Just Enough: Lessons from Japan for Sustainable Living, Architecture, and Design

How the mindset of traditional Japanese society can guide our own efforts to lead a green lifestyle today.

If we want to live sustainably, how should we feel about nature? About waste? About our forests and rivers? About food? Just Enough is a book of stories and sketches that give valuable insight into what it is like to live in a sustainable society by describing life in Japan some two hundred years ago, during the late Edo period, when cities and villages faced many of the same environmental challenges we do today and met them beautifully and inventively.

Azby Brown is a leading authority on Japanese architecture, design, and environmentalism and the author of several groundbreaking books, including Small Spaces (1993), The Japanese Dream House (2001), The Very Small Home (2005), and The Genius of Japanese Carpentry (1989/2014). He is lead researcher for Safecast, a global citizen-science organization that pioneered crowdsourced environmental monitoring. Azby Brown has lived in Japan since 1985.