Living
Coming to Japan we chose countryside living over city living. (thats probably not better!) We live in a small house. Importantly, its a very short drive to work and we can walk to shops and restaurants. Its a longish walk to the station.
Car
We bought a nice small car. Its a Nissan Tiida (Versa in USA). We got the smallest engine. I have not fixed my bicycle. This is one of my big failings on the environmental plan.
Travel
We decided against a trip to Australia for New Year instead choosing Taiwan. And we haven't done any international recreational travel since.
Work
I have tried hard to reduce business travel too. This is tricky because I don't want to be ineffective at work. If I am then our competitor who does continue to travel will just take our business and the travel will be done by somebody else. I want to start to leverage remote meeting technology and video conferences more and early in projects. I used my FTP server to distribute test software so I didn't have to ship it.
Consumption
We eat locally. Tochigi has great local fruits and vegetables especially. And we eat it a lot. Our weakness here is wine. We drink a lot of imported wine!
Overall, I feel pretty good about our efforts. The one area I really need to improve is business travel. But as I said, I don't want to be inefficient in this because I run the risk of just transferring the travel to somebody else.
