We offer Kyoto, with its rich tapestry of cultural practices woven across time, as a field to help participants to break out of conventional ways of thinking and seeing.
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.
This study trip connects industry, infrastructure, and culture through meetings 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 to cultivate a new way of seeing that encompasses multiple perspectives, drawing from a broad range of fields such philosophy, history, economics, sociology, and ecology.
The capital of Kyoto has long benefited from the resources of the surrounding region, developing a distribution infrastructure that has concentrated wealth and human knowledge, which in turn allowed its culture to flourish.
On this program we travel through the watershed connecting the traditional industries: from the streets of downtown Kyoto, up to the mountainous Keihoku area: the resources that contributed to the construction of the ancient capital. We connect these to Uji city further south, which flourished as a strategic location for water and land transportation connecting Nara, Kyoto, and Shiga.
Encounters with our cast of practitioners and tactile experiences are connected through careful facilitation to help cultivate your sensitivity and sensibility in a way that is different to the passive consumption of experiences. These methods are based on the anthropological method of ethnography, which we have learned through ongoing collaboration on research with local institutions. We combine this with the interpretation method used in the field of environmental education and environmental guiding.
This program is a typically 4~6 days long mimimum and up to two weeks. Content may change depending on group size and time of year. To learn more please contact us from the link below.
If you are interested in bringing this program to your university or workplace contact us from the link below.
We will set up a meeting where we can dicuss how best to apply this program to your context.
