Everything begins with soil.

From the soil, to how we live.

Place-based and plant-based.

Everything begins with Tsuchi (土 — soil, in Japanese). We live on top of it — our eating, our living, our water, our forests, our farming, our culture. Everything we do rests on an ecosystem of countless unseen lives beneath the ground.

But somewhere along the way, we drifted from nature — losing the sense of where our food actually comes from, and what land we are truly living on.

Japan has an old word for this: ubusuna (産土) — the land where a person is born, raised, and goes on living in relationship with it. We believe this old word holds a new clue for how to live in the years ahead.

To reconnect people and soil, once again — that is why TSUCHI FEST began in 2025, an international movement that ties the world together through soil.

2026 Edition — TSUCHI FEST in Kameoka

The second edition of the festival in Japan is part of the "food and agriculture" programme of the National Urban Greening Fair in Kyoto-Tamba — a festival that returns to the origins of food to think about the food culture of the future. Chefs visiting from around the world and cooks from Kyoto-Tamba come together, ingredients from this land in hand, to create dishes that could only be born here. This year's theme, championed by Kameoka City, is "plant-based" — getting to know the land that grew the ingredients, meeting the people who grow them, and connecting agriculture, environment and local life.