ANDREWS ASIAN ADVENTURE
Like most adventures starting from the South West of England, my journey started with an early morning alarm. This was made even earlier thanks to a section of the M25 being closed for the weekend and my route to Gatwick Airport requiring a 30-minute detour! Luckily, at that time of day, there wasn’t any traffic to worry about and the three-hour drive included a pretty epic sunrise. Considering I was heading to the land of the rising sun, this felt like a pretty good omen.
Once at the airport, it was pretty straightforward, 12 hours to Shanghai, a four-hour layover followed by a short two-hour hop to Okinawa, Japan. My flight left Gatwick at midday on Saturday and I arrived in Naha, Okinawa mid-afternoon on Sunday. Okinawa is a small Japanese Island 400 miles southwest of the Japanese mainland. It is also the home of Prof. Higa, the father of Effective Microorganisms (EM®), and his company EMRO.
The purpose of the week-long trip was to visit the EMRO headquarters, learn about EM and how it is used in Japan as well as visit several farms, and recycling centres, take a trip on the Bullet train, go for a dip in a natural hot spring and, if the stars aligned, maybe even see some cherry blossom.
Unfortunately, the cherry blossom didn’t really materialise. I was a week early and not in the best area but I think this just provides an excuse to go back another day!
After my week in Japan, I would be heading to Bangkok, Thailand to join the Asia Pacific Natural Agricultural Network (APNAN) conference, visit the Queen Mothers Farm, a recycling centre and, what is sure to be the highlight of my adventure, the Sara Buri Natural Farming Centre.
All in all, it was going to be a jam-packed, non-stop, whistle-stop tour of Japan and Thailand before hot-tailing it back home again.
Although Japan and Thailand are very different to the UK, there were a lot of take-home messages, ideas and methods that I think we could learn from. I want to share with you as best I can what I experienced and in particular the things I learnt which you will hopefully find as interesting as me.
I will be splitting my trip into four blogs posts. I appreciate that not all the posts will be of interest to everyone, so you will be excused if you skip the one or two that don’t float your boat. However, I would encourage you to stick with the blogs because what I learnt most from my trip was that inspiration came when I least expected it.
This was perfectly demonstrated by my final visit in Japan. I had spent the day in the back of a very hot and very small car, driving around Nagoya. I had already had two visits that day and I must admit I thought I was heading back to the hotel to eat some more Sushi and get an early night before flying to Bangkok the next morning. Instead, I was driven almost two hours out of the city and up into the mountains where we visited a Japanese Tea Garden called Miyazakien.
Anyone who knows me knows I don’t drink hot drinks. Coffee is a definite no and Tea is a drink I can drink, I just generally choose not to. Anyway, the Tea Garden wasn’t huge, it wasn’t particularly innovative or elaborate but what they did they did exceptionally well. They were, without doubt, the best in class.
Driving along the road heading towards Miyazakien, you would have been forgiven for driving past without giving it a second thought. However, for anyone lucky enough to stop and visit, you were rewarded with an experience I don’t think you’d get anywhere else in the world. In fact, the experience is highly sought after all over the world with clients from Australia to London paying for the privilege.
Luckily for me, Miyazakien owner Atsushi Umemura was in Japan at the time of my visit. He had returned home the day before from Sri Lanka where he has been asked to serve green tea to dignitaries at a state dinner. Atsushi, myself and Jun Matsumoto spent a good few hours walking the tea gardens and drinking tea. What was apparent from the first minute was that Atsushi was a perfectionist.
My Grandad always said, ‘if a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing well’. Atsushi had never heard that saying before but he was a living breathing example of it. The attention to detail was something we could all learn from and I left with not only a new appreciation of green tea but also the level of detail needed to make a small business an international success.
Sometimes inspiration comes from places where we least expect it. I arrived hot, bothered and tired but left enthused, motivated and inspired. Find out more about the Tea Garden here: https://miyazakien.com
I hope through the reading of my Asian Adventures blog posts you can get a sense of what I experienced and maybe even find inspiration or motivation like I did.
Enjoy.