Can a kominka be a homestead?

What started off as a balcony garden kind of became this thing with growing my own food. Though I could barely grow potted tomatoes in my balcony, I had some success with growing herbs like rosemary, basil, garlic etc.

Anyway, I’d already kind of gone on this path of being a plant mom while I was still in Oakville but it was a full fledged fever now.

Now that I was kinda-sorta stable and ready to unpack some serious sh!t, what better hobby to cultivate than gardening?

So I watched a bunch of YT videos, namely Epic Gardening because the host was just so charming and honestly very easy on the eyes.

Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. So of course, the slide into romanticizing homesteading was the inevitable course of things. I mean if you were to believe what you watch on YT, homesteading basically solves all world problems. It’s fun to think about how you’d grow your own food and you cook the food you grow and your kids help you raise cute little farm animals.

In the mean time though, I had been on a crash course to unpacking a lot of trauma, all the way back to my phopho and my phopho’s unknown phopho whom we would never know because well, we have no more graveyards because the Indian government destroyed them to build shitty buildings. idk. Point being, we no longer have access to our ancestors. And that was just one of the things I was processing.

Aside from that, since I moved to Japan and through Co-Vid, I had intense India feels and couldn’t help feeling as if I were really just completely rootless. Like my entire foundation had washed away and I were just a nub. In the beginning of 2023, I made up my mind to take a mental break from trying to “make it”, forcing on myself whatever I thought it meant to be productive. I really sat with every single thing I made and I thought about if it was regenerative, if it was an act of resistance against capitalistic forces or if I was just making shit because I didn’t know what to do with myself.

All that stewing and brewing eventually made its way to the way I took on gardening as a hobby like a newly minted English gentry trying to show off his own exotic gardens. Which is to say, I was buying and raising invasive plants with no regard to what it meant to be responsible for it, other than how showy and awesome it looked in my apartment.

So anyhow, once we moved into our kominka, the idea solidified in my gut that an an “off the grid” homestead, an ideology that your home is this island was an extension of the imperialist mentality and it was just as toxic as its colonial form.

A homestead required you to become a slave to another system in which you were this central figure to keeping the machine oiled. It’s built on this idea that once you disengage from the capitalist system, you suddenly don’t need community or solidarity. That disengagement from an imperio-capitalist space requires you to be this hermit.

Taking care of my kominka is a commitment and frankly speaking, I have NFI how my house exists. If I did not have the bevy of specialists, from the woodworkers, to roof specialists, to the landscaper, to my neighbors, I could definitely not live in this house. I can’t even ask a general contractor to replace my tatami mats cause he’s gotta contact the tatami guy.

They are specialists and their trade is ancient. The idea of a kominka, imho, is antithetical to that of a homestead. We depend on a community of people to bring this house together. That’s why a kominka could never be a homestead because tbh, it requires a goddamn village to keep it upright.

So on that note, I’ve been on a thing with food sovereignty which became an off shoot thing while I was dabbling with the idea of homesteading… which I’ll probably talk about next but for now imma just leave some interesting YTs I’ve been watching!