The Question That Stayed With Me
What on earth had happened.
After the flood that hit Amakusa in August 2025, I couldn’t even reach my orchard. For a while, I couldn’t speak.
Mudslides had completely blocked the road in. Two days later, once the mud had started to dry, I climbed over it to get in. Part of the orchard had been buried too, and several trees were knocked down — some still holding fruit. These were dekopon trees I’d spent nearly ten years raising. Pruning, feeding, timing the harvest — I’d learned every one of them with my own hands.
I thought I understood what it meant to work with nature. I’d been through typhoons and brutal heat more times than I could count. But what stood in front of me that day was beyond anything I’d call “experience.”
What on earth had happened.
The question wasn’t only about the weather. Something inside me was quietly coming apart.
A year has passed since then, almost to the day.
When “once in fifty years” becomes “once in ten”
Kyushu has always been a rainy region. But lately, the gap between wet and dry has felt sharper than it used to.
I once wrote that Amakusa’s climate suits citrus well. That’s still true. But the range within that “suitable climate” seems to have shifted into territory I hadn’t reckoned with — a feeling that’s grown especially strong these past three or four years.
How many times have I heard the phrase “a once-in-fifty-years storm” in just the last few years? On paper, it’s once in fifty. In the body, it’s starting to feel like once in ten. I doubt I’m the only one who feels this.
Perennial crops — trees you plant once and live alongside for decades — are built on a long-term trust with the land. I’ve started to feel that the foundation of that trust is quietly shifting under our feet.
Is retreat the same as defeat?
Standing in that orchard, I had a decision to make.
Rebuild the road, restore the damaged trees, put in the time and money to bring it all back — or let go of the orchard itself?
Honestly, the word “retreat” repelled me at first. Quitting something I’d built over ten years — wasn’t that just losing? Some part of me kept circling back to that thought.
But given a little time, I started to see it differently.
Back when I worked for an airline, I was also involved in corporate planning — including decisions about when to bring in new aircraft, and when to retire old ones. How long do you keep flying an aging plane? That was never an emotional question. It was about safety, cost, and where the business needed to go next.
Continuing to use something isn’t always the right call. Sometimes letting go, cleanly, is the more rational choice for what comes next. A sense drilled into me during that earlier career came quietly back to me, standing in front of that orchard.
In the last issue, I wrote about Hari-Kuyō — the custom of holding a memorial for worn-out needles, giving thanks for their work before setting them down. That wasn’t resignation. It was a way of marking an ending so you could move forward.
Maybe letting go of the orchard is the same kind of thing. Thank the trees and the soil, and close that chapter. Not defeat — just a point you pass through on the way to something else.
I once heard that an old Chinese military text describes something like “a courageous retreat.” I haven’t studied it closely, but the phrase has stayed with me. Retreating takes courage too — sometimes more than continuing does. Standing in that orchard was the first time I really understood what that meant.
Knowing when to get on, and when to get off
Let me say a bit more about the decision itself.
Looking back, my farming life had good timing baked in from the start. When I left my company job to farm, direct-to-consumer platforms like Poketto Marché and Tabechoku were just being born. Long before anyone used the word “no-code,” tools were emerging that let anyone build a website or an online shop with their own hands. Selling directly to consumers, without relying on the old JA distribution system, was just becoming possible right as I started.
A few years later, the pandemic hit. Ironically, it was a high point for anything sold online. As markets and restaurants closed, online sales kept more than just my orchard afloat.
This year, one of the major direct-sales platforms quietly shut down. Around the same time, last year’s flood damage caught up with me.
The timing was good going in. Looking back now, the timing of leaving hasn’t been bad either.
Maybe it’s just luck. But if I had to put a name to it, I’d call it ten years of sensing small shifts in the environment and making my own judgment calls, one at a time. Not a stroke of divine wind — just being ready when the moment happened to arrive.
What I’m keeping, what I’m letting go
There’s one more thing I want to be honest about here.
What I let go of was farming for production — orchards built around shipping fruit and chasing yield. What I intend to keep are the parts where people show up in person: harvest experiences, the farmstay.
There’s no noble reason behind it. I just want to keep doing that part.
I’ve never been suited to desk work. Part of why I chose to become an aircraft mechanic instead of an engineer, straight out of school, was to avoid sitting at a desk all day. I ended up doing desk work anyway — nineteen years of it, in management and corporate planning. I started thinking about leaving at 35. I actually left at 45. Ten years to make up my mind, slowly.
Touching soil, being tossed around by the weather, meeting people within nature’s own rhythm — that’s part of what “work” means to me, in a way profitability alone can’t measure. Even now, having folded the production side, that part is something I won’t let go of. Maybe that’s just my own way of keeping balance.
To what was under my feet all along
And so I decided to let go of most of what this orchard, as production farming, had been.
Ten years of riding the weather’s ups and downs with these citrus trees came to a kind of close. Around the same time, word reached me about a job in silk, in the heartlands of Japan.
Coincidence, or something else? Honestly, I still can’t quite explain it. But those ten years of growing citrus taught me, in my body, both what it means to live by nature’s rhythm and what it means for nature to refuse to go your way. Without that, I don’t think I could have taken on this new work.
The flood didn’t change everything. But the question it left me with, standing in that orchard — what on earth had happened — brought me another question.
Maybe continuing isn’t the only way to honor something.
What’s the precious thing at your own feet — and how are you protecting it?
221fab, and an orange kei truck
There’s one more thing that happened this year — another case of “coincidence, or not” that I want to write about.
This newsletter’s colors, and 天草農工房ふぁお’s brand colors, are amber gold (#fab221) and deep blue (#221fab). The numbers actually come from a simple pun — combining the farm’s domain, fao-agro.biz, with my family name, Tsutsui. Any deeper meaning was added afterward.
As it turns out, though, that amber gold happens to be close to the color of a mikan.
I recently traded in the kei truck I’d driven for nearly ten years. For the new one, I chose an orange close to that same “mikan color,” of course.
That the color I chose as a citrus farmer happens to overlap with my own brand color — coincidence, or not, I honestly don’t know.
As an aside: these small trucks that run Japan’s farm roads apparently have a cult following overseas as “kei trucks.” My nephew in New Zealand actually messaged me — what happened to the old kei truck?! Apparently old Japanese kei trucks sell for good money there too, even used. Mind you, I’d already traded mine in by then.
There’s something here about how an outside gaze finds value in what we treat as an ordinary working tool. It feels like the same structure as Hari-Kuyō, or the sense that the divine dwells in all things.
I can’t prove it. It’s just the convenient daydream of an ordinary middle-aged man. But somehow, in my head, it all connects along one line.
Back to Japan #3
Yosui Inoue, “Shōnen Jidai” (1990)
The summer of the flood. The summer of retreat. And now, the next season.
This song kept playing in my head the whole time I was writing this issue.
🎵AppleMusic. 🎵 Spotify
PS.
While I was still writing this, on July 28th, an earthquake with a maximum intensity of 7 hit Kumamoto. Amakusa also registered an intensity of 5. My orchard, and my family in Kumamoto, were fortunately unharmed.
But knowing that this same region saw a major earthquake about ten years ago too, I find myself quietly asking — without an answer yet — how I want to live and work on this land going forward.
English translation by Claude