By Antonia Vesting

Apart from small projects at school and later at university, I had little experience in field research. By conducting my first fieldwork in Japan one could say that I plunged into the field headfirst. During my time at Waseda University, I learned about methods for conducting interviews. This however did not reduce my worries as a rather inexperienced fieldworker. Fortunately, I was not alone. My professor for rural development at Waseda University, who happened to be familiar with the region from his time as a student at Kyōto University, agreed to accompany me. This was truly a lucky coincidence!

As we stayed in Kyōto, we had to drive back and forth to the interview locations every day. Initially I had planned to stay at my friend’s house in Miyama but due to the advancing Covid-19 pandemic, she was worried that her neighbors would be anxious about having people from Tōkyō visit. Luckily, my interlocutors and my friend did not share this opinion and we could meet in person to conduct the interviews. As I have a driver’s license but no routine in driving, I was especially thankful for not having to drive the winding mountain roads that lead to Miyama and which are often frequented by deer at night. Taking these 70 minutes drives to and from Miyama also had their upsides: aside from long and interesting talks, I learned a lot about rural development and the practice of interviewing.

Returning from a long day in the field, creeping into my hostels dormitory late at night and collapsing on the futon with utter exhaustion, I found that field research and interviewing can be a very positive and enriching experience. Having completed all obligatory language-classes before going to Japan, my Japanese improved drastically during my half a year stay in Japan and transcribing the interviews further boosted my language-skills (not to mention personal growth and unforgettable experiences and insights). Still, there remain points for improvement.

Considering that I conducted research only for my bachelor’s thesis, my sample of interlocutors was very small, and I gained access to them through only one gatekeeper which induced some bias in my study. Furthermore, one of the interviewees only agreed to an interview for a small monetary compensation, which, as I learned afterwards, could negatively affect the credibility of the interview’s content. After returning to Germany, I found that there had been other studies on I-Turners to Miyama in Japanese, which rendered my research less relevant regarding novelty of findings and insights (not relevant for bachelor’s thesis but for later academic research). Nevertheless, this scholarship proved useful to compare my findings. I also was very conscious about the handling of interview data in respect to data security and the protection of privacy of my research participants.

Being now in the second semester of my master’s studies at Freie Universitāt Berlin, I have come to look back at the time of conducting interviews in Miyama in a new light. With my experience from visiting Miyama for the first time in 2016 as a backdrop and with the new knowledge and input, I gathered during my research in 2020, I now reevaluate my first experience of doing fieldwork in Japan. Reflecting on this first fieldwork experience and learning more about qualitative methods as parts of my master’s degree curriculum, I will hopefully enhance my research skills and avoid some of my initial mistakes in my upcoming projects.

I am very much looking forward to putting this new knowledge into practice when doing fieldwork in Japan again in the (hopefully) near future.

Antonia Marie Vesting is a MA student in Freie Universität Berlin’s Japanese Studies program. She received her bachelor’s degree from Hamburg University with a BA thesis on lifestyle migration in  Kyōto Prefecture. She has presented results from this research in an earlier blogpost.

by Ksenia Kurochkina

This is Ksenia Kurochkina here. In this post, I share how I started studying rural Japan and how my personal journey contributed to my research.

I came to Japan to study in 2009 with the main interest in contemporary society and younger generation’s working styles. I started visiting rural areas, first as my hobby, volunteering at organic farms. Interestingly, during my trips to villages, I had acquainted many young people from a social cohort I have not heard of before: young urbanites who recently migrated to the countryside to live and work. After witnessing high unemployment rates for youth, uncertainties of irregular employment, and psychological traumas of social withdrawals in the cities, I was very enthusiastic to see many young people with positive agendas, dreams, and revitalization projects on the outskirts of metropolitan areas. These people held different ideas on work, leisure, and the future from what I have seen in urban life. From my fascination with these people grew my research interest for the MA and Ph.D. theses on urbanites migrating to rural areas in Japan. Also, in the following twelve years since the beginning of my research, we all observed “how rural settlement in the ‘post’-productivist era has moved from ‘dropping out’ of the agenda to heading it” [1].

As a part of my dissertation project, I did long-term fieldwork in the Japanese countryside. I stayed for one year in a village in Kansai, renting a rural house, raising chickens in the backyard, and also getting ready to giving birth to my first child. Doing ethnographies, especially in sparsely populated remote areas, challenges researchers to investigate personal boundaries and engagements with informants. On the one hand, the immediate neighborhood with my informants gave me plenty of advantages in gathering valuable insights for my research. Through daily errands, I could closely observe the everyday lives of rural newcomers around their houses, paddy fields, and community. For example, because I was pregnant during the fieldwork and gave birth to my daughter in the local hospital, I could access the village’s young mothers’ community and learn a lot about their natural childbirth and child-rearing practices and how this contributed to their quality of life in rural environments. Caring for my backyard chickens with the advice and tips of my neighbors gave me valuable insights into newcomers’ routines of organic homesteading, sustainable cooking, and their deeper motivations for rural life.

On the other hand, I experienced that close interactions with some villagers may prevent a researcher from quality conversations with other villagers, as human relations in rural communities are loaded with many histories, rumors, and conflicts. For example, after some weeks in the fieldwork, I found out that two I-turn neighbor-newcomers have broken relationships and do not even greet each other. Therefore, I took measures to balance my relations with the informants to avoid bias. 

When doing fieldwork in the countryside, building up trust with the informants is a big part of successful interviewing and participant observation. Although a researcher should take an independent stance in the field, personal relationships and experiences always contribute to the research path we are walking.

[1]
Halfacree, Keith. 2006.  “From dropping out to leading on? British counter-cultural back-to-the-land in a changing rurality”, Progress in Human Geography 30, 3 (2006), pp. 309-336.

Ksenia Kurochkina is an associate researcher at Sociological Institute, Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation. She received her PhD from Waseda University in 2021 with a thesis on lifestyles of young rural newcomers in Japan.

by Tu Thanh Ngo (Frank Tu)

Policies to revitalize rural areas are nothing new in Japan. Revitalization policies date back to the 1930s when the Farm, Mountain and Fishing Village Economic Revitalization Campaign (1932–1941) was initiated that was followed by a series of laws and policies, such as the Promotion Services for Home Living Improvement (1940s–late 1950s), the Basic Agricultural Law (1961), the Mountain Village Promotion Act (1965), the Emergency Act for the Improvement of Depopulated Areas (1970) or the Law on Food, Agriculture and Rural Areas (1999) [1].

However, a new policy has been introduced in 2014 by then Prime Minister Abe Shinzō that became the epitome of rural revitalization. According to a Chiikiryoku Advisor for the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, “Regional revitalization (chihō sōsei) was born under the Abe Cabinet” (personal online communication, 16 June 2021). According to Hijino (2017) and Yoshizawa (2019), the Abe administration did not only introduce the term chihō sōsei, but also framed rural revitalization as a flagship policy. The term chihō sōsei refers to a policy titled “Machi, hito, shigoto sōsei” and its policy framework “Machi, hito, shigoto sōsei sōgō senryaku” [Comprehensive Strategy for Communities, People and Work] [2].

The Comprehensive Strategy’s intention is to centralize all strategies used for rural revitalization, decentralization of population in Tokyo, and anti-depopulation under one single framework [2]. The Comprehensive Strategy consists of four objectives [3]:

1. Create a stable economic environment in rural areas
2. Strengthen the ties between rural and urban areas to attract new in-migrants
3. Provide support for marriage, childbearing, and child-rearing in rural areas
4. Create a safe living environment 

In essence, the Comprehensive Strategy “aims at reversing the population flow into the greater Tokyo area” [4]. To be specific, by the end of the first five-year phase, the government expected to reduce the number of in-migrants to the Tokyo region by 60,000 people and to increase the number of out-migrants from the Tokyo region by 40,000 people [5]. In addition, the Comprehensive Strategy is expected to “make it easy for young couples to live and work full-time with support from the local government” [4] by creating 300,000 new jobs in rural areas [5]. On how to achieve the goals that the Comprehensive Strategy sets out to do, the MIC advisor quoted earlier wrote: “From my point of view, regional revitalization needs to consider transportation, living standards – including education, income, etc.” (personal online communication, 16 June 2021).

However, as mentioned above, policies to revitalize rural Japan existed long before Abe’s Comprehensive Strategy. Thus, although all existing policies have now been centralized to constitute one regional revitalization policy framework, is this new policy a breakthrough or just merely old wine in new bottles? This is what we want to find out through our project that studies the implementation and the impact of the Comprehensive Strategy in four municipalities in Kyushu. In addition, we will also pay attention to how the implementation of the Comprehensive Strategy differs across different levels of government (national, prefectural and municipal).  

[1]
Feldhoff, T. (2013) ‘Shrinking communities in Japan: Community ownership of assets as a development potential for rural Japan?’, Urban Design International, 18(1), pp. 99–109.

Nakama, Y. and Uchida, K. (2010), ‘Seikatsu Kaizen Fukyū Jigyō no Rinen to Jittai: Yamaguchi ken wo jirei ni’, Nōringyō Mondai Kenkyū, 178, pp. 1–13.

Smith, K. (2003), ‘Building the model village: Rural revitalization and the Great Depression’, in Farmers and village life in twentieth-century Japan. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, pp. 126–155.

[2]
Hijino, K. V. L. (2017), Local Politics and National Policy: Multi-level conflicts in Japan and Beyond. London and New York: Routledge.

Yoshizawa, Y. (2019), ‘Chūō Seifu ni okeru “Chihōsōsei” no Seisaku katei to seifu kan kankei’, Seiji Keizaigaku Kenkyū Ronshū, 4, pp.1-20.

[3]
Office of the Prime Minister (2014), Machi, Hito, Shigoto Sōsei Sōgō Senryaku ni tsuite, Shushō Kantei. Available at: https://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/singi/sousei/pdf/20141227siryou5.pdf.

[4]
Kumagai, F. (2020), Municipal Power and Population Decline in Japan: Goki-Shichido and Regional Variations. Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore.

[5]
Nakamura, Y. (2015), ‘Chihō Sōsei o meguru Sōgō Senryaku to Chihō Jichitai: Kokusaku kara Jichi e no Tenkan wa Kanō ka’, Utsunomiya Daigaku Kokusai Gakubu Kenkyū Ronshū, 40, pp. 43–48.

by Sarah Bijlsma

At the north side of Miyako Island, from a rock in the sea a bit off coast, arises a pillar with a height of 4.2 meters. The pillar is narrow at its foot, widens a bit towards the middle and comes together at the top in a smooth and round shape. Its material could be that of a mineral or quarts; being partly transparent, the object merges with its surrounding environment as it takes on the color of the air behind it. Apart from the color, it reminds a little of an ancient megalith, like the statues of Stonehenge or the Moai on Easter Island. As such, it is not entirely clear whether this is a man-made shape or a natural geomorphological object. In any case, the pillar has certainly a spiritual atmosphere around it and could be an important object of worship in local religious traditions.

The object I described above was created by the Japanese artist Mori Mariko (b. 1967, Tokyo) and part of the artwork Primal Rhythm.[1] Primal Rhythm is one of six site-specific artworks that will be placed on different continents. The statue Sun Pillar was put on the stack in July 2011 and made of layered acrylic; synthetic fibers with pigments in between that create different hues within the shape. The work further contains of a Moon Stone; a round stone-shaped object that floats on the surface of the sea and changes color according to the tide and the phase of the moon. Once a year, at the winter solstice, the Sun Pillar casts a shadow over the water that pierces the Moon Stone. Mori explains that she was inspired by artifacts found from the Jōmon Period (ca. 14.000 to 300 BCE). “Two objects were always found in a particular area: a round stone and a kind of small standing stone. The pair seems to me to be a symbol of regeneration, or a wish to help in harvest, or related to worship of the nature god. It’s probably a primitive stage of Shintoism.”[2]The Moon Stone, however, is not yet finalized, hence hitherto, the Sun Pillar glimmers alone on its rock formation.

The location of Miyako Island for this artwork has not been chosen coincidentally. Mori “visited” Miyako via Google Earth and decided for Nanako Bay—referred to as “Seven Light Bay” by the artist—as the area seemed fairly untouched. Mori explains that some of the villagers who live nearby participate in annual rites where other islanders are not welcome. “[the rites are] quite hidden,” she says. “If you see [them], you will die. They’re really secretly done, these ceremonies. The island is very well-preserved. There is a rich indigenous community that still exists. Modern things not there so much but there is a lot to learn from them in terms of the relationship of human society to nature.” [3]

In 2011, Mori invited the village shaman to perform a ceremony on the beach during the winter solstice in 2011. “They immediately understood what I am trying to do because they have such a rich relationship with nature,”[4] she states. Since then, Mori herself performs occasionally a ritual at the site, the most recent one during summer solstice this June. In white garment she spread her arms towards the Sun Pillar and let herself and a miniature version of the Moon Stone float on the waves of the sea.[5]  In this regard, Primal Rhythm is indicative for the way how Miyako-jima is represented outside of the region, including assumptions on human-nature relationships and cultural purity that draw so many Japanese tourists and migrants near. Yet, more importantly, what this artwork also illustrates is how Seven Light Bay becomes a site where globalized concepts of place and indigeneity merge with local rituals and rites and where, accordingly, opportunities are created for new “traditions” to emerge.

[1]
Visit for more information about the project its official website via https://www.faoufoundation.org/

[2]
Indrisek, Scott. “Crystal Flag: Mariko Mori wants to bring her nature-loving art to six continents.” Modern Painters, May 2011, pp. 58-93. (Here p. 60).

[3]
Ibid. pp. 60-61.

[4]
Ibid. 61.

[5]
See for videos of these rituals Mori Mariko’s Instagram page via https://www.instagram.com/marikomori/ and https://www.instagram.com/faoufoundation/