HappyBlackSheep Japan

Groups allow members to form a sub-section of the site to discuss and organise a particular community or project. Its a place to focus on location specific details. Access is limited to trusted members only.

This site is intended to grow as a resource for members. As such, a few pages of the site are open to all to view, but much of the content is only available to members. If you wish to join up as an active member, you will be contacted via email to provide a little information about yourself, and your reason for wishing to join, and this is mainly to verify you are a real person and not a spammer. You are then strongly encouraged to provide a little background on your "My Page" as way of introduction to the rest of the members, especially where you are located so you will appear on the HBS GoogleMaps (only Trusted Members can view profile information - and individuals can limit it further to only friends). Within the site are Groups focused on specific regions of interest. These are only accessible to Trusted Members who join them, to provide a little more privacy for detailed localised discussions. Administrators reserve the right to reject or rescind membership to anyone not following the core principle of mutual respect.

Non-members can see some areas of the site, notable the first 100 characters of Blog posts and general information sections, but to access the Members list and profiles, Groups and the Forums you will need to join as a member. There is no cost to join. After you have been a member for a while you can apply to join as a trusted member, and have access to more forums and private information. To become a trusted member you must be know and sponsored by another trusted member, preferable having met face to face in the real world. Read more about the member access system here.

This site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

wealth without work;
pleasure without conscience;
science without humanity;
knowledge without character;
politics without principle;
commerce without morality;
worship without sacrifice.

This network has been set-up to provide a meeting place and discussion group for people interested in establishing and transitioning to semi-intentional communities within Japan. The organisers area of interest is Okayama, but people wanting do something similar in other areas in Japan are also welcome to join the discovery process. We can set up groups for each area of interest. This really is an exercise in Transition Initiatives, and our aim is to use this concept to build the many resilient future communities in Japan that we want to live in.

The long term aim is to:
Discover a place/s where a group of like minded people can establish a loose collective of independent long term settlers within a countryside environment, with the intention of moving towards a simpler, more sustainable future, whilst building a supportive and resilient wider community in which to do so.

This group is especially focused on English speaking foreigners wanting to live in Japan, but does not wish to exclude people of any background, especially like minded local Japanese people. There may be a related Japanese language site to this one in the near future, though you are welcome to post here in Japanese as well.

Our core values are: mutual respect, a desire to become part of a supportive community, and a belief in building a resilient, sustainable future.

The framework is a loose collective to allow individual freedoms, whilst building a community to support the core values. Instead of an "intentional community" that seeks to impose fairly rigid guidelines and rules, the semi-intentional community is more a process of finding good neighbours, and building good neighbourhoods. While the initial focus is in the countryside, this concept can be applied just as well to towns and cities, and I hope it will! How it might work for us is what we are here to discover. :-) Each eventual community will have its own way, based on the desires of those who join, but in all cases the core values should hold.

For general discussion on Country Living please also visit the Gaijinpot.com and CountryLiving forums.

Note: Please set your username to the be same as your Gaijin.pot user name if you use that site. Helps us identify each other. :-)

Also, can I urge you use your Profile page to display a little about yourself and your own goals, and maybe use the Blog function here to outline your own personal point of views about what sort of future you would like to see, and describe your own personal journey towards that goal.

“If you do not change direction, you will end up where you are going” - Lao Tzu