CIRCULAR VILLAGE FARM, Osaki Town, Kagoshima

I worked on the concept text and the accompanying overview document for a newly launched project in Osaki Town, Kagoshima Prefecture. Osaki Town is Japan’s leading municipality for recycling, boasting a recycling rate of 84% (as of April 2024). Through the “Osaki Recycling System,” which has been in place since 1998, sorting waste into 27 categories has become part of everyday life for residents, and household food scraps are returned to farmland as a fully matured compost called “Okaeri Kan-chan”.

This project sought to extend the town’s philosophy of “circulation” into the context of agriculture, using it as a lever to address the regional challenge of abandoned farmland. Rather than seeing these neglected fields as a problem, the project reframes them as land ideally suited to organic farming: having gone untreated with pesticides for many years. The plan is to enrich the soil using “Okaeri Kan-chan”, and to cultivate Japanese pepper sansho, a crop that pairs naturally with eel, another of the town’s well-known specialties, and one that can grow relatively well even in challenging conditions, with the aim of developing it into a signature product of the town.

In writing the text, I was conscious of connecting the perspective Osaki Town has developed over many years, that of turning what seems unusable into a resource, to this new challenge of agriculture. The hope was that local residents involved in the project would be able to imagine what the area would look like when the challenges were continued, and to feel a genuine sense of possibility. At the same time, I structured the text with an eye toward it being something that town officials could hand to people inside and outside the community, using it to explain the project’s outline and open up conversation.