Housekeeping & crowdfunding
New website, plus fundraising for Labyrinth House beginning this week
Fall as arrived in all its glory in Tokyo. Between time outdoors last weekend, I cleaned up my online presence. This newsletter now resides at samholden.jp, which had previously hosted an embarrassingly out-of-date profile (“The first stage of the Labyrinth House will be complete in late 2021” 🙈).
For now, it made sense to roll everything into this site by adding some static pages that appear in the navigation bar at the top of the homepage. There’s now an About page with an up-to-date bio, as well as a Projects page that introduces my four ongoing projects, with links to related posts. If you subscribed to my writing but are confused about all the projects I reference, start here. There’s also a Translation page and a Tokyo tours page about the two historical tours that I can offer in Tokyo (group tours on 10/26 and 11/16 are now both full, sign up for future info here).
Raising money to finish Labyrinth House
I came down to Onomichi on Thursday for another week of construction at Labyrinth House, the 29th since we began in 2020. Going into our fifth year, we’re finally within reach of completing the second phase, which includes our experimental community general store, common space for exhibitions or cafes, and living space. This week we’re working on plumbing, ventilation, and finishing walls and infrastructure before we move on to plastering and interiors.
Six to eight times a year, we come together for a week, sleep on the floor above the worksite, share meals and conversation, and build. The project has been sustained by the mutual trust and affection shared by a core team that’s now like a family, as well as a constant stream of fresh energy from young architects, artists, travelers, scholars and others who come nearly every time to help. We do just about everything ourselves, but we still need money for materials and food. So we’re going to have a crowdfunding campaign to help us get over the finish line.
Right now, my accounting sheet for construction of the second house lists expenses of ¥3,296,216 ($22,081 in today’s very low exchange rate, but it feels more like $30,000). Some receipts have surely been lost, and I would estimate I’ve spent another ¥2 million on purchasing tools and traveling down to Onomichi on the Shinkansen. So far, we have received ¥1.23 million in donations from friends and family for the second house. The rest has come out of my pocket.
One way of looking at this is wow, this is really cheap! We got several houses for free and are restoring them for only a few million yen each (the front house, completed in 2022, cost about ¥4.5 million). It’s the real akiya dream! On the other hand, this is actually a pretty significant amount of money for me!
Will I someday earn back the investment? A lot of people in America hear what I’m doing and ask if Labyrinth House is an “investment property” or if we’re going to “flip it.” These concepts simply aren’t relevant in our context. The whole point of this project—the curiosity that brought me back to Japan a decade ago and that keeps us all motivated to carry heavy materials up the hill week after week after week—is to explore the possibilities of how we can use urban space when buildings are no longer real estate assets. What we’re doing is closer to a form of communal play than labor, more art than business. In other words, I don’t want to make money on this. Sure, I want to have enough cash flow to pay the utilities and maintenance expenses down the road, but once we’re done, we’re not going to be optimizing for income, but for uses and opportunities that we think make the community a richer place.
Campaign details to come next week
For this campaign, we are hoping to raise ¥2 million, which should allow us to nearly complete the second house, including all the necessary equipment. If we exceed that amount, any additional funds will go toward stage three: a labyrinthine library that my collaborator, artist Akihiro Yamamoto, has imagined in the ruins of our warehouse.
Later this week, I will send out a newsletter explaining the project’s purpose and progress, and the campaign returns we will send out to supporters (be sure to get your Onomichi cat calendars, original tenugui hand towels, and more!), and instructions for how to make direct, one-time contributions.
Over the past few months, some readers have also been pledging subscriptions through Substack. I really appreciate this sign that you value my writing! I don’t plan on putting up a paywall, but I also recognize that supporting me through this platform may be easiest for some readers, so I will also turn on subscriptions and send out returns to those supporters as well. I do have a lot more planned for this space going forward, including more essays on Labyrinth House and akiya, and a six-part series on the islands south of Onomichi. My immediate goal is to start posting about once a week. Every dollar I can raise for the crowdfunding is more time that I can spend sharing through writing instead of having to overburden myself with translation projects.
All my career choices and projects since coming to Tokyo a decade ago have involved leaps of faith, but few seemed as clear to me as Labyrinth House, despite having no organization, prestige, or income attached to it. I wasn’t going to miss the chance to renovate a couple of beautiful houses in my favorite town, with a community of the best kind of people who share a vision for a new urban commons. We’ll finish it no matter what, but I would be honored to have your support as we reach the end of construction and the next exciting stage begins.
So cool! Excited to be able to support this project - thank you for sharing and looking forward to hearing more deets!