A reporter's love affair for farmhouse

"Minka: My Farmhouse in Japan" (Princeton Architectural Press, 241 pages. $24.95), by John Roderick: The extraordinary living room on the cover of John Roderick's new book of Japanese-American love brought back a precious memory of my best days as an Associated Press correspondent in Asia and sent me digging for a 24-year-old album that includes my own first impressions of Roderick's beautiful minka.

At the time, I described Roderick as AP's "famous old China hand." He was then a youthful 69.

A quarter-century later, he's still one of the best-known writers for the world's largest news organization, an occasional contributor to world newspapers with a unique view of the Asia he covered over several decades.

A journalist to the end, Roderick has already proofread his own obituary, but without pushing for its publication anytime soon.

His just-published "Minka: My Farmhouse in Japan" is an architectural look at Japan's remaining 17th-century farmhouses, a cultural and historical adventure, a famous foreign correspondent's journal, and, indeed, a love story. It chronicles Roderick's growing love for his restored minka that he at first rejected as a monstrosity, for the Takishita family whose son he eventually adopted legally, and for Japan.

The book builds from the basics of the love-hate relationship between Americans and Japanese that grew from the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the acceptance into his minka of luminaries including European royalty, ambassadors, governors.

Other visitors included a then-future American president, U.S. envoy to China George H. W. Bush, and a possible second future American president.

Roderick's memory of a visit to the farmhouse by then first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and her mother while President Clinton attended a 1993 summit in Tokyo marks a delightful chapter in the story of the house Roderick purchased from a descendant of an ancient military clan in Gifu prefecture for 5,000 yen, the equivalent in the early 1960s of $14.

Roderick, with the help of his surrogate Japanese family, spent several thousand dollars over several years dismantling the house board by board and transporting it to a hilltop in Kamakura, and then restoring it and another ancient farmhouse on the same property, creating a showcase of Japanese antiquity and modern ingenuity.

His adopted son, Yoshihiro "Yochan" Takishita, supervised the restoration and became a renown antique dealer and rebuilder of Japanese farmhouses, including one in Argentina and a complex of three in Honolulu.

In 1983, I described the scene stepping out of the Kamakura train station to visit Roderick's minka as a scene from a Norman Rockwell painting. I expect it to be not quite so quaint today, but his book assures that a visit to the minka still provides an escape from the roar of modern Tokyo and world turmoil.

"When the hurly-burly of today's world overwhelms me with its news of the never-ending war between good and evil, love and hate," Roderick writes, "I hobnob with the rustic ghosts of centuries past in my restored old farmhouse on a hill, overlooking Kamakura, the ancient capitol of Japan."

The book, published in Roderick's 10th decade of life, is also a testament to the possible joys of longevity. It celebrates a life well lived and is an accomplishment that serves as an inspiration for anyone entering advanced age with fear there may be no more of a life's story worth telling.