In Soho during the pandemic, I was one of those who were addicted to video games. First, the country life RPG Stardew Valley and then Animal Crossing drew me into a video game world for the first time in decades. With so many things suddenly disappearing before my eyes during the lockdown, I started thinking it would be nice to be self-sufficient, so I scraped together what I had at home and made planters to plant seeds and to grow basil, shiso, and other herbs. I also got some mushroom beds to raise oyster mushrooms and lion’s mane mushrooms. By extension, I was expanding my pumpkin farm in Animal Crossing, and every time I logged in, I would grow pumpkins, sell them, and upgrade my house with the money from the sales. In the game world, I was making a steady income out of the field (laughs).

When I moved to Connecticut, an essential condition for choosing a house was that I could do the gardening. Jim, my landlord, had said he would build a space for it, but I hadn’t heard anything even until around the spring equinox when winter was slowly coming to an end. However, I had zero knowledge about garden building, so while curbing my enthusiasm, I watched YouTube videos about soil, seed germination, and other gardening processes and learned the schedule from the “Old Farmer’s Almanac,” an agricultural calendar that you go through once if you are serious about it. Unfortunately, once I started delving into it, there turned out to be tons of things that I didn’t know.

In New York, I used to frequent Union Square Green Market. At the time, I often pondered which one to choose and take home from a pile of the $6-a-pound heirloom tomatoes (about $6 for one medium-sized tomato) freshly picked from Upstate (laugh), but now I can see how much work the farmers put into them and why they were high-priced. So I definitely wanted to grow heirloom tomatoes. I also wanted to grow a lot of Japanese cucumbers, shiso, and manganji peppers because I wanted to grill them with dried bonito flakes and a little soy sauce. I ordered Japanese vegetable seeds from Kitazawa Seed Company in Utah, whose packages for seeds have lovely illustrations on them. I started growing them in small planters in late March until they grew into seedlings indoors after the last frost (which varies from region to region) at the end of May. It is said that one should sow one seed per hole, but I sowed three or four seeds in one hole, thinking some seeds would germinate, but some won’t because they are so small. Surprisingly, however, they all sprouted, and by the time they became seedlings, the roots were too tangled, and it wasn’t easy to untangle them.

So, the one-seed-per-hole theory turned out to be correct. It may sound extreme, but I experienced firsthand that we live in a world of “microcosm and macrocosm” and the mystery of nature that such a tiny seed can grow into a lush vegetable. I raised enough seedlings to fill the sunroom of my house, but in May, I saw a variety of seedlings for sale at a local supermarket and thought to myself, “Why didn’t I just buy these seedlings?” Anyway, although it took more work, growing vegetables from seed was definitely more cost-effective, and it was great to grow organic Japanese vegetables that are not available in the supermarket. Watering the seedlings, replanting them in larger planters along the way to make them bigger, and seeing the growth process while caring for them was very much in sync with the game. In the meantime, as if Tom Nook, the mayor of the village, approached me in Animal Crossing, Jim, the landlord, told me he had something to show me. I took a short walk around the massive lot behind the house, and to my surprise, I was told that I could use a garden space there that hadn’t been used for decades. He said he would also build a new fence and bring in a machine to till the soil for me, which was an incredible turn of events. What an upgrade!

From that day on, we started picking up rocks and removing old roots, pieces of plastic, and other impurities from the soil. I am so grateful to my friends Glave, Nika, Nathan, and Maria, who stayed with me then for their help with the endless stone picking. Jim also renewed all the posts, and the “Kudo Garden” was completed just before the last frost after his solid, well-balanced, and beautifully done job, which was precisely what you would expect from a farmer. The seedlings were too numerous for the space available, so I planted them without measuring the distance between each of them and ended up redoing it the next day. But it helped that Magwart, a former farmer, DJ, graphic designer, and Georgia music fan from Portland, OR, stayed with me for a week in the summer to help us with the garden. He was a supervisor who helped me numerous times, from making cucumber poles to telling us that oyster fertilizer is suitable for Manganji peppers.

Fortunately, the garden was not destroyed by insects or animals, and the plants grew well. As a result, as for those heirloom tomatoes, I was able to harvest so many that I could pick one to take a bite and toss it away (although I never throw them away!), and I could even share them with my friends. Brian’s favorite summer breakfast was freshly picked cucumbers dipped in miso. The crispy Japanese cucumbers are totally different from the American ones, and I can’t wait for summer to arrive. So I hope to harvest more this year, and I also want to make some game music!

The post “In Real Life,” Stepping Out of the Game Field: Kiki Kudo’s Steady Life Vol.4 appeared first on TOKION - Cutting edge culture and fashion information.

We found our house on Zillow, an online real estate marketplace. It was a major adventure moving from the metropolitan city of New York to the American countryside. Thanks to the pandemic, the BLM movement, a demand for societal change in the prolonged mistreatment of the Black community in the country, erupted nationwide. Amid all this, something I imagined would happen in the Midwest took place in the big city of New York: White Supremacy rallies. I started to see news of hate crimes against Asian people too. I had lived in the city for a decade, yet I didn’t know anything about the distorted social structure of America. I didn’t know anything about Connecticut, either. 

Our top conditions for our new home were: within two hours from New York by car, far away from neighbors, thus ensuring the protection of privacy, and equipped with a fireplace and some gardening space. Another essential condition was distance. That is, being able to see friends within an hour’s drive. I looked for houses close to my good friends because I knew I would want company. With that said, there weren’t a lot of houses for rent to begin with, and we didn’t have much leeway to choose. On Zillow, you send a request to go on a house tour once a listing catches your eye. You then connect to an AI broker called Alex and exchange inorganic-sounding messages. It introduces a local broker who would set up a house tour. But when I found our current home, I got connected to Jim and Julie instead of Alex. When I saw a normal message starting with a hello, I almost screamed to Brian that there was a human being on the other side of the screen.   

The house was a 40-minute drive from Evan and Liutas, our friends living in upstate New York, and an hour away from Dimes Deli’s Zach and Sophie’s upstate home, whom I’ve known since I founded Chiso, my food project. Coincidentally, journalist Yumiko Sakuma’s “house on a mountain” was across from Zach and Sophie. And it was 20 minutes away from our life-hack boss and New York neighbor, Ross’s cabin.   

We went to see the house at the beginning of January 2021. We wore masks the first time we met Jim and Julie since the pandemic was still in full swing, but they were so welcoming it blew my mind. They also knew about Chiso because they looked at my website after our first exchange and told us we could move in immediately if we liked the house. The renovated two-story farmhouse from the 1800s was where Julie grew up. The 2,000-square-foot house was on a 36-acre plot of farmland with two fireplaces and six bedrooms. Jim told us he’d make sure we could use the classic-styled fireplaces, which the previous tenant didn’t, and that he’d make space for a garden. The walls had been painted in brown and cream colors, and they had many windows from which you could see a beautiful landscape. One of the reasons I felt comfortable was simply because the house was built in a similar way to Evan and Liutas’ place. Moving away from my New York life, which had become dreary because of covid, felt refreshing since I had never lived in the countryside. I felt excited to start a new life surrounded by nature. It was winter then, so the trees were bare, making the house in the distance visible. But we were told we would have privacy once spring brought its abundance of greenery.   

Moving during winter was more challenging than expected, but I got it done thanks to Nathan and Brian’s hard work. The two fell asleep because they were exhausted, but I began unpacking at midnight to at least clean the kitchen because Jim was planning on visiting the following day. Then, something suddenly flew over my head: a bat! The room was boiling because I didn’t know how to use the heater, so I kept the windows with no screens open. The bat probably flew in by accident. I woke Brian up, and we somehow shooed it away with a broomstick. I was shocked, however, after discovering that some bats carry rabies. 

A year has passed since we moved into our home, but my feelings haven’t changed. I get to experience the beauty of nature through the intricate colors of each season—yellow, blue, purple, pink, red, green, and so on. The sunsets in winter are so gorgeous that they made me discover the existence of the wonderful time of just gazing at the sunset. I feel grateful to live among nature’s epic rhythms: birds chirping, strong winds from over the hills, the sound of the many wind chimes around our home. The house does require some maintenance, though, since it’s old. Jim is thankful we’ve taken that role on.   

Our house is in a farming region where you can’t get your food delivered, but there are excellent supermarkets and bakeries—possibly better than those in New York—15 minutes away by car. Let me tell you all about it next time.   

Translation Lena Grace Suda
Edit Nana Takeuchi

The post Just Gazing at the Sunset: Kiki Kudo’s Steady Life Vol. 2 appeared first on TOKION - Cutting edge culture and fashion information.

My story begins in Japan. For a long time, I wrote articles about art, subcultures, and fashion for magazines. I’ve also written books. I was blessed to work as a writer from the late 90s, but my zest for everything vanished in 2011, the year of the Great East Japan Earthquake. That same year, on Halloween, I moved to New York on a journalist visa. Since then, I’ve worked as a chef and musician, using food and music as communication tools. 

A decade has passed since I started hosting dinners, making music on my computer, and drawing based on concepts related to food. All the while, I’ve been trying to avoid writing.  

In 2018, I married my partner, Brian Close, an animator, visual artist, and musician. We lived in a loft in Soho, New York, but moved to a farmhouse in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 2021, the following year of the start of the pandemic. 

We had one condition upon moving since we enjoyed our freedom in our Soho loft: no neighbors. We were able to play music anytime without any complaints from neighbors because no one lived in our Soho building. I felt like it was a miracle when we found an isolated farmhouse surrounded by pastures full of horses and cows for rent—a 36-acre plot of land. Today, the house is our living space and creative studio for food, music, and visual art. It might come as a surprise that I’m leading quite an active life here.  

New York City is a two-hour drive away, so I can go there if I miss being around people’s energy. But this physical distance hasn’t made me feel lonely thanks to increased online communication, such as FaceTime, Zoom, Twitch, VR, and games. I enjoy getting inspired by my new environment, just like when I left Tokyo. I initially didn’t want to write again, but I’m grateful to be given another chance to write for an online magazine. I plan to write about my life in two places, one in the American countryside, where I started living for the first time, and the other in New York City, where I return occasionally.  

We moved at the end of January 2021. We moved house by ourselves thanks to our friend Nathan and his truck. Nathan is one half of the artist duo Blazer Sound System and is a DJ, filmmaker, and producer. I DJed a lot for his friends’ and his dancehall and techno parties around 2014, and I’m also in HTRK’s “Chinatown Style” music video directed by Nathan. I released my first mixtape on his cassette label. As friends, we’ve shared many moments of joy in New York.  

Once the pandemic hit, we experienced lockdown and the pausing of time. We found ourselves in the vortex of an astronomical paradigm shift we couldn’t seem to comprehend. It felt like we went back to the beginning. Once lockdown was over, the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum, and protests were held every week. We were relearning justice and equality. Things were still unstable, but people slowly started returning to the streets. With that said, covid showed no signs of stopping, and I held my breath as I continued living in a city that had lost its function. I eventually began envying those who lived among nature.  

Being physically close to others has been put on hold because of covid. It’s even hard to meet up with our neighbors now. I didn’t hesitate to move to the countryside because I felt it would be the same wherever I went. While driving his truck, I remember how Nathan said, “The community we built will never change, no matter where you go.” I can be myself whenever I return to the city and feel like I’ve come home precisely because I have a community there.  

My friends Evan and Liutas, who live in upstate New York, played a big part in my countryside awakening during the pandemic. They’re the pioneers of what I like to call “dual life,” as they also have an apartment in Chinatown. Their upstate home is an oasis, a place to escape all the noise. Their renovated farmhouse sits on a green plot of land in front of a river. Beautiful plants that almost seem artificially designed surround the place. They have a minimal kitchen, living room, vintage carpets, antique interior, a fireplace that burns brightly, and a classic cigar and library space. Liutas’s eye for detail as a gallerist is reflected in every corner of their house. Everything there feels fresh and beautiful because of the blend of the above elements and a farmhouse.  

In the summer, you can run out of the living room and jump straight into the river. The gap between the intense sun rays and cold water feels good on the skin. Once night falls, you can fall asleep to the sound of frogs and bugs. As such, I fell in love with their vibrant lifestyle in nature, one that couldn’t exist in the city. Lockdown ended in April 2020, but we still didn’t have enough information about covid. Regardless, Brian and I, wanting to feel rejuvenated, had the best time in nature because Evan and Liutas kindly let us stay at theirs. We began searching for our new home in November of the same year. But that story’s for another time.  

Translation Lena Grace Suda
Edit Nana Takeuchi

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