Maimee Rice Commons: designing rice commons by the people, with the people, and for the people of Tsujido

In Japan, the average age of a Japanese farmer is 65 years old. Extreme weather caused by climate change is making rice harvest unpredictable. And no matter how hard you try, no matter what leading edge technology you implement, rice farming is simply not profitable. With the superposition of the societal and natural macroscopic drivers, Japan’s food sufficiency index is at an all time low of 38 percent. Without the economic incentives to grow rice, without a predictable harvest season, without the youth pursuing careers in agriculture, the future of rice, our staple food, and our food security is looking rather grim.

So if rice is not profitable, is it not worth growing? If rice is not profitable, do we throw away our cultural heritage? If rice is not profitable, do we abandon food security? Hopefully no. And we are hoping that you all can help us.

One major issue with modern day rice farming is that it is rather a solitary act. Once a duty tackled by all members of the village, the implementation of “efficient” and “convenient” farming technologies made rice farming a one-person job. While many Japanese people became “free” to spend their time to pursue other careers, what was at stake was community tradition, local communication, and social resilience.

For the last three years we have been fighting this uphill battle in our hometown Tsujido. As the elderly rice farmers are beginning to retire from the solitary repetitive field work, many rice paddies in the local area, as well as rice culture, are beginning to be abandoned. Therefore, a group of us have been adopting these abandoned rice paddies to experiment with alternative forms of “value” creation. Value not derived from capital but value that is nurtured organically by the community.

Through our MAIMEE rice movement, we foster third-places for individuals in Tsujido who feel disconnected in our modern world, we teach organic rice farming techniques to empower local individuals, and hold community events to weave together weakened social bonds. In 2024, we rescued 3 abandoned rice paddies (3000 square meters) and harvested roughly 1 metric ton of rice distributed among the local community to fight food insecurity. Rice farming might not make money in Japan, but it sure does bring people together.

In 2025, we hope to do the same and even more. However, one of our biggest challenges is funding as our initiatives have been all out of pocket for the last three years. We hope that through this microgrant we can help fund future community events, procure and fix necessary equipment, invest in rice paddy infrastructure, and invest in digital communication/management tools.

Over the next few years, 10+ rice paddies are estimated to be abandoned in just our local area. To fight the loss of food security, loss of culture, and loss of social resilience, as practicing futurists, we hope to be a signal of change for Tsujido, Japan, and the world to reimagine the care economy through rice.

Brief: New Care Economies

In the western world, we have recently been hearing an awful lot about the Crisis of Loneliness. With respect to this, Japan is ahead of the curve due to the early bursting of the bubble in the 90s. The superposition of the lost decade, aging population, urban migration, dissolution of the nuclear family, and importation of western consumerism culture all feed in to create the perfect recipe for the loneliness epidemic. And we see this in many forms such as the 68,000 deaths of lonely elderly in 2024, Japan’s romantic sexlessness as well as the marriage “ice age”, and rentable people for social outings.

At Maimee Rice Commons, we believe that we need to confront this societal loneliness by providing people with an alternative form of care. Not one where we can buy ourselves out of loneliness, a practice that we have all become deeply habituated to, but rather one that we all invest our time and energy to rebuild social resilience. And there is nothing better than community farming, an act of nurturing the land, water, and soil, to strengthen social bonds and culture.

As an aside, if any of you might be interested in reading a bit more on Crisis of Loneliness, I wrote an article on this topic more in detail here: https://kentakondo.com/prototyping-retirement

Audience include:
Local people of Tsujido
Future generations of Tsujido
Animals, insects, and microbes that inhabit the rice-paddy ecosystem

In terms of delivery, we will continue to what we have done over the past three years.
We will continue to enrich abandoned rice paddies via organic rice farming (no pesticide, not herbicide).
We will invite and reachout to the local community to grow, harvest, and eat rice.
We will hold community events rice cake ceremonies, harvest ceremony, planting ceremony, cherry blossom viewing, etc.

In 2025 there will be new experiments on our end.

-On the backend we will be developing tools and infrastructure (both physical and digital) to make joining/partaking in the community driven rice paddy more accessible as well as operational as our community grows.
-We will be making this project public and start showcasing our efforts via social media (instagram) and website.

At Maimee Rice Commons, we don’t operate under the traditional notion of leadership. We are a collective of individuals who aim to create a “headless” organization driven by community consensus. We do not have hierarchies, org charts, or a chain of command like a traditional team. We do this because the very idea of “leadership” is the weak point of sustainability and social resiliency projects. We want to create an autonomous local community.
d
There are currently 6 active members who facilitate the groundwork of the rice paddy work and about 50 people who join us when they can.

As the applicant, I am one of the 6 active members of a few who is a native english speaker. If you're interested in a few of my previous work, they can be found on my portfolio website at kentakondo.com

1000 dollars: one year operating cost of 3 rice paddies from last year’s budget (material, seeds, fuel, packaging, tools, etc.)

500 dollars: Investment in rice paddy common infrastructure both physical and digital. This includes building bridges, soil care, compost toilets, signage, tools, digital tools for team communication and social media communications. We would like to create a shared common asset so that anybody can join in without needing to purchase farming equipment.

500 dollars: 4 large community events throughout the year (one for every season $250 each)

Jan-Mar.: Building infrastructure, Setting up Social Media
Mar-May: Sprouting Rice + Cherry blossum Community event
May: Planting Rice + Summer Event
June - August: Weeding Weeding Weeding, did i mention weeding?
October - November: Drying + Harvest, Harvest Ceremony
December: Clean up, Rice Cake Ceremony

• repeat