for a long time, and they are even a little harder to cook than ordinary eggplants.
In most parts of the planet, through the ages, agriculturalists have not had a high status. Productivity was limited, and they were far from the complexities of urban civilization. In terms of modernization, agriculture was modernized, first and foremost, by the leap in yields achieved through technologies such as fertilizers and breeding, so that most people could begin to have enough to eat. Perhaps because of this, in the evaluation systems we know, the criterion for assessment regarding agriculture is first and foremost quantity. Peasants were ranked from poor to rich peasants and then upgraded to landowners. It’s a change of ownership, and in the end it’s a measure of capacity to produce. How much capacity do you own to produce a small amount. Back in the day, when there was bragging rights all over the world, the KPI for the assessment of farmers was also quantity, how many pounds per mu. But I didn’t hear about a quality assessment. No one treats farmers as specialized skills, setting the rating standard from beginner to advanced, from P1 to P10. The top of the list of domestic agricultural experts is, of course, Yuan Longping. The problem he solved is still the yield problem.
“Xiao Yangping” is different from Yuan Longping. The instructions talk about the characteristics and qualities of the eggplant. I don’t know if this is a modernization or a revival of some tradition. Because in traditional societies, we would say, what is the specialty of this place, what is the flavor, without talking about its quantity.
After purchasing from the grocery store, V took us to dinner. Halfway there we passed two dairy farms, countless meadows, farmland and sparse houses, just no town in sight. Somehow we turned off the tarmac onto a gravel road through the woods. The road was so narrow that only one car could pass. On both sides were woods and meadows, hundreds of meters deep. As the car entered the woods, we came across an old black wooden house next to a small stream with a roaring sound of water.
The view was certainly nice, but not so nice that it became a must-visit landscape. So my first thought at the time was, won’t I lose my ass if I open a restaurant here? When I walked into the restaurant, it suddenly looked familiar. Full of natural materials, placed in large and small porcelain and pottery, handicrafts, the menu says to provide Indian tea, foreign style arts and culture, the key there is a cat, like Songzhuang Xiaobao village store.
This old wooden house is 150 years old. A family picked it up and transformed it into a full-fledged cafe and craft workshop. It was probably a bit of a hodgepodge business, so they came up with a very un-restaurant-like name, Dream House.
After lunch we went to a coffee bean roastery that was 25 years old. The owners are an old couple. The husband worked in Singapore when he was young and can speak a few words of Chinese. The hosts were very polite and invited us to taste a dark roasted bean first, and when they left, they did not forget to remind us of the ratio of water to beans when brewing coffee, and gave us some more.
In the evening, we went to Nasu Country to soak in the hot springs. Very small wooden room hot springs, men and women separated by a partition, each side divided into two indoor and one outdoor hot spring pools, each about the size of a parking space. The hot springs in Nasu-hyango have a strong smell of sulfur, the water is milky white, and is said to be 1,200 years old.
The cake we had in the evening was the private work of a local granny who specializes in cakes. While eating, I asked my daughter which cake was better than Songzhuang Xiama’s. My daughter said if you ask me that, the answer is the same. My daughter said if you ask me that, the answer is the same. My feeling is that the style of the two cakes is different. I was shocked when I said that. I have eaten all kinds of cakes before, but I have never used the word “style” before.
The French restaurant at noon the next day was the same family store. The Western-style wooden house was alone on the side of the road. There was a parking space for bicyclists, and vegetables grew in the backyard. I wondered why it was as full as the stores in Tokyo’s Shinjuku or Kichijoji, with the bathroom dressed up like a show with a wide array of items and no corner empty. There were even advertisements for today’s desserts, and even when you squatted on the toilet, you could still see recruitment notices for restaurant cooking classes.
A few places around and we probably had an answer to V’s choice of place to call home. These places are workshop operations where the owners seek products made to their hearts’ content. When we consume these products, we are actually connecting with the people behind them. This is very Songzhuang.
When V first came to stay in Songzhuang, we also introduced her to the local workshops, coffee beans, desserts, pottery, and so on. Before the epidemic, one of the advertising slogans my friends and I loved to use when bragging about the benefits of Songzhuang was that there were 4 craft breweries in my village.
Whether it’s Songzhuang or Nasu’s workshop, and whether it’s us or V, the understanding of business is actually traditional. We don’t like to talk about volume. Investors like to talk about volume, without volume there will be no scale, low ceiling, low valuation. Shopping malls and the Internet in addition to like to talk about volume, but also like to talk about standardization, the more standardized the more efficient, the more efficient the more cost down. so they like to make the product the more standard the better, the store or business detail page to make the more fancy the more personalized the better. Now even my peers, the media people have to talk about volume. So operation is very important, where there is volume to run to.
I wonder if Tokyo is also the place to talk about volume. Most likely it is, otherwise these workshops wouldn’t have to come to Nasu. For us “SongZhuang/Nasu” people, the criteria for success in the workshop business is whether or not something can be done the way we want it to be done, whether or not we accept that it is the right thing to do, and then whether or not we can do it right.
Choose quantity can live first, but the more you do it the more you live like a tool. Choosing quality may not survive or make a fortune. But every business is an effort to realize the connection between oneself and the other on a spiritual level. Yes, in the end, it is this deep connection that counts, the connection that capital and abstract modern mechanisms cannot provide.
Human Connection.
Why would Nasu take on these workshops. In fact, the vegetable market has already given part of the answer. At the entrance of the market, there are photos on the wall of the last emperor’s visit, and V told us that the emperor had his royal residence here, which was built almost 100 years ago. Nasu has hot springs and ski resorts and is more than 100 kilometers from Tokyo. You can enjoy the summer heat, fall foliage, skiing in winter, and hot springs all year round. This is clearly a hot river for Beijingers, a summer resort.
Nasu is Tokyo’s daily relaxation valve. Nasu is a place where people can take off their suits and shoes, soak in the hot springs, and have a spiritual massage. In this sense, Nasu is a sort of companion to Tokyo. It provides a dream house for those who cannot adapt to the busy city.
In retrospect, Songzhuang is no different. Only what will be the future of Songzhuang? We don’t know yet. For a moment, I even thought about whether or not I should direct part of Songzhuang to Nasu and open a branch.
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