Eat your heart all those who dream of creating a sustainable life in "real Japan." Most people have no inkling as to how to find a way, but some do, and Tom Morris and his wife, Kae, are two of them.
They live in Gokurakuji, on the narrow-gauge Enoden Line running along the Shonan coast between Kamakura and Fujisawa. The small, quaint station spills out crowds to view misted hydrangeas during the rainy season, but walk across the red bridge and turn right, and it's a different world.
The house is not only in traditional style, but enormous. Upstairs, in the room used for teaching, with a scroll reading "Agape Ceramic Studio" hanging in the "tokonoma" (art alcove), Tom explains that it was built somewhere between 60 and 80 years ago; no one seems quite sure. "We had a visitor at one of our exhibitions, an elderly man well over 60, who remembered living here as a child."