By Josko Kozic

During my research on rural Shugendō, a Japanese religion focusing on asceticism and mountain worship, I regularly come across temples contributing to their local communities in different ways. This is not a new phenomenon, however, it might be an increasingly important factor, due to several demographic changes which also affect the sphere of religious life. It so happens that Japan currently does not only face a decline in the birthrate or rural outmigration, it also faces a decline of temple successors (kōkeishamondai).

At Manidera temple in Tottori for instance, I got to know the successor priest, who himself is an I-turner and moved to the area from Tokyo only a few years ago. He became a monk at the age of 40, which seems relatively late for dedicating oneself to a temple for the rest of one’s life. It shows how much rural temples rely on successors from far away. At Sanbutsu-ji, a more famous temple in the region located on Mt Mitoku, an I-turner from England is working as a guide, bringing international tourists to the site. He offers one-day ascetic workshops (shugyō taiken) that include hiking to sacred sites, sometimes called “power spots” or meditating under waterfalls (takigyō). Sanbutsu-ji recently updated its website and Instagram page to attract more national and international visitors, also hoping of promote the temple’s registration as a world heritage site. Both power spots as well as waterfall meditations seem to be part of a mainstream interest in sacralized, “Japanese” nature. Forest bathing is also part of this trend. For temples located in areas with forests and waterfalls, including such workshops or “experiences” in tourist campaigns is an important way to contribute to the attractiveness of their local communities.

In the past, most temple economies relied heavily on their parishioners (danka). This is also true for temples in charge of practitioners of Shugendō. Originally, they maintained cofraternities of lay practitioners and parishioners (kō) from whom they received financial donations and other goods. Recently however, both the danka as well as the kō experience rigorous decline. It so happens that during festivities and rituals performed by Shugendō groups, almost no kō associations are left to host the practitioners. Nowadays, members of the Community Building Support Staff (chiiki okoshi kyōryoku-tai) occasionally take over this task.

Another temple I built a connection with is located in the mountains near the small town of Aoya. Apparently, the priest in charge was asked to become a monk by a family member before he entered monkhood. As he mentioned during one of our conversations, there would have been no other person to take over the temple otherwise. He now runs his own YouTube and Twitter account, sharing impressions of his everyday country life and his thoughts on worldly matters. Last month, he kindly invited me to join for a waterfall-meditation. His wife is originally from Saitama prefecture and is a self-employed manga artist. She moved to Tottori as an I-turner after publishing her first manga, ‘Yamabushi Girl‘. In an interview, she told me about pros and cons of living in the rural area, emphasizing though that she is happy with her choice after all.

I always feel grateful being able to get in touch with locals, priests and practitioners who live at the outskirts of Japan. Currently, I am residing in the Tamba region of Hyōgo prefecture where I am conducting further research on this topic.

Josko Kozic (MA) moved to Japan five years ago after graduating in Japanese & Southeast Asian Studies at Goethe University in his hometown Frankfurt. He currently resides in Yokohama while working on his PhD thesis about contemporary Shugendo (a Japanese religious tradition). He is affiliated with the faculty of Religious studies at Heidelberg University.

By Cecilia Luzi

The first time I arrived in the Wakayama prefecture countryside was in 2016, on a cloudy August afternoon, and the heat and humidity at the beginning of the typhoon season were at their peak. I was welcomed by the cheerful Yukari-san, who came to pick me up at the train station with her white, compact pick-up truck –

an ever-present element in Japan’s countryside. I spent one month as a WWOOFer (see Maritchu Durand’s post) working with her and her husband Āyan-san on their small farm in the southern part of Wakayama prefecture. We became good friends and eventually kept in touch even after my departure.  When I moved to Tokyo with a scholarship in 2018, I took the opportunity to visit them whenever possible, especially, to spend time with one of their daughters, who became a very close friend. We shared space, time, long chats, food, drinks and music. We helped each other a lot and I began to understand her fascinating way of living in the countryside.

Kai is a young woman and a single mother of two daughters. She used to live in Kōbe. When she decided to start a family, she moved back to the place where she grew up. Today, she rents a small field overlooking the ocean, where she grows sweet potatoes. She uses them to make sweets, tarts, and bagels that she sells at the local grocery stores or at occasional outdoor markets. In November 2018, we would wake up at 6 a.m. Kai prepared breakfast while I dressed her older daughter Konoha and dropped her off at the nursery school. I then joined Kai on the field to help her dig up sweet potatoes. When I came back in July 2019, Utaha was born, and we were working around the house to make space for a winter vegetable garden. Kai would put Uta-chan to sleep on a futon inside and leave the shōji all opened to let the summer breeze pass through the house.

While living with Kai, I learned that children are a central part of the life of urban-rural migrants in Wakayama prefecture. They play hide-and-seek barefoot on rice paddies during the harvesting season in September, sink their hands deep into the bean paste when making miso for hinamatsuri in March and run around the house while adults are eating and drinking during long winter nights. Families may have different shapes and compositions, but children are always around. One of the reasons why these people decided to move and resettle in a remote rural area was precisely because they wanted to start a family and raise their children in a better environment. Fresh air, healthy food, wide space to run and play outside is what made the countryside appealing, while the distance from nuclear power plants more specifically explains why they chose this specific area. Escaping from the city means to provide their children with what they believe is a more sustainable and happier future.

As Cornelia Reiher wrote in her last post, local authorities are mostly driven by demographic reasons: they want to attract migrants with young children in order to fight the population decline of rural areas. However, beautiful landscapes and delicious food are not enough for young families and life is not always idyllic for in-migrants with children. Families dwell in old houses far from each other and spend much time isolated; one parent often has multiple and/or seasonal jobs in order to make ends meet, often leaving the other at home with the children. Yet the strong sense of community counterbalances this precarity. Despite the distance, people tend to be supportive of each other: they provide comfort and care when one is ill and recurrently take care of each other’s children.

Earlier this year, Kai finally realized her dream to open a cafe where she can cook and sell her own products. She received a lot of help from the community to renovate the old, abandoned grocery shop where she now works and lives with a friend. Before the Covid-19 outbreak, I was planning to stay some months in Japan to help her out with the construction works and the opening. Unfortunately, I could only follow the developments through Facebook and Instagram. I know it has been hard for her, and the economic environment in which she works and lives today is still precarious. Yet, I sometimes scroll the pictures of her cafe on my phone waiting for the moment I will finally be there with her, chatting and eating a delicious imo-no-taruto while our children play together on the ground.

By Sarah Bijlsma

A little over a year ago, Ryutaro Hagi decided to quit his Tokyo job, to move back to his birthplace in Mie Prefecture, and to become an organic farmer. While growing up on a farm as a child, he had never considered this kind of life for himself. Quite the opposite; Ryutaro studied transnational communication in Kyoto, spent a year in the U.S., has friends living all over the world, and started his career successfully at an international travel agency in Osaka.

Interestingly, it was exactly Ryutaro’s interest in people and media from outside of Japan that inspired him to go local. His business partners, who politely refused Japanese meat and fish-based dishes, the Netflix documentary Cowspiricy (2014) on the global meat industry, a 2018 keynote speech by Rose Marcario, the CEO of Patagonia at the time, made him aware of the large part the food industry plays in contributing to global warming.

Ryutaro tells me that what struck him the most in Marcario’s talk, was that she mentions that soil acts as a sponge for carbon and that if agriculture would be fully organic, the CO2 emissions annually produced would be completely sequestered in the soil. Over time, he became aware that organic farming offers a solution to a wide variety of environmental threats, both globalized issues and those particular for Japan, like water pollution and the countries dependency on foreign food supplies. Being unable to travel because of the Covid-19 pandemic, he took the opportunity to change his life and started Aina Farm on a small plot of land that he borrows from his father. Aina, as he explains on his website, means “soil” or “land” in the Hawaiian language—producing healthy soil without chemicals is what organic farming is all about.

On the website of Aina, people can learn all about Ryutaro’s new life. In a promotion video for the farm, he talks in English about nature and his own dreams of becoming a farmer. Aina Farms Instagram page, which has more than 1000 followers, shows colorful pictures of growing crops, children playing with vegetables, and Ryutaro himself working the fields. In addition, he publishes long articles on his blog sharing his own experiences while referring to American films, books, and theories of human-nature entanglements. Looking at these posts, I think to myself that his life looks very different from the image of a farming life that I know from the Netherlands. Rather than a simple life, it looks like out of a fashion magazine.

When I ask him about this, Ryutaro explains that this is exactly what he is strategically aiming for. In Japan, there is a fundamental need for more agricultural businesses. But farming suffers a negative image; it is difficult, badly paid, and perhaps even seen as backward. Making use of social media, he wants to change this image and show young Japanese that farming can also be fashionable, fun, important, and rewarding. That farmers are “cool” and can speak multiple languages, that they also travel the world.

Furthermore, since Ryutaro moved to Mie he realizes that the older generation of farmers—including his father—have their very own ideas about best practices. Growing crops without chemicals does not make any sense to them. In his heart, he wants to tell them directly to stop destroying the earth. “But that generation is very stubborn,” he says. “And also, this is everything that they know and grew up with. Picking a fight is not the way to reach them. But in the end, it is all about supply and demand. They do not listen to me and do not care about the environment, but if more people choose to buy organic products, also that generation will have to change. That is why I do my best to grow healthy vegetables and post those cool pictures on Instagram.” He pauses and smiles, “you know, I do not want to be negative and against everything. I just want to be an inspiration to others.”

What I find so fascinating about Ryutaro’s story is that it is defined by a variety of interwoven scales. On the one hand, his practices as a farmer are fundamentally local; the crops that he grows and the physical work he performs all depend on the conditions of this one plot of land somewhere in the middle of Mie prefecture. On the other hand, Ryutaro’s story is largely shaped by events and thoughts originating outside of Japan. And on his turn, social media allows him to spread his message to people living in very different parts of the world. This illustrates that the global and the local are neither easily defined, nor simply dichotomous. Rather, Aina Farm can be seen as a place where different sets of relations intersect, and where nature and technology collaborate.

By Cornelia Reiher

The idealized notion of rural Japan inherent in the term furusato is characteristic of discourse on rural Japan. It connotes beautiful nature and traditional lifestyles, nostalgia, warmth and a feeling of security that is constructed in opposition to urban spaces [1]. Although this idealized notion of rural Japan has been mobilized in regional revitalization discourses since the 1970s, the success of such portrayals has been rather limited when it comes to attracting capital, people and jobs to the countryside [2].

But with the increasing popularity of urban-rural migration it is not only the countryside that is represented in such an idealized manner. As prefectures and municipalities compete for newcomers and return migrants (ijūsha), they promote idealized images of their prefectures and of the migrants who should settle down in the respective areas. Prefectural and local governments have specific ideas about who should relocate to their towns. When looking at promotional material prefectures issue, it is striking how they attempt to appeal to different audiences. While some prefectures present themselves as the ideal place to raise children, others target women who want to realize their dreams and yet other prefectures are mainly interested in u-turn migrants.

In promotional material found on- and offline, ijūsha share their experiences and praise their new places of residence for beautiful nature, delicious food, a slow lifestyle or the support infrastructure provided by the prefecture or the municipality. Against the backdrop of population decline, it is not surprising that many prefectures target families with young children. Ijūsha featured in these prefectures’ promotional material stress how easy it is to raise children in the countryside, how children benefit from growing up in close contact with nature and how much easier it is to get access to childcare. Images of laughing children running around in paddy fields, feeding chicken, enjoying outside activities or harvesting vegetables and fruits they have grown in the family garden accompany these accounts. Their parents share their experiences with support for buying or renting land and house construction and talk about how they connect easily to locals through their children. The ijūsha depicted in such a manner mostly have three or four children and women mainly speak as mothers.

But the promotional material does not address the many problems related to education in Japan’s countryside. These include the closing of schools, the small size of classes in some rural schools or the difficulties of long distance commuting to a high school that prepares children for the university entrance exams. When I interviewed ijūsha in Ōita in 2018, many had smaller children and some complained that the number of students in the local elementary school wasn’t even large enough to open a baseball team. Many worried about their children’s future and wanted to move back to urban areas as soon as they would start high school. Nevertheless, after being stuck in an apartment in Berlin with my family during the Covid-19 pandemic for one and a half years, I can imagine that people from urban areas feel attracted to the imaginary of a happy life in the countryside presented in the promotion material by prefectures across Japan. It will be interesting to find out how people considering relocation perceive such material, what questions they ask staff at local support desks and how the imaginaries presented in promotional material affects their decisions when selecting a place to relocate to.

[1]
Ivy, Marilyn (1995), Discourses of the vanishing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p.105-106.
[2]
Reiher, Cornelia (2014), Lokale Identität und ländliche Revitalisierung. Die japanische Keramikstadt Arita und die Grenzen der Globalisierung, Bielefeld: Transcript.

By Ngo Thi Nhung
Translated by Ngo Tu Thanh (Frank Tu)