Talent Misato Okada appeared on Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's long-running talk show "Tetsuko's Room" (TV Asahi), which aired on February 26th.
She lived in Yamanashi Prefecture to care for her mother, but she had no friends around her and nothing to do. She spent her days embroidering and sighing. After the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, she went to teach cross-stitch to women who had to spend their entire lives in temporary housing in the disaster area.
She formed a group called the Stitch Girls, including the wives of elderly fishermen, and they got together to help pass the time by embroidering. "The women in the disaster area came together and eventually opened a local shop. I feel like we were able to support the recovery in the truest sense of the word, and even now it feels like my cousins, like a second home to me," she says.
She also tried beekeeping in Yamanashi. "I was staring outside and wondering what I should do here, and that's when I thought about beekeeping," she explains. A neighbor told her about it, and she smiles as she says, "I love insects. I think bees are so cute. Every morning at around 8 o'clock, they fly out like bullets. They fly through the forest and flowers about 2 kilometers away, and then they all come back in the evening."
Together with the local people, she made a lip balm-like cosmetic product using the honey, and added honey to pound cake. "Those experiences are very encouraging to me now, and I'm really glad that I went to Yamanashi," she recalls.
He currently rents a plot of land about six tatami mats in size in Tokyo and runs a community garden. He seems to find it rewarding that he can "harvest a huge amount" of turnips, radishes, carrots, chrysanthemums, and potatoes.
