About the Blog
I almost didn’t start this blog. I’ve been thinking for a long time about how to merge my interests in writing, minimalism, sustainability, overseas living, and parenting. A few years ago, perhaps in desperation after spending way-too-long tidying my house, I started to daydream about moving our family of six into a two-bedroom apartment a la Jim Gaffigan: we would reduce our stuff by 70%, I’d hang all of our laundry, there would be one room for kids and one for adults, and I’d write about the adventures of life in close quarters.
When our family moved last year to a 900-square-foot rental in Tokyo, after ten years in a big house in Shizuoka, I thought my chance had come. But then I started to have doubts. After all, there are plenty of families bigger than ours, and also families living smaller. (Tiny houses, anyone?) Perhaps the biggest dissuader, though, was that our way of life in Japan had become commonplace to us — everyone around us lives small and considers environmental impact, so I wondered if I wouldn’t be showcasing the evident. And then we took the kids to America for Christmas.
I still remember the look on my mother-in-law’s face when I told her that our only kitchen counter was about the same size as that above her dishwasher. (Oh, and we don’t have one of those.) My sister-in-law laughed, maybe snorted, when I said each of my four kids is allotted two to three drawers of clothing. A variety of reminders on the trip made it click for me: this small life in a big foreign city really is different. And so here we are.
This blog is meant to be a chronicle of what our big family is doing to live with intentionality, sustainability, and simplicity in order to reduce both our egos and our carbon footprint. I call this “creating smallness.”
I do not pretend to be more knowledgable than others who have gone before me or will dive deeper than me into any of these areas. But I am an expert in the choices we’ve made to create smallness in our family. We’ve worked hard to orient ourselves towards growth, responsibility, awareness, and a willingness to change. And as foreign residents of Tokyo, one of the largest cities in the world, we have a unique cross-cultural perspective on some of these interests that I believe can bring value, humor, and curiosity to the table.
Welcome. I hope that you can be inspired by our vision to live small as a family in the big city.
