Documenting a two-yearlong Experiment with Truth in the Countryside of Ayabe, Kyōto

Welcome, dear reader, to the page on the blog dedicated to documenting, learning from and reflecting on a yearlong living Experiment with Truth in Ayabe.

You probably have many questions reading the subtitle of this page. Part Farming Part X? Experiments with Truth? Ayabe? What?

Long story short I am going to be living in the countryside of Ayabe city in Kyōtō prefecture in Japan with a partner as of the beginning of September 2025 for 2 years on a Working Holiday Visa. The overarching purpose of living there is to experiment with the following three sub-points mentioned in the title:

• Will participating in community farming and food preparation/preservation activities support genuine connection to the wider web of life and the local community and feel a part of it?
• Will spending multiple short periods of time working with various local people doing artisanry and handicrafts support bringing artisanry and handicrafts more fully into life?
• Will walking the full Ō-henro pilgrimage with a female friend support restoring movement in life?

Here is the full Experiment with Truth written out. “Part Farming Part X” is a term coined by Naoki Shiomi and a movement originating in his hometown of Ayabe in Kyōtō prefecture. I encountered this work in a podcast with Mika Furugori through an online course called Cultivating Regenerative Livelihoods. After listening to the podcast I reached out to her to ask to co-translate his latest book together at the time, which we’ve been meeting online to do for nearly three years now. The term encompasses a comprehensive view/take on life in which connection to where food and things come from, community development as well as finding and utilizing your innate gifts in service to the world are considered important. It doesn’t mean that you only do two things for exactly half of your time each one. Mika expands on it as representing the three f’s for life: food, fulfillment and flexibility.

The phrase Experiments with Truth comes from Ghandi, who described his life as a series of experiments and whose autobiography has the same title. The particular format of Experiments with Truth that I am using to build and carry out this experiment comes from a manual and scaffolded template created by Emma Quayle and Eddy Quinn from the Nonviolent Global Liberation Community (which I am also a part of). I encountered their take on Experiments with Truth in a weekly online offering called Responding to the Call of Our Times with Miki Kashtan. The particular calls in which the manual and scaffolded template were introduced on June 21st and August 9th, 2024 are available to access as recordings on a gift economy basis. There is also a past course introducing the Experiments with Truth template in which you are able to register to receive the recordings revisiting the structure of setting up an experiment and delving deeper into the framework.