A pile of pots and a blue scooter

A mentality of finding value in abandoned things goes beyond aesthetics or nostalgia

Usually we might expect a mound of thousands of cracked terra cotta pots, shrouded in weeds on the edge of an old settlement, to tell us about the past. But sometimes they also say something about the future.

After ten days back in Tokyo, I was down in Onomichi again last weekend for a few more days of construction. Before getting to work on Labyrinth House, several of us spent two days on Innoshima, a mid-sized island of about 20,000 residents some ten kilometers south of town, where our friend Midori lives. She often drops by Labyrinth House to help out when we’re doing construction, usually carrying a bag stuffed with uncommon citrus fruits like banpeiyu, decopon, and hassaku picked from her family’s fields.

This spring, she began renovating a small hut near the house where she grew up along a quiet stretch of the island’s north shore, not far from where the big white suspension bridge touches down from neighboring Mukaishima. The structure was once home to a man who had returned from captivity in Siberia after the war and his wife, and has sat empty since before Midori was born. She’s starting by turning one six-mat room and a small kitchen into a cafe that should attract members of the local community and cyclists who travel the bridge network to Shikoku, with dreams of eventually creating a book space and a place for people to stay.

On our days off at Labyrinth House, we often go down to relax and help her build. The tides change quickly in the Inland Sea, and after the water recedes and leaves behind a layer of bright green seaweed, local people pick through the shallows in search of clams. In the evening, we chop wood and barbecue until eventually only a few ship lights bob on the horizon and the occasional booming sound of an anchor being dropped reverberates through the darkness.

Like many of the renovation activists in Onomichi, Midori has a knack for finding things she can repurpose. She’s building her space with kitchen fixtures, doors, and furniture she received from acquaintances, and old materials she scavenged. The sliding glass entrance doors came from the warehouse in Onomichi where the local NPO keeps windows, doors, furniture, boxes, and other useful things it has pulled out of the city’s vacant houses—a sort of renovation library where we also found the wood for her tabletops. The hut’s original doors, no longer the right size, ended up on the second floor of Labyrinth House. In April, Midori heard that a store on Innoshima was throwing out its unsold stock of tiles, and saved a few boxes of grey and blue tiles that we ended putting on the wall of the kitchen at Labyrinth House. Things that exist beyond the monetary economy are harvested like natural resources or circulate as a form of social currency. Ask around, and people often know where we might find just what we need for free. Finding and creating something together—embedding it with social meaning in the process—is part of the fun.

Which brings us to the terra cotta pots. Midori discovered several mounds of them discarded in a field alongside the breakwater where she sometimes walks her family’s shiba dog. She asked one of the men working on the neighboring lot of a local transport company about the pots. “Go for it, take ‘em all!” came the reply, so she brought two carloads back to her hut and started crushing them into gravel for a path to the entrance.

We pick up some hammers and start smashing, indulging in the primal, Pleistocene pleasure of it like a band of homo habilis sitting around in the African savannah. The pots are thin and brittle, and shatter easily. But to crush them down to a small enough size to be scattered on the path takes some time. Filling a small bucket takes about ten minutes. There was already an enormous amount spread on the ground. “Occhan power!” Midori grins; some of the old guys in the village (occhan) brought over camping chairs and spent a few days as full-time pot breakers. 

The terra cotta path flows from a mentality of making use of found objects shared by many people who renovate akiya in Japan. A reductionist understanding of renovation culture simply treats it as an aesthetic—the “authentic” style of reclaimed wood or rustic interiors that is now superficially grafted onto spaces all over Tokyo and every other city in recent years. Others may dismiss the choice to repurpose an abandoned space or return to a small, slowly re-wilding island as a nostalgia for a simpler past. But this mentality is also a survival strategy—a natural adaptation to the material environment of our present moment and apparent future. When you live in a world where the economy and incomes aren’t growing, but abandoned houses and discarded objects are sitting around everywhere you look, why wouldn’t you find riches where you can?

After we finish the day’s work, Midori takes us for a walk through her village, past the spot where she found the pots. A lane too narrow for cars wiggles inland from the shore, and most of the houses we pass are abandoned or beginning to collapse. There are at least seventy akiya here, Midori says. Many are big, traditional farmhouses with attached barns that frame a courtyard. At one, a rusting orange van has been enveloped by fluorescent pink hollyhocks.  Passing another, Midori points at a set of engawa doors she says she wants. Yu asks her to keep an eye out for a left over solar hot water heater we could attach to Labyrinth House.

The next ten years will determine the future of this place, Yu says as we pass one house where the roof has begun to cave in. Leave a house vacant for too long in Japan, and the termites and rain will turn it to mush. Over the next few decades, entire settlements, towns, and cities are now certain to become unsustainable in their current form. One way of life is coming to an end as nature swallows the human world here, yet the present still contains possibilities for new forms of survival before the inheritance of the past disappears completely. Perhaps we could learn a thing or two from Midori’s dog, who seems perfectly content in this empty village.

Back at Labyrinth House the next day, I need to go buy a bag of cement at the home center behind the station in order to pour a foundation for a column. I load the 10-kg sack on a two-wheeled trolly and drag it for a kilometer or so up the paths and stairs back to the site. Everything we buy must be carried or rolled up the equivalent of an 8-10 story building. We get to talking about how it would be nice to be able to haul bags of cement, plaster, and rice on a scooter like the ones used by delivery people, who follow a winding route that avoids all the stairs up the hill.

It so happens that there is an abandoned blue scooter sitting behind Labyrinth House. We have no idea how long its been there—the story is that it belonged to a woman who once lived nearby and fled an unhappy marriage one day, never to return. Of course we don’t have the key, but perhaps it could be fixed? We ring the police and a few minutes later a couple of cops appear to run the plates. It’s no longer registered, they tell us, and since it’s on the property, it’s our problem. We call a locksmith, who shows up grumpy after discovering that he needs to park his car below and trudge up the hill to get to us. He makes a new key. The next day, a friend staying with us this week who knows his way around motorbikes disassembles it, and amazingly, it runs! Now we have a set of wheels—one that was just sitting there for the taking all along.

Labyrinth House construction is on hiatus until fall, so I’ll be in Tokyo this summer building another community space at my favorite sento. More to come shortly!