Q: Now that we've been together to Mishima-machi in Fukushima Prefecture, could you use that place as an example to describe what exactly is entailed in community building?

A: Comprehensive community building is something that arises from within a community. The type of economic relations that we in the community-building movement try to cultivate are not like those connected with regular commercial products. In the latter case, you just decide to make and sell something on the basis of market demand, which is external to the community. The people of Mishima-machi have a loyal customer base, and they only supply their products in limited quantities, because they only want to sell their products to people who truly appreciate Mishima-machi. They know who is buying their products, and they have a personal relationship with their buyers. The producers of Mishima-machi have certain requirements for the things that they make. There is a tremendous joy in completing something and seeing that the buyer truly appreciates what you've sold. This sort of thing is what the people of Mishima-machi strive for in life. Also, making good use of natural resources is another special feature of life in Mishima-machi. This tradition may have gotten started back in the Edo period.

The population of Edo (present-day Tokyo) 300 years ago was 1 million, but it didn't have any waste disposal problem at all. Mishima-machi also generates very little waste. They don't use many plastic products there. They mostly make products from plant fibers, which can be recycled. The term junkangata shakai (zero-waste society) is a big buzzword these days in Japan, and this is the sort of thing it refers to. The original zero-waste society may have been established back in the Edo period.

Q: How well do you think we're doing with community building in Taiwan?

A: The pace of change in Taiwan is very rapid. I remember the first time I went to Puli, local residents told me they had some very beautiful flowers there. I looked around, but I couldn't find them anywhere. Later they took me to a greenhouse where the flowers were grown. The flowers were beautiful, but the greenhouse itself was covered with some sort of black cloth, so I said: "You could make a lot of money by exporting these flowers to Japan, of course, but why aren't you making use of these flowers in your own lives?" The next time I went to Puli, it was too beautiful for words! At the community development center there, the flowers were everywhere! It would probably take a very long time in Japan for us to achieve such a big change.

Q: How would you compare the way community building is pursued in Taiwan and Japan?

A: Both Taiwan and Japan are island countries with a limited amount of land available. As such, communities are basically no different in our two countries. Taiwan's per-capita GNP started rising in the 1990s, and Japan, too, has consistently ranked number one or two in the world during this same period. At the same time, however, against the backdrop of this high GNP, the phenomenon of "impoverished wealth" arose in Tokyo. The term refers to people being materially wealthy but spiritually impoverished. While rural villages suffered depopulation and economic decline, the big cities became overpopulated. Serious traffic jams became a frequent headache. As a result, people in the big cities and the countryside came to have very different value systems.

By 1980 the problem had grown quite pronounced and people promoting comprehensive community building began running into the same basic problems in both Japan and Taiwan, but we may have had slight differences in how we view community building, and in our methodology. Community building in Taiwan is pushed by government agencies, which tell people at the local level what to do. Comprehensive community building in Japan was the same back in the beginning. The government prepared the plans, and then it had people at lower levels carry them out. But while the people at the local level accepted the leading role of national policy, they also studied how community building was carried out overseas, so the outlook and methodology of Japan's community-building movement was created at the local level, not by the central government.

Q: How could Japan's non-governmental sector be so strong, that it would be able independently develop its own outlook and methodology of community building?

A: A big reason for it is that university professors in Japan get involved in actually carrying out and promoting community building. But it's not like every community in Japan is so full of vitality. Only about half of them are capable of taking community building into their own hands, and it's taken them a long time and a lot of trial-and-error effort to develop their own way of doing things. At the outset they would typically ask themselves, for example, how they could make their communities just like Tokyo, or how they could get big corporations to set up local factories. In other cases they were interested in building golf courses. Not everything has turned out well. During the bubble economy, for example, people spent a lot of money trying to attract tourism or investments by foreign companies. This spending spurred a fleeting economic boom, but once the bubble burst, facilities were left standing all over Japan with no tourists to come and use them. Some people really lost their shirts. Back in the 1970s and '80s, the mood of the times called for everything to be "big, fast, and strong." That's why Japan's GNP rose so rapidly.

In the latter half of the 1980s, comprehensive community building in Japan took off in a new direction; communities no longer sought to attract foreign investment, but focused instead on putting local talent and resources to work for the cause of community building. They began to think along the following lines, for example: "Kyoto has a long history and lots of ancient temples, to be sure, but we also have a little temple of our own where people go to pray for a good harvest and the like. It may not be big, but it's ours, and its very much a part of our lives. We should value it." Another example might have to do with the making of ropes. Someone might think: "Ropes made of nylon are strong, to be sure, but with hemp ropes you can make use of natural resources. The hemp ropes may not be as strong as the nylon, but they'll eventually return to the earth without causing any pollution." These are examples of thinking outside the box. When this type of thinking takes root, you don't have to attract foreign investors. You can rely on your own local resources, and your own ability to develop them. That's what we mean when we talk about "spontaneous" community building.

Q: In pursing community building in Japan, do you use any special marketing and distribution techniques?

A: With a lot of community building activities in Japan, the producers themselves deliver the product, driving a truck right to the consumer's home. Sales are done face-to-face. For example, there's a group of 80 farmers in Chiba Prefecture that sells to a co-op. Their 700 co-op members live in Tokyo, Chiba, and Kanagawa prefectures. The people who plant the crops are the same ones who deliver it to the home. Every Thursday they box their products and deliver them to the consumers' homes. This system brings the producers and the consumers together face-to-face once a week. The co-op members and the producers have organized an "agricultural products council" that has adopted a rule strictly forbidding use of chemical fertilizers. The co-op members call this council the "Production Safety and Agricultural Products Council." It's been active for 30 years now. Prices are set in advance by contract between the co-op members and the producers, and they don't change no matter how good or how bad the harvest is. This protects both the consumers and the producers, because the former promise to buy a fixed quantity, and the latter guarantee to sell at a fixed price. This setup is great for the farmers; they really couldn't be more pleased.

Q: What are some of the things you've learned after decades of involvement in the community building movement?

A: I grew up as a city kid. When I first went way out into the little mountain towns to carry out my research project, I was really surprised. I had no idea such lifestyles existed in Japan. After finishing the research project, the places I had been to were always on my mind. I wanted to go back and see how things were going.

The first time I went back to visit, they said: "Oh, you guys are back again. It just so happens we're going to have a town meeting today to talk about how to turn the town into an 'art village.' With so many young people moving away, we ought to be able to have artists move into the empty houses." My reaction was: "Do we really need to have artists move in to accomplish that? The everyday things these farmers make from natural materials are works of art already! Why do we have to search for artists anywhere else?"

So I went around with the town mayor, calling on every single household. It took us a year and a half. At one home we went to, there sitting on the kitchen table were bamboo steamers and baskets that these people had made by hand. I wanted to take a look at them, but our hosts were embarrassed; they served us fruit in a plastic basket, figuring that a fancy plastic basket from Tokyo was more appropriate for a guest from Tokyo. This was supposedly better than the things they had made themselves. That's how people all over Japan thought back then. They were throwing away the things they had made themselves, which they regarded as worthless, and replacing them with newly purchased items.

After a year and a half of this, I told them: "These things you make are fantastic. For outsiders like me, these things are very special. If you don't use the materials you've got here to make stuff like this, the carefully tended mountain slopes you've got here are going go back to the wild, or will be built up with housing, or whatever. You've been protecting the environment for hundreds of years. If you let the tradition die, what will become of your kids and grandkids, and the environment?

I still remember Mayor Saito's eventual conclusion: "Then let's open a school to teach everybody how to do these handicrafts." But it took some doing to get to that point. The first community meetings we had in Mishima-machi were only attended by four local government officials. Mayor Saito was discouraged and suggested that we drop the idea, but we kept at it, and eventually we had ten people coming in. With ten students, we decided to go ahead and open the school. By the tenth year, there were so many students we didn't have room for everybody. We got written up in the newspaper, and the headline read: "Big News from a Little Village."

That was in 1974. As we were doing those things, I felt like I was growing a lot myself as well. It's not like we were all thinking right from the very start: "Okay, let's go forward with this community building thing!" It just sort of happened naturally. It sprang up from interaction among local residents, and they've kept it going through their hard work.

Winner in 2000 of the Japanese Society for the Science of Design's "JSD Prize for Design"; Professor, Engineering Department, Chiba University; member, JSD Board of Directors; member, Traditional Handicrafts Council (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry); member, Chiba Prefecture Outdoor Advertising Council; Specialties include design of cultural projects, theory of traditional Japanese design, and local design projects.

A 30-year veteran of community building in Japan, Miyazaki has been similarly involved in more recent years in Taiwan, where he has played a role in community study and planning projects carried out in Lukang, Puli, and Nanchuang. In Taiwan's first exhibition focusing on community building, held in 1997, they even set up a "Miyazaki Pavilion" to introduce some successful community building projects that have been carried out in Japan.

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Paulownia handicraft items from Mishima-machi sell for a high price, and take a long time to produce. The paulownia wood has to be set out to dry for two years before it can be worked.

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Beautiful chests made of paulownia wood are a favorite with women in Japan as they look ahead to marriage. Which of these chests might be used as dowry?

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Kiyoshi Miyazaki is one of the best known activists in Japan's community-building movement. He's been at it for 30 years.

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As Mishima-machi residents prepare for the new year, restaurants there hang out fish skewers under the eaves, to be eaten over the holidays.

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The residents of Mishima-machi live a highly self-sufficient life, planting their own vegetables and making various goods by hand in their spare time. The simple, undistracted rural lifestyle here gives local residents a chance to do a lot of handicrafts.

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A Taiwanese group from Tsaotun Rural Township once visited Mishima-machi. They left behind this bird of paradise, a symbol of hope and love.