by Maritchu Durand

For a few years now and increasingly since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, urbanites’ interest in moving to the countryside and renovating vacant houses has been growing in Japan. Prefectures attempt to attract younger people who seek a place to live outside the metropoles while keeping a close connection to urban spaces. But for more remote prefectures with high numbers of abandoned houses, it is hard to compete with prefectures that are much closer to urban centers like Tokyo or Osaka. Isseki nichō – to kill two birds with one stone –is what towns and prefectures in remote areas try to do when promoting the reuse of akiya, the vacant houses of rural Japan, to attract young migrants. Oita prefecture, for example, organizes workshops on different aspects of DIY (Do It Yourself) renovation of akiya and features stories about recently renovated houses and their inhabitants in short videos on its migration and relocation website.

Each story is centered around an interview with people who renovated a house and introduces the renovation works they accomplished themselves in their new homes. Each of the renovation projects represents a different ‘level’ of experience: beginner, intermediate and expert. The video about the ‘beginner level’ introduces a young couple who moved from southern Kyushu to a small mountainous community where they renovated a more than 100-year-old house from floor to ceiling. They threw down walls to create a wide and open central space and furnished it with antiques. While the young man declares that with an akiya, one starts with a disadvantage, it becomes a precious advantage in many aspects later on. It gives them the freedom to design it the way they want. In addition, it becomes a unique way to connect with the local population by asking them for advice on renovation. The migrants also discover skills they did not know they had prior the start of this adventure. In the future, the young couple wants to turn their new home into a guesthouse.

The lively and energetic family featured in the second video represents the ‘intermediate level’ of renovation and shares a similar experience of connecting with locals through their renovation experience. The couple moved from Tokyo and renovated a 50-year-old house in a traditional shopping street. The more they asked locals for advice, the more they discovered how much the community was willing to help them fulfill their dream to open a share-house with a multi-use room on the ground floor they rent out for events and pop-up stores. In addition, they could rely on a broad network of friends and connections, both nationwide and international, that came to help with the renovation. The couple could therefore manage to take care of their three children while conducting all the renovation work themselves.

The video on the ‘expert level’ tells a renovation story of a U-turner who transformed an old house into an Italian restaurant. It unravels a successful mixture of boldness, determination, and community ties. Within forty days, the 30-year-old man managed to completely renovate and modernize a 70-year-old building into a modern restaurant. He realized that once he started making things himself that he will also be able to renovate again and maintain the house in the long run, thereby making the restaurant sustainable and economically viable.

All interviewees talk about an innovative and “DIY” spirit that is growing in Oita. According to them, more and more people decide to take matters into their own hands and, with the help of the local community and their friends and acquaintances from all over Japan, they manage to realize their own renovation projects. Their renovation experiences include stories of entrepreneurship, strong community ties, self-realization and perseverance to realize one’s own dream.

In addition to the videos, Oita prefectures also offers workshops about DIY renovation. The workshops target especially young women and their families who wish to move to Oita and renovate a house. As experienced senpai, the people who appear in the videos, also participate in the workshops and talk about all the possibilities renovation projects offer to potential migrants. The workshops offer a comprehensive overview of what a DIY renovation implies from finding a house to living a fun life while renovating an akiya. Offering workshops on renovation featuring true life stories while creating a network of young innovators and an active community surrounding the reuse and repurposing of older houses might be an advantage for more remote areas like Oita. It remains to be seen if these events will motivate more young people to move to Kyushu and transform a vacant house into their dream home.  

by Bobby Okinaka

My name is Bobby Okinaka. I am 52. I am an American, but a long-time resident of Japan. In April, 2021, I moved with my wife and young son from Tokyo to the middle of Shikoku Island. This place is called Niyodogawa-cho. It is a region of many steep mountains and clear blue rivers. The town is actually a number of smaller towns joined together to reduce administrative costs known as the gappei system. Today, its population is 4,968. The main industries are logging and tea. At one point, its peak was 26,000. There was a copper mine that has since closed. And on the sides of the mountains that got the most sun, they grew the paper mulberry plants for washi paper. Today, there is only one paper maker left.

How did I end up in Niyodogawa-cho? A few years earlier, a friend of mine from university moved here from California to open a craft beer brewery. Located deep in the mountains, it’s safe to say his beer has the most naturally pure water in Japan. Since the birth of my child, I had been looking for an opportunity to live in the countryside. I think it’s a good life for little children and it would be better for our health as well. When I visited my friend, I was introduced to some people from the town office and they let it be known that I could apply for the Regional Revitalization Corp (Chiiki Okoshi Kyorokutai). So I went back to Tokyo, packed everything up, and we started our new life in the countryside.

My role is to do activities that enrich the town is some manner. They asked me to teach English at the local schools and support various town activities, but for the most part it’s up to me to find my mission and ideally, a way to make a living, so that I will continue to live here after my three year stint is up. Initially I thought about working with tourism. I thought it would be nice to open a guest house. The major attraction in this area is the tranquil color of the river water they call, “Niyodo Blue.” We are only an hour from Kochi City, so it is easy for visitors to come here and play in the river. I am also interested in sustainability. So I started composting. In the spring I am looking forward to experimenting with growing vegetables with microbes. I hope to start a community composting program. I learn everything about composting and gardening from YouTube.

The internet has changed country living. 30 years ago, I lived in another rural area of Japan as a member of the JET Program. Back then I felt very isolated. Today, I feel like life in the countryside is not much different from the city. I can buy everything I need online. I can get my favorite American television shows. I can communicate easily with family and friends. Of course there are some inconveniences, especially the lack of restaurants, sporting events, museums and live concerts. But I can exchange that for riverside barbecues, gardening and camping. And instead of seeing stars on a stage, I can see real stars in the night sky.

Together with one of my coworkers, we started an oral history program. We interview people from the community and record their life stories. Our goal is to create an exhibition about a small town in Japan. We will combine their voices with an examination of rural problems and the regional revitalization strategy. We will also imagine the future through the lens of sustainability. About sustainability, I believe the solution for many global problems can be found in the countryside, albeit on a small scale. Farmers can change their practices to build healthy soil. It will increase water holding capacity and end the use of chemical fertilizers that wash into the oceans. Healthy soil means that more carbon can be sequestered into the earth. Healthy soil means that the fruits and vegetable are rich in nutrients and full of flavor. Also, the countryside has the promising potential to be an energy solution. They have the space for renewable energy production. The costs are getting cheaper, the technology is proven. If the rural regions make clean electricity to meet the demands of power-hungry cities, they will never be short of funds again. With all our mountains and rivers, this place is an ideal condition for micro hydropower.

I hope to show our exhibition in cities around Japan to challenge the common perceptions of the countryside. People say the countryside is dying; I say it is full of opportunity and this is a way to show them. In addition, using my connections in North America, I hope to bring the exhibition to Los Angeles and Toronto. We may be a small town, but I think our story is worth sharing, much like this website. After the exhibition, rather than start a guesthouse, I have a big idea to convert a vacant schoolhouse into a campus for university students. They can come to the countryside and do remote learning. The added value will be that we can provide daily English lessons. There will be an organic farm for students to grow the food they will eat. The students can volunteer in the community as farm help, coach sports to the local kids or help the seniors. In exchange the seniors can pass along their knowledge such as traditional dance, woodworking and cooking. The facility will be powered by a micro hydropower turbine and solar panels. Hopefully, this idea can become a reality. After the global pandemic, please come and visit Niyodogawa-cho and let’s have a craft beer by the river!

Bobby Okinaka is a member of the Chiiki Okoshi Kyoryokutai Program in Niyodogawa-cho, Kochi Prefecture. He is on a three-year mission to help revitalize the Japanese countryside. You can find him on Instagram at slowinjapan. For tourism information about our area, please visit: https://niyodoblue.jp/en/ Domo!

by Ngo Tu Thanh (Frank Tu)

Social Media (Social Networking Service or SNS in Japanese) like Instagram, Youtube, Twitter or Facebook have become an important part of our everyday life. SNS are even mentioned in policy documents about rural revitalization and urban-rural migration in Japan. For our project on urban-rural migration and rural revitalization in four prefectures in Kyushu I have analyzed the Comprehensive Strategy for Communities, People and Work in Fukuoka and Nagasaki prefecture. SNS appeared as one strategy to disseminate information (jōhō hasshin) about the prefectures, tourism, local products and support for in-migrants among many other things.

Both Fukuoka and Nagasaki prefectures highlight the use of SNS as an important strategy to attract tourists or in-migrants. For instance, the plan of Nagasaki prefecture states that Nagasaki will publish footage of young people working in Nagasaki on Twitter and Instagram to attract young people to move to the prefecture. It will also disseminate information about migration on Facebook and LINE that appeals to Nagasaki natives who have moved to other places, particularly during times when they return home like Obon and New Year’s to inspire them to think about return migration (U-turn). SNS are also considered an important tool to showcase the charm of Nagasaki’s fisheries on YouTube, to promote local products and to attract foreign tourists from China, Korea, Vietnam, and Thailand [1].

Similarly, the Comprehensive Strategy of Fukuoka prefecture entails a strategy called “Disseminate information effectively” which states that Fukuoka prefecture aims to further enhance the recognition of the prefecture’s name, and thereby to attract visitors from Southeast Asia, Australia, and Western countries. In order to do so, Fukuoka’s plan suggest to make use of various digital means of communication, such as popular tourism websites or SNS to disseminate information that appeals to tourists [2].

The use of SNS for rural revitalization was also a recurrent topic in my interviews with three Chiikiryoku Sōzō Advisor for the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. That said, all the three advisors were skeptical of this strategy. For instance, one of them was an advisor in his early forties whose expertise lies in the fields of videography, copywriting and marketing. He has been creating promotional videos to help municipalities showcase their strengths to attract visitors and newcomers. He points out that although many videos have been posted on YouTube, no one watches them. Thus, he prefers advertising his promotional videos on specialized websites or making DVD copies and to distribute them to students who are doing job-hunting. Moreover, he is skeptical about how municipalities evaluate the effectiveness of such promotional efforts. In particular, he wonders whether the number of views could really reflect the success of a video, if, despite having many views, it does not really attract newcomers (interview in October 2021).

The other two advisors who are much older than the advisor mentioned above shared this critical view of SNS. One repeatedly mentioned that efforts to publish footage or photos on Instagram and Facebook do not create any substantive impacts on rural revitalization while the other stated that although there are people who disseminate information on Facebook, such information is just “words” not “actions” and does not necessarily lead to real impacts on rural revitalization (interviews in September and October 2021 respectively).

The ubiquity of SNS in everyday life renders social media an inevitable topic in today’s discourse on regional revitalization. Nevertheless, given their rather recent integration into rural revitalization policies and strategies, it will take time to adequately evaluate the impact of SNS on rural Japan and its revitalization. I will follow up this question as I proceed with my PhD project.

References:
[1]
Nagasaki Prefecture (2020). Dai ni ki Nagasaki Ken Machi, Hito, Shigoto Sōsei Sōgō Senryaku (Reiwa 2 nendo kaitei ban). Available at: https://www.pref.nagasaki.jp/shared/uploads/2021/04/1617856105.pdf

[2]
Fukuoka Prefecture (2020). Dai ni ki Fukuoka Ken jinkō bijon, Chihō Sōsei Sōgō Senryaku. Available at: https://www.pref.fukuoka.lg.jp/uploaded/attachment/109804.pdf

by Hanno Jentzsch

Urban-rural migration in Japan is receiving increasing attention, and so is the question of how to define and to delineate urban and rural spaces. As the answer to this question is ultimately a matter of perspective, I would like to briefly reflect on the contrast between the ethnographic and the political-administrative lens on “rural” Japan.

Facing ongoing socio-economic decline in large parts of non-metropolitan Japan, the central government is actively trying to get young urbanites to move (or move back) to rural areas. One of the most prominent initiatives in this context is the chiiki okoshi kyōryokutai (COKT) scheme, which provides successful applicants between 20 and 45 years with a steady income for up to three years to set up a project (a café, a farm, or any other activity to “revitalize” the area) and hopefully a new life in the countryside. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, about 5,500 persons were active under the COKT program in 2020, and the ministry hopes to increase their number to 8,000.[1] COKT members are often (although not exclusively) featured in ethnographic accounts of urban-rural migration. Susanne Klien frames her interviewees as “lifestyle migrants”, who seek to escape the pressures of a demanding, but increasingly unstable system of “lifelong” regular employment in metropolitan Japan. Rural areas, in contrast, appear as to some extent malleable spaces of experimentation and opportunity for young urbanites seeking “self-realization”. Klien and others have thus captured urban-rural lifestyle migration as a process that is producing new, hybrid, and fluid forms of rurality, in which idealized notions of rural Japan intersect and not rarely clash with urban aspirations, “post-growth” values, and local norms and practices, for example regarding agriculture.[2]

The hybridization and fluidity emphasized in ethnographic accounts of urban-rural migration form an interesting contrast to the sharp boundaries drawn by government programs such as the COKT. Through this lens, rural areas are strictly delineated first and foremost by their eligibility for various development and revitalization programs, on top of which the COKT program constitutes an attempt to structure migration flows from metropolitan centers to “target” rural areas. To get an idea what this means in practice, let us zoom into Shimo-Ina district in southern Nagano, where I did field research on civil society-state relations in 2017 and 2018. It is a beautiful area with tall mountains and deep, green valleys – a paradise for mountain bikers, but remote and rapidly aging. The tiny village of Ōshika currently seeks a COKT member to help develop the local (biking) tourism industry. In the words of a former colleague, who moved to the neighboring city of Iida for a similar task a few years ago, it is a dream job for anybody who seeks to turn a hobby into a meaningful occupation. It comes with free housing, reasonable working hours, and a monthly salary of 225,000 Yen. However, not all young bike enthusiasts can apply. Applicants must currently reside in one of the three “metropolitan areas” shutoken, chukyoken, and kinkiken, including the prefectures Tokyo, Chiba, Kanagawa, Saitama, Gifu, Aichi, Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, Mie, and Hyōgo. Applicants from other prefectures must currently reside in an urban area (toshi chiiki). Residents of non-urban areas are excluded.

What “non-urban” means is defined by a total of seven laws to support disadvantaged areas, most importantly the Kaso law, under which officially designated “rapidly depopulating areas” (kaso chiiki) – i.e., areas that display above-average population decline and below-average fiscal strength – are eligible for a wide array of redistributive measures. The list is completed by programs with similar purposes, such as the “Okinawa Special Promotion Law” or the “Peninsula Promotion Law”. The Kaso law alone currently applies to 820 of Japan’s 1718 municipalities – more than 60% of Japan’s total area, but only about 8% of the population.[3]

The state’s objective to define a clearly delineated set of “sending” and “receiving” (or rather:  deserving?) rural areas to structure migration flows is clear. The consequences, however, can be quite odd. For example, while a person residing in the depopulating village of Toyone in the rural north of the “metropolitan” Aichi Prefecture is eligible for the job in Ōshika Village, a person residing in central Iida – the largest city in southern Nagano with about 100.000 inhabitants – cannot apply, since Iida is officially designated as a “partly depopulating” municipality under the law. Such a person could, of course (and likely will at some point), move to Tokyo for a regular job anytime. In any case, sharp boundaries drawn through political programs and/or administrative divisions are obviously limited to delineate rural and urban spaces in Japan (and elsewhere). They are, however, still crucial to understand rural-urban migration, and rural “revitalization” in general, as a political project that is fundamentally about who (and which area) gets what kind of support in the ongoing redistribution of resources and people across Japan’s increasingly unequal socio-spatial landscape.

Hanno Jentzsch is Assistant Professor at the Department of East Asian Studies/Japanese Studies, University of Vienna. He works on the politics of revitalization, administrative restructuring, agricultural reform, and social welfare in (mostly) rural Japan. He is the author of “Harvesting State Support” (University of Toronto Press) and co-edited the volume “Rethinking Locality in Japan” (Routledge, with Sonja Ganseforth).

References

[1]
https://www.soumu.go.jp/main_sosiki/jichi_gyousei/c-gyousei/02gyosei08_03000066.html

[2]
See e.g., Klien, Susanne. 2020. Urban Migrants in Rural Japan. Between Agency and Anomie in a Post-Growth Society. Albany: State University of New York Press; Reiher, Cornelia. 2020. ‘Embracing the Periphery: Urbanites’ Motivations for Relocating to Rural Japan’. In Japan’s New Ruralities, ed. Wolfram Manzenreiter, Ralph Lützeler and Sebastian Polak-Rottmann. Abingdon, Oxon, New York, NY: Routledge: 230–244.

[3]
http://www.kaso-net.or.jp/