Sending you our best wishes for a joyful, healthy and fulfilling holiday season!
Please find our project update below ...

- Tree Planting Ceremony at the Park
- New Houses in Kobunaki Ecovillage
- Joint Research Project to create model for “Sustainable Shiga”

[Tree Planting Ceremony at the Park]

88 Kobunaki residents, or 29 families, got together to plant trees at the central park of the Kobunaki Ecovillage on 25 October 2008, celebrating the beginning of the new community. Currently, about 30 families have moved into Kobunaki and other 30 families are planning and building new houses.

We invited Mr. Minoru Nakamura, who has been working as a local ecology advisor. At the beginning of the ceremony, he taught us about the ecosystem of local wooded area and how to plant trees in our park. Each family planted a small seedling, which consist of various kinds of native tree species.

Participants’ impressions are:
“It was a very good memory. I’d like to plant more trees in my garden, too.”
“I’m really looking forward to living at Kobunaki and seeing the growth of the trees.”
“I’d like to tell today’s experience to children when they grow up.” … etc.

We would like to continue such kind of planting events with future Kobunaki residents, and when the seedlings grow into big forest, we imagine that residents can enjoy walking, collecting insects, or picking acorns.

Tomomi Takada

[New Houses in Kobunaki Ecovillage]

30 families have moved into their new houses and enjoy living at their own “eco” houses. I’d like to introduce some of the main features of those houses.

1. Using Local Timber for Constructional Material
Many people wish to use local timber but most of them give up, because current timber markets in Japan handle imported wood mainly. Domestic wood are rarely available in quantity and more expensive than imported wood. A family at Kobunaki utilized local timbers for their house, taking the advantage of subsidy from Shiga Prefecture and balancing out the higher cost of local timber. The distance between building site and logging site is only one and half hour drive by car. As about two-thirds of Japan's total area is covered by forest, and we think it is very important for sustainable community development to utilize locally accessible construction material, and regenerate the circulation from forest to towns as a whole.

2. Edible Landscape
Looking at gardens at Kobunaki, there are not only vegetable gardens but also various fruit trees on each house plot, such as blueberry, juneberry, kumquat, Japanese citron, oleaster, Japanese apricot and so on. We often find many families walk around Kobunaki, enjoying this edible landscape!

3. Careful Water Use
Groundwater around Kobunaki area contains lots of iron, thus it is hard to use groundwater for our daily life. Instead, we request all houses to install rainwater tank, and use rainwater for gardening and car-washing. One of the houses installed a rainwater tank with the capacity of 1.5 tons under their garden. The family can use stored rainwater just by turning on a faucet. (In the picture below, the right faucet is for rainwater.)

This family also introduced pipe arrangement from bath tub to laundry sink to their house, and utilizes remaining bathwater.

Please come and find the features of each houses and pleasant landscape at Kobunaki!

Kotoko Yamaguchi

[Joint Research Project to create model for “Sustainable Shiga”]

Shiga Prefecture has declared a vision at the beginning of this year to change Shiga towards more sustainable society, reducing its carbon dioxide emissions by 30 percent before 2030 as compared to the levels in 1990. In response to requests from citizens and business sectors for more concrete images of sustainable society modeled on Shiga, the Lake Biwa Environmental Research Institute initiated a joint research project in collaboration with local universities, companies, local authorities, and communities including Kobunaki Ecovillage! This project was adopted as one of the sustainable R&D projects sponsored by the Japan Science and Technology Agency.

As a part of this project, we are going to establish “Community Energy Eco Station” based at Kobunaki Community Center over the next 5 years. The station consists of two elements: car-sharing system for residents using electric vehicle powered by solar power generation, and collecting platform for various recyclable materials from houses.

Editor's note
In Japan, people have a tradition of doing a big year-end cleaning of homes, offices, and everywhere to greet the New Year. It is always a very hard task ... but make me feel very refreshed! (Tomomi Takada)