From the flamboyant Bangkok of the 1950s to a mostly abandoned factory in Issan, a memory of Jim Thompson and an open question about the future of luxury.

Toshifumi Ishida's golden rice, bowing under the weight of its own abundance, taught me something no amount of wealth or success ever could. The richer the grain, the lower it leans towards the earth that made it.

Master Yano had packed the riverbed with branches and charcoal, bringing oxygen back into soil that had been sealed by trash and sewage for ten years. It was extraordinary, watching land repair itself in such a short time.

My New Year's Eve fish was fed Peruvian anchoveta, raised in a Vietnamese pond, and served to me as a Caribbean catch of the day. I believe the world is now fed by this paradox.

Space is not measured by what fills it, but by Ma, the interval between things, the invisible structure of emptiness that allows life to exist. I lived in a house that was physically minimal, yet the space it held was vast.

At thirteen, Daisuke Tanaka bought a train ticket to Tokyo and walked into the Australian Embassy to plan his own way out. Today he buys coffee directly from farmers and teaches them to read the true value of their own beans.

Four years ago, Kiyoka walked away from an engineering career to grow organic roses in her family's village on Suo-Oshima. She's not looking for perfect roses. She's looking for honest ones.

In a small village in Kyushu, a father and his son still make pottery exactly the way their ancestors did. Two wheels per workshop. No exceptions. The tradition is 300 years old and it shows no interest in modernising.

Lost in our CNN cyber-vision of life, we forget how much power we actually hold as individuals to sustain a strong local economy. Jour de Fête 2017 reminded me what that looks like in a room.

We spend enormous energy certifying what is natural. What if we simply labelled what is not? A Neroli project in Minamata, a French certifying body, and a question that refuses to go away.

Hideya Matsumoto left winemaking school, worked two wineries, and settled on Suo-Oshima to grow grapes on soil wrecked by forty years of chemicals. He's not making wine yet. He's rebuilding the ground it will eventually come from.