“Slow Life”

Japan has, in the past 100 years, achieved what most Western civilizations struggled two or three times as long to achieve. The result, as we’re all aware, is video games and text messaging (among my favorites, anyway). But spawning countless Pokemon isn’t easy, and the average Japanese person is ridiculously overworked.

Kakegawa City is a town built on the principles of returning to an older, more thoughtful time in Japan’s history (and all of ours, I’d venture.) The city is built on a series of 8 guidelines to how a life should be lived, which it calls “Slow Life.” Wanna hear more?

The principles are:

SLOW PACE: We value the culture of walking, to be fit and to reduce traffic accidents.
SLOW WEAR: We respect and cherish our beautiful traditional costumes, including woven and dyed fabrics, Japanese kimonos and Japanese night robes (yukata).
SLOW FOOD: We enjoy Japanese food culture, such as Japanese dishes and tea ceremony, and safe local ingredients.
SLOW HOUSE: We respect houses built with wood, bamboo, and paper, lasting over one hundred or two hundred years, and are careful to make things durably, and ultimately, to conserve our environment.
SLOW INDUSTRY: We take care of our forests, through our agriculture and forestry, conduct sustainable farming with human labor, and ultimately spread urban farms and green tourism.
SLOW EDUCATION: We pay less attention to academic achievement, and create a society in which people can enjoy arts, hobbies, and sports throughout our lifetimes, and where all generations can communicate well with each other.
SLOW AGING: We aim to age with grace and be self-reliant throughout our lifetimes.
SLOW LIFE: Based on the philosophy of life stated above, we live our lives with nature and the seasons, saving our resources and energy.

From Japan for Sustainability.