I was brought up in the UK and have been a vegetarian for about half my life. I'm a qualified mechanical engineer and moved to Japan in 1998 to start a business which still continues today.

My Japanese wife, daughter & I are interested in healthy living and nature & have become concerned about the amount of GMO's, growth hormones, antibiotics, etc. in many commercially supplied foods.

For about 3 years we've been researching buying a home in Japan and have recently bought a traditional Japanese farmhouse with plentiful flat land & forest. Our blog is here: www.eco-kominka.blogspot.com

In the last year prior to buying this home we have been learning about permaculture and realised it must be a part of our future if we are to remain healthy. We are now actively making efforts to meet people with experience & enthusiasm of permaculture in Japan who we can learn more from and continue to study whilst sharing what we can offer from our own learning. Networking is important for these grass roots projects.

We have many interests aside from this project that may also benefit others, even socially. For example we like music, live dancing and culture and our home will be a place where we'll hold special events for guests and the food we'll serve is intended to come from our gardens. This presents another way to introduce & promote permaculture to younger people. To get to the house people will need to walk about 100m from the gate, it's important the garden is presentable and inspiring - so design is an important consideration for this and many other reasons.

For the first year we need to spend time & efforts on the main building and understanding our 3 acres of land, but as soon as we feel we know enough our intention is to create a well developed & designed permaculture project. We will certainly learn from our experiences.
Our hope is to share & inspire others to make similar projects in Japan because not only is nature beautiful, but it's the future we need to embrace for the health and well being of our future generations. We're excited to be a part of this movement.