Taking water, the basis of all life, as a through-line, we explore Kyoto and its watershed from multiple perspectives, including culture, forests, infrastructure, distribution, social structure, and industry.
Our experienced navigators, along with an esteemed cast of practitioners across an array of cultural practices provide experiences that transcend the fixed perspectives of modern society.
The capital of Kyoto has long benefited from the resources of the surrounding watershed, developing a distribution infrastructure that has concentrated wealth and human knowledge, which in turn allowed its culture to flourish.In this program, we travel through the watershed that connects Kyoto’s traditional industries—starting in the downtown streets of Kyoto, up to the mountainous Keihoku area, the source of resources that supported the building of the ancient capital. This journey continues to Uji, a region further south that prospered as a key hub of water and land transportation linking Nara, Kyoto, and Shiga.
This study trip connects traces of industry, infrastructure, and social activity through guided walks in forests and cities, and through encounters with people deeply embedded in different genres of tradition such as crafts, landscape gardening, tea ceremony, performing arts, Buddhism and Shinto.Through these experiences, participants become aware of their own preconceptions and limited ways of seeing the world.We help cultivate a new way of seeing that is complex and intertwined across multiple disciplines—such as philosophy, history, economics, sociology, and ecology—by drawing on forms of knowledge rooted in human experience and inquiry, which help us to question the dominant value systems established by modern science and industry.Culture, in this sense, serves as a visible trace of these alternative ways of knowing.
Encounters with our cast of practitioners and embodied, tactile experiences are connected through careful facilitation, designed to foster a deep sense of understanding—one that goes beyond passive observation or superficial consumption.These methods are based on the anthropological approach of ethnography, which we have studied through ongoing collaboration with research institutions. We combine this with the interpretation techniques developed in the fields of environmental education and guiding, and have adapted them into our own original facilitation approach.
If you are interested in bringing this program to your university or workplace please apply from the link below.
We will set up a meeting where we can discuss how best to apply this program to your context.
