At the mid-year conference we had a speaker who came to Japan twelve years ago as a JET program participant. He's been here ever since, like one of the stories I heard so many times before I left, the one about the "friend of friend who went to Japan for a year to teach English and then never came back."

Michael Kahn started out teaching in Kochi City. At the end of his three years he knew he didn't want to leave Japan, but he didn't know how to make that happen. Without much of a plan, he started asking around for a job, which eventually ended him up as publisher of the Japanese language Kagami Village newsletter. He said that his first issue was received with raucous laughter, not because it was clever and entertaining, but because no one could understand what he'd written, his Japanese was so bad.

He got the hang of things, though, which allowed him more time in the community, covering local events. It sounded a lot like working at a weekly newspaper, but instead of the figure skating carnival, he had to cover the sumo wrestling tournament and rather than how the wheat was looking, his hundred words were on how the rice was coming along. Michael ended up staying in Kagami Village and eventually bought a house there. It was, as luck would have it, the last house in the village with an irori, a traditional Japanese fireplace.

Sitting around an irori is a unique experience. The fireplace is actually an open pit located in the middle of the living room. Smoke rises to the ceiling, where it eventually cools and escapes through slats in wall. It's a lot like having a camp fire inside your house. In fact, the one time I've been by an irori was to cook a pizza with a big group of new friends. We took turns checking the pizza and pouring sake to the music of a French girl on guitar and an English girl on accordion. As I say, it's a unique experience sitting by an irori.

But back to Michael, who ended up buying the last house in town with an irori. The next logical thing for him to do was start inviting the locals over for drinks, to talk about what it was like back in the old days, when everyone had an irori. One by one they would drop by until a whole group of them was huddled around talking about the old days. Michael learned a lot from the men and women of Kagami Village: how to make charcoal, how to weave tatami, how to thatch a roof and how to throw a clay pot. He learned the local dialect, the folk songs and the folk stories. He learned their history and their magic and it sounds like he's almost learned how to fit into Kagami Village.

But of course he never will. One of the other things that Michael learned up in the mountains is that time and place mean something different to the people of Kagami Village. Of course there are the seasons: the season to plant rice, to harvest rice, to pick mushrooms, to weave tatami and to make charcoal. Longer than the waxing and waning of the moon, though, are the eons, which have been passed down for generations in Kagami Village. In fact, when he started asking, Michael found a family that has lived in the exact same house four generations. Next he found one that has lived in their house for six generations. Then twelve generations. Then eighteen generations. Then all the way to 37 generations. Imagine! Living in the same house (or on the same piece of land, anyway) for nearly 1000 years!

It caused him sadness, he said, to think of that way of life on its way out. He related the situation in Kagami Village to that of his hometown, Houston, Texas. He said his family moved to America from Asia and Europe. They eventually ended up in Houston. Now he lives in Japan and his sister lives in London. His parents, meanwhile, live in a new suburb. Movement, he said, is the story of the modern world: the will to pick up and leave, to strike off into the great unkown destined for greatness, is a defining feature of American (and Canadian) culture.

What Michael thinks about that way of life is that it doesn't allow for a proper understanding of the elements, how to live with the land, how to be self-sufficient. He said that there's a lot of knowledge that is being lost as the generation from before World War II dies. As such, he records his conversations around the irori. That way, people can remember what it was like in the old days. Which was what I think he was trying to say from the beginning: that it's important that we not forget how we used to live in the old days, because like it or not, it's how we should still be living. My feeling is that Michael may never leave Japan.