Table of Contents

1. Newest blog posts
2. The purpose of this site
3. 📨  Sign-up for bi-monthly updates about the translated work, excerpts from our translation sessions & for a notification of when the co-translated book is published
4. The book we are co-translating
5. The mission of this book
6. Who this book is for
7. Our shared purpose in co-translating this book
8. Who we Are + How this Came About
9. About the Author
10. How we have been Working on the Co-Translation
11. FAQ
12. Contact us

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The purpose of this site is to;

-First and foremost let people know that we (Katherina and Mika) are doing this work!!! And that we have been co-translating this book for nearly three years now and are nearing the final stretch of our work.

-To provide basic information on the co-translation of the book.

-To provide regular updates and celebrations of our work to generate excitement and momentum toward its’ release (as well as energy and motivation for us while finishing co-translating, editing, and communicating with the people doing the cover art, layout design and publishing in this nearing-final stretch of the work).

-To share relevant tidbits, resources, references and excerpts from recordings of mine and Mika’s reading sessions together of learnings, bits of our conversation and self-exploration that we had while co-translating that we found meaningful and think that you, dear reader(s), may also enjoy hearing and/or reading. 🙂

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 📨  If you’d like to receive two emails a month with updates on the work we are doing, excerpts from the book and our conversations translating it together, and to know when it is published, enter your email in the box below and click Subscribe ˚𓆝｡𓆞˚

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The book we are co-translating

📖 Above is the cover of the original Japanese book available via Amazon Japan here by author Naoki Shiomi-san.

The mission of this book

The mission of this book is to provide practical tools and ways of thinking to generate new ideas for community development and self-discovery to help in finding alternative ways of living that are more aligned with who we are and with nature in order to utilize our innate gifts in service to the world. Included in each of the 88 sections is a self-inquiry question to prompt you to look deeper into who you are, what you want and what you might be able to do where you are now with what you have.

Who this book is for

Mika: It is for anyone who is kind of lost and doesn’t know how to live. I think it’s more for the younger generation and for those who live in the city. For the people who do kind of decent work and cannot leave well-paid work that doesn’t satisfy their soul.

Katherina: I want to answer who this book is for anecdotally. When I met with Shiomi-san online for the first (and only) time so far since asking Mika to translate his book together and her agreeing, he asked me “Who are you translating this book for?”. At the time I hadn’t really thought about it and didn’t have much of an answer. He then asked me how old I was and when I answered 28, he said that he was 28 years old when he came up with the concept of Half Farmer Half X. He told me that this was the book that he wished he had had as a 28 year old.

In reading it together with Mika, I felt a definitive sense of being believed in and guided as a younger person. I had the sense that my worries about how I was living were being confirmed and that there was someone out there who was encouraging me to look deep inside myself and envision what my life could look like beyond the boundaries of what it looked like now. That someone else was affirming that connection with nature and growing food, however small-scale are important. That we are all one-of-a-kind and each have our own unique gifts to offer in service to the world. And lastly that there is no step too small that I can take with what I have where I am now as a way to move forward towards my vision for how I want to live.

I don’t want to say that this book is only for youth or the younger generation, although it’s certainly the focus, so I will say that it is for anyone looking for practical tools or new ways of thinking about how to live and exist in this era and around community development that are more full of meaning and aligned with who they are and with nature in order to utilize their innate gifts in service to the world.

My answer to Shiomi-san now is that I have co-translated it for anyone looking at their current way of working and living and longing for something different. For those spending so many hours in front of a computer and feeling a deep sadness longing to be outside, to move their bodies and to connect with other people. For people who find that despite having food on the table, that their hearts aren’t satisfied without doing something they find meaningful in their lives as well. And especially for anyone who longs for a different sphere related to Japan to actively engage in that aims to creatively address and interconnect two big challenges of our time; the environmental crises and the challenges of doing work we find fulfilling, by coming up with creative ways of living and working both as individuals and as communities.

Our Shared Purpose in Co-translating this Book

To invite people into trying to find or create a new way of living that is more meaningful for them, more connected to nature and that utilizes their innate gifts in service to their local communities and the world.

We believe the Half Farmer Half X Lifestyle gives some hints for the younger (and older) generations for how to live. It’s an idea for a way of living from Japan.

Katherina has lived in Japan and Mika has lived in the Western world so this dynamic and this encounter produced something that was unexpected. Mika never believed something like this would happen from talking to Della on her podcast. So even though we live so far apart we found something in common.

We believe that there are some people who can resonate with the ideas in this book. We are not making community here but are more inviting people to ask themselves; Why don’t you try getting involved and take a first step to try something different? This co-translation is more like an invitation to find a new way of living. Half Farmer Half X is something that resonated with both of us. And if you want to know something more around this idea, we are going to publish this translation.

Interview in English with Naoki Shiomi-san and Furugori Mika-san on the Upstream podcast about Half Farmer Half X with Renegade Economist Della Duncan

Who we Are + How this Came About

Mika’s interviews in Ayabe and her final dissertation can be downloaded and read here;

About the Author

How We Have Been Working on the Co-Translation

In this book, Shiomi-san writes about the danger of leaving everything to the professionals and the importance of thinking things through for ourselves. Along this vein, in an era of valuing professionals, certifications, and AI as much as we do, we find it very meaningful that we were able to do this translation in the way that we did.

We have been meeting online more or less consistently for the past two years one to two times every week or so to read a section (2 pages) of the book together. We’ve been recording our reading sessions together in which we each reach 1-3 sentences in Japanese at a time and then say in English what the meaning is of what we just read. The other person then checks their understanding of what they’ve just heard and asks any questions about what was just read. Then after our sessions, I (Katherina) translates into English what we read based on the recordings into a Google doc. There, I’ll add comments for any parts and sections I’m unsure about. Mika, when she has time, will edit the whole of what I translated and answer any questions. When we both have questions about a particular section or part, or are both unsure about something – we email Shiomi-san who clarifies for us what he meant.

We didn’t have any deadline and instead focussed on the quality of connection between us and the essence of the meaning behind Shiomi-san’s work through finding time to meet and work on it around our other work commitments. We hope that the joy and presence that we had in reading it together will be conveyed energetically through our work and that you too, as readers, will feel it! We also hope that our co-translation stayed as true as possible to Shiomi-san’s original intended meaning and messages that he tried to convey in this book!

Frequently Asked Questions We Imagine You Might Have

We’ll add to this list as questions come up.

1. Why translate this book and not Shiomi-san’s first book?

I (Katherina) was asked the same thing by Shiomi-san and at the time answered that because this book was his most recently released book, it would have his most recent thoughts on how to live a Half Farmer Half X kind of way of life. I thought that if he had changed his mind since writing his first book, that I would know about what he thought differently now by reading this book. I had also gotten confused with this book and another of his books with “88” in the title, 綾部発半農半Xな人生の歩き方88: 自分探しの時代を生きるためのメッセージ (88 Walks of a Half Farmer Half X Life From Ayabe: Messages for Living in an Era of Self-Discovery, not yet translated into English) published by U Time Publishers in 2007. So at least initially, I was hoping to glean more practical real-life examples for how to actually live in this way from what other people were doing. In the end we decided to continue going with the one we had started translating. This past late summer of 2024, Shiomi-san reached out to us to let us know that a publisher in the UK reached out to him this past summer to ask to translate his first book, 半農半Xという生き方 (The Way of Living Called Half Farmer Half X) published by Sony Magazine in 2006. So stay tuned! There will be two books about Half Farmer Half X and related concepts coming out in the near future.

Contact Us

For now, if you have any questions about our work, want to share anything related to it, or would like to offer any appreciations, celebrations or acknowledgments for what we are doing, please use the below form to send us a message and we’ll try to respond within two weeks via the email you entered.