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.