Namaiki’s Green Grafitti

Photos and artwork courtesy of Namaiki

“The New Zealand-Japan Foundation probably has Interpol out for me,” chuckles David Duval Smith.

He is a stellar designer with a proclivity for creative thinking, and in the late ’80s was selected by the New Zealand-Japan Foundation for a scholarship to go to Tokyo and study the methods of Japan’s industrial success through graphic design. “I was meant to go back after a year and share the secrets of industrial wealth with New Zealand,” says Duval Smith, who never did manage to catch that plane back. He’s been in Japan ever since, having adopted it as his home.

“Yeah, I did a runner,” he grins.

Duval Smith stuck around Tokyo, freelance art-directing for clients like Weiden & Kennedy, Idee, and Sony under the name Namaiki, which means naughty or rebellious in Japanese. In the mid-’90s, he ran into architect Michael Frank. The two of them had something in common—Frank, on his way back to the UK from a trip to China, had stopped in Tokyo six years earlier “for just a week,” but he, too, chose not to catch his homeward-bound plane. “Mike and I found each other at a bar about eleven years ago,” explains Duval Smith, “and this is where a lot of our work is still done.”

The two realized that they had complementary skills that catalyzed each other’s creativity, and a partnership was born. (The moniker “Namaiki” came to encompass both of them.) They love beer, so they started Tokyo Ale, a beer company, with some friends. They needed a place to hang out and play silly music, so they got together with their friends Mark and Astrid, from Klein Dytham Architecture, and created the event space Superdeluxe. Many of their other projects followed the same pattern: we like this, we can create that, let’s connect the dots and come up with an opportunity.

Namaiki’s latest project is guerilla gardening. Theme caught up with Duval Smith to get the story of how two transplants became the ultimate transplanters.

Theme: We understand you’ve grown some champion vegetables in…a vacant lot near your apartment in Tokyo. How did you become such a card-carrying hippie?
David Duval-Smith: (Laughs.) Good kickoff. Kind of happened by accident when I moved into an old Japanese house with a garden. After years of making useless bloody stuff, I was amazed to see the stuff make itself. Things that are alive just seem so much more useful—they multitask. Cleaning the air. Cooling things down. Making you feel good. Making your food, making the birds and insects food. Changing everyday. Oh, and producing insanely psychedelic, mathematically complex, impossible-to-print color blooms all over the place. Man! Lucky world.

Tell us about your guerilla farms. What are they, and how are they operated?
They are not exactly operated, they are simply left to their own devices. That’s the beauty of it, the self-sustainability.

There was an empty lot where they knocked down the house in front of mine, and we just kept chucking seeds in there. Loads of pumpkins and herbs sprung up amongst the weeds. It was all left to go wild, and I was surprised that the insects and diseases left the goodies alone, unlike trying to grow and tend the same vegetables in my garden. This lasted one season, then got turned into a carpark. But it did become a real community for a while, everyone borrowing herbs and chatting and playing and admiring the garden. It was really a nice thing in the area for a while. Should’ve got permission!

Another [guerilla farm] was the continuation of gardens started by old people in a site destined for redevelopment in the Kamiyacho district in Tokyo. In the unused empty lots behind an office, we planted veggies and flowers, pruned the trees, and visiting Swedish artist and rebel Lagombra built a small treehouse. They will be redeveloping the site within 10 years, and it’s all been locked up now, so we can’t get in there anymore. We also planted a bunch of broccoli in the holes in the concrete outside the Yokohama Bank Art Gallery. It was really funny, they were just popping out [everywhere]. We’ve planted daikon radishes next to individual roadside trees. You know, those little plots of dirt on the side of the road...why should they house just one tree? We just carried seeds with us all the time last year and were popping them all over the place.

What led you to projects like this?
Logic, good food, and good friends. Smoking pot helps, too. Only in Amsterdam of course.

The model for my farms is Masanobu Fukuoka’s seed ball project and Bill Mollison’s Permaculture system of sustainable agriculture. (Fukuoka is the pioneer of natural farming and sustainable agriculture in Japan who now gives lectures abroad. Mollison is an Australian researcher.) Basically, the idea is to spread the seed and let nature go. It’s about living in an edible jungle. You don’t need to pay 100 yen to buy a few pieces of lettuce or herbs. You just plant some seeds, the rain falls and they grow, and you get hundreds of leaves and thousands of seeds the next year. People have been calling them “guerilla farms” or “green graffiti,” I guess because it is done without permission. But I believe it is a victimless crime, if a crime at all. No one profits [financially], there is no damage, no loss of anything. A gross and a net gain. I came to a realization that nothing was more miraculous than soil and seed. They are positive in every sense, right up to the massive real profit in seeds at the end of the plant’s life, clearly sustainable, and essential to human existence.

The project also was started as a reaction to the car, which I believe is a true villain in communities. Cemented roads are unproductive, as is parking. Yes, personal mobility is important, but I think that can be addressed more intelligently. And also, yes, goods and delivery systems are important, but only in commerce and the consumer market, which is quite unsustainable. At present, it takes 100 calories to make 10 calories of food, not to mention petroleum-based fertilizers, machine harvesting, plastic, and the worldwide delivery involved. This is unsustainable, unhealthy, and unintelligent. Vegetables are best fresh, and so I thought that they should be grown locally.

People sometimes use the expression “going to seed” to refer to something in the process of declining or decreasing, but I think going to seed is a necessary part of life. That’s what harvest is about: throw everything, return everything.

How have people reacted to them?
Very positively. People love plants and nature in general. And of course, people really love free food, though this is really a dangerous political move that some people are quite shocked by. It also creates a great sense of community. I haven’t met anyone that hasn’t reacted with delight, apart from those who have a financial interest in the properties.

People sometimes use the expression “going to seed” to refer to something in the process of declining or decreasing, but I think going to seed is a necessary part of life. That’s what harvest is about: throw everything, return everything.

Are the guerilla farms part of your work/art, or was it something that just happened?
Well, I feel this “every man for himself” thing is not going to get us much further as a species. Mainly, it’s really fun and never does what you expect. No damage being done either.

How much time do you spend these days actually designing? Do you still consider yourself a designer, or an artist for that matter?
Well, the labels don’t really help much. I will never consider myself an artist, but that word does get thrown about a bit. We do loads of graphic design still. It is easy, and it pays the bills. Interestingly enough, the more I became interested in plants and food, the easier graphic design became. We’re still doing art projects, installations, and live events. We’re also playing video and music quite often at Superdeluxe, though more and more, the things we are making are alive.

What keeps you in Tokyo?
I think, as a project, it is more relevant to do this kind of thing in Tokyo. The “belly of the beast” kind of thing I guess. We are looking for a place an hour outside of Tokyo with more land. Probably down in the cheap area on the bottom of Miura Peninsula, below Tokyo. We’d like to find a cheap, old farmhouse or something that we can turn into a guesthouse/studio/farm/gallery/theatre/et cetera. There’ll be a big, fat net connection to keep the media flowing—kind of a countryside Superdeluxe. We work mainly with people over instant messaging networks now. Well, and in the bar.

We currently have a place about four hours out—an old thatched-roof farmhouse, our manager Yada’s grandparents’ house. Yada’s mother tends the farm and apple orchard on a daily basis. We go there and help once a month or so. Great tasting veggies and some good lessons to be learned from the old Japanese countryside.

We assume it’s very different from the world you grew up in.
I grew up in a regular family in New Zealand, with a nice house and two cars. The lesson I learned from that experience was that the more you have, the more you have to protect. Right now I live in a hiraya (old, traditional wooden house) built in the ’60s in Minami-Azabu, right behind the hip Roppongi district. The house is made of dark wood and the columns are really thin. But I love it, because these Japanese houses are made to expand their space, by opening up the shoji (rice paper screens), for example. It’s great how easily an abundance of air and light is let into the house. And sleeping on the futon is very efficient because you can just fold your bed and put it away, which also expands the space. Western beds waste so much interior space!

And look at the irori (fireplace used to burn firewood and charcoal). Burning fire in a house practically made of paper! (Laughs.) It’s a dangerous but very sophisticated system of providing heat throughout the entire house. Japanese design is beautiful, and I hope things like that are maintained.

Right now I’ve pretty much opened up my house for anybody to come and sleep in. I’ve left the keys outside for my friends to come and go as they like, and they can pull out their futons and sleep and stay overnight. I’ve opened up my studio too. It’s a free space, and anyone is welcome.

Mike visited Japan “for a week” that turned into 17 years or so. We both ended up loving Japan. It’s a safe country and an intelligent society with a great sense of humor. In fact, I now feel entirely homeless, for I am no longer a New Zealander. But it’s okay, because my friends are my extended family. Like I said, I don’t need too many things to be happy. I still go back to visit New Zealand from time to time, but if I had stayed in New Zealand all along, I never would have become the person that I am. Coming to Japan changed my life.

Can you envision living anywhere else other than Tokyo?
Parts of Europe interest me. Costa Rica sounds amazing, I hear it has the largest amount of protected forests of any country. And Cuba. I love the statistic that Havana produces 80% of its own food from car park gardens, rooftops, and empty lots.

Tell us more about the Namaiki philosophy.
We’re more concerned with playing around and goofing off very professionally. Hard work and tomfoolery is the idea. Most of our work is not rational (though I have been post-rationalizing it here for you!); [most of our projects are] made in the spirit of a practical joke, whatever makes people laugh. The workshops that we do are always in the spirit of “no rules” and collaborative play, so a lot of the stuff is generated by kids, and old people, and whomever. Trying to get rid of the “I am an artist, and so you listen to me!” kind of crap. Sixteen-year-old girls can definitely draw images that I could never think of. Everyone has a voice, and everyone can be involved.