SHINDO is an initiative, based mainly in the Aizu region, to build the foundations of life — food, housing, energy, health, and shared learning — with our own hands.
Film: Ayako Mogi & Naoya Sasaki ／ Watch on Vimeo
Someone else grows our food, energy arrives from far away, a home is something you buy, and learning happens at school. The ways people once supported one another have been replaced by services paid for with money. Over the past eighty years life has become astonishingly convenient — and at the same time we have lost the ability to support the foundations of our own lives.
That cheap energy will be available. That the world will stay at peace and supply chains will keep moving. That money will hold its value and food will keep being imported. Yet abrupt climate shifts, conflicts over resources, structural change driven by AI, farming that is losing its farmers, and wavering trust in currencies — every one of those assumptions is being shaken.
This is not the beginning of the end; it is a time to create together, in resonance with one another. Not to build out of fear, but out of the wish to live better. That difference will profoundly shape the world that is created from here.
What SHINDO creates are living assets: soil that bears fruit every year, water that keeps flowing, houses that can be lived in for generations, the wisdom to make it through the world, and companions to create and live with.
What we are trying to build is a new operating system for everyday life, one that can keep life going in the era ahead. Rather than leaning on outside dependence, we will raise five foundations that we can maintain and renew ourselves, step by step toward 2030. They are not separate businesses; they grow together, linked within a single village.
The foundations of life are being built in Onogawa, Showa Village.
The main base for farm production is Aizumisato.
Centered on low-till, low-input natural rice farming,
producing and storing more than the residents consume.
restoring empty houses together with local carpenters.
Five or more houses by 2030.
Exploring groundbreaking alternative energy.
through daily habits that follow the cycles of nature.
Creating a place where children and adults grow together,
nurturing the ability to survive, to create, and to support one another.
Follow conversations among the people involved and updates from the field
Our worldview, the restoration of our bases, a year in the field, and the voices of those who gather here. Long-form conversations, released as recordings.
See the channel →Fields, mountains, kitchens, buildings under construction. Photos and a few words from the day, almost every day.
See the account →A thousand years on, nurturing a forest of great trees:
the creation of a new civilization.
Building the foundations of life in Aizu and Oku-Aizu.
A path toward a new kind of abundance.
Published by ZEN-BU Inc.