Gilles Beaufils/Base Camp Imari
- Gilles Beaufils and his wife ditched Tokyo city life to renovate an abandoned house in rural Japan.
- Beaufils, 56, estimates they spent less than $10,000 buying the abandoned property, or akiya, on Kyushu island.
- While they did most of the work themselves, he says they'll never take on a project like that again.
After three decades of working in Tokyo, Gilles Beaufils decided he needed a change of scenery.
The 56-year-old Frenchman arrived in Japan as a backpacker in the early '90s. He met his wife right before he was about to head off for his next destination. In the end, he never got on the plane.