The "sai" of "Sai no Kuni"(Country of Sai) is taken from the "Sai" of Saitama Prefecture. This time we visited the Sai no Kuni Camp Village in Urayama in Chichibu City, Saitama Prefecture. While passing by the Urayama Dam which is nearing completion, as we approached the mountain road which was occasionally crossed by monkeys, a handmade signpost saying "Sai no Kuni Camp Village" at the side of the road came into sight.
This is an auto camp site with 23 bungalows and a tent site with an area of 50 tents.

The owner is Mr. Tadao Matsunaga of Matsunaga Chikusan Inc. He bought the place in June 1993 when the previous owner gave it up before the opening due to financing difficulties.
Inside the camp village, amongst the clean log house bungalows dotting the site was a dazzling silver white hut. This is the management building of the camp village. Its outside walls are made of aluminum cans piled up and held in place by cement. A close look shows some walls are made of empty bottles. These empty cans and bottles were left behind by visitors to the camp village. This is the embodiment of the earthship architecture which Mr. Matsunaga saw in the U.S. and Canada. Of course old tires are also used.
In the first place, no garbage bins are seen in this camp village. Empty cans are collected at the waste collection area in the management building as material for building the hut extensions. The management hut is still under expansion. Visitors happily bring in their empty cans when they hear that these are used to build the hut.

So what about the other wastes. Raw wastes such as remaining food, etc. are used to feed livestock such as chickens and goats. As the chickens here are let free to roam around, their eggs taste very good. The village sells eggs inexpensively the campers. But sometimes these tend to become the prey of the foxes and raccoon dogs since it is situated in the mountains.
Burnable waste is also used to heat the bath. Boilers are expensive and very often some wastes burn at high temperatures and damage the boiler. What came up was the "Goemon" bath (bath tub made of metal). As familiar from the tale of the great theft Ishikawa Goemon who was sentenced to death in a boiling caldron, it is a simple bath tub made by putting a caldron on fire. At the same time, pipes are wound around the chimney to pass water used for the bath to make hot water with the hot air. In the summer, to prevent the bathroom from becoming too hot, pipes are run underground to take in the cool air in the ground. It is indeed use of "ground cooling".

In this way, the wastes produced inside the camp village are used for building or feeding, or turn into fuel. After campers return home, almost no wastes are left behind except for cigarette ends dropped here and there.
However there was one waste which worried Mr. Matsunaga. That was wastewater. The water used in this camp village are filtered through purifying tanks and when clean, soaked by the earth and returned to nature. Sometimes, up to 300 visitors come to the camp village. At such time, the cleaning tanks are insufficient to clean the water, and it seems to make the water smell slightly. Processed water containing detergents also seems to smell. Although this water satisfies water quality standards, still Mr. Matsunaga wondered if there was a way to do something this. He consulted one of his friends, who laughed, saying he was surprised to see Mr. Matsunaga worry about such things.

Mr. Matsunaga is a live stock farmer. He rears 600 cattle at Matsunaga Chikusan Inc. in Ome. Cattle huts there apparently never smell, as the whole floor is spread with sawdust. Sawdust is produced by sawing trees, and wastewater passing through this sawdust becomes clean. The friend laughed because he knew about this. So, Mr. Matsunaga buried sawdust near the mouths of the purifying tank water so that the water passes through it. After that, the odor was removed. Though cattle huts require the sawdust to be changed once in one to two months, in the camp village, the sawdust lasts 1 to 2 years because already purified water is passed through. To change the sawdust, a new hole just has to be dug to fill new sawdust.

Mr. Matsunaga calls himself not a camp village owner but a village chief. It is the show of the spirit to solve waste problems in his own village instead of burdening others.