by Lynn Ng

In April 2019, I made my first trip into Fukushima on a friend’s spontaneous invitation – a week-long trip I never imagined would turn into an MA, and now doctoral research project. On a late afternoon in end-April, I arrived at Odaka station and was greeted by the station master. “The winds sure are strong, right? Please take care,” he said as I handed him my ticket. Heeding his words, I cautiously pulled the doors open and stepped out of the station expecting “strong winds” but was met with nothing more than a mild breeze. With the station master’s strange warning stuck to my mind, I slowly made my way to the café where my friend would meet me.

At the quiet café, with all due social awkwardness, I’d blurted out “the winds sure are strong, huh?” to the café owner. The owner looked up, glanced in the direction of the station, and commented that, yes, the winds were indeed strong. A silent minute passed before he began a lengthy explanation of why the winds were strong: The lands beyond the station (towards the coast) used to be farmlands protected by windbreaks – the rows of trees that shelter the farms from coastal winds. After 3/11, the trees felled and unobstructed coastal winds now blow freely into the town.

As an environmental biologist, my first instinct then was to question this exaggerated range of windbreaks. Still, I held my tongue. Instead, I asked how he knew this information, and what it was like growing up in this area before the triple disaster. To my surprise, he was from urban Tokyo and had never been to Fukushima until 2016. And thus, my curiosities were piqued – what was an urbanite such as him doing in rural post-disaster Fukushima?

Later in the week, the café owner introduced me to his friend who offered to give me a tour around town. She drove me past rolling hills of sunflowers and canola, with wind turbines turning far in the background. She told me about the town’s plan to develop into Japan’s canola-town, since canola plants are sturdy and grow quickly, and thus can very efficiently absorb contaminants in the soil. I’d silently scoffed at her comment, not because of canola’s capabilities in decontaminating the soils, but because Japan’s canola-town is a crown already claimed by the town [1] in Hokkaido in which I lived for three years. In that brief moment, standing amongst the canola flowers in Odaka, I had felt immensely protective of the place I had called home.

Again, I kept my mouth shut. I instead redirected the conversation to anecdotes of the countryside. We joked about hazardous elderly drivers before she admitted that she missed having movie theaters nearby. I would from here on learn that she came here from metropolitan Nagoya. And from here, my curiosities spiraled out of control – What were urbanites such as her and the café owner doing in rural post-disaster Fukushima? Were there more of them? Are they an isolated bubble of I-turners? How integrated were they into the larger population? What else do they do here? Do they participate in the region’s revitalization programs? Out of all of Japan’s regions, why Fukushima?

Over the months after this trip, I developed these first questions into a full MA project. With every return trip I made to Fukushima, I met more I- and U-turners (or in Fukushima’s terms, F-turners [2]) and learned more narratives. I would learn that the complexity of Fukushima’s nuclear exclusion zones extends far beyond population movements and Becquerel-Sieverts, and traverses into domains of hope and belonging. Now as a doctoral candidate at GEAS in Berlin, I approach the phenomenon of urban-rural migration into Fukushima with the same curiosity, and cannot wait to dive in even deeper than before.

References

[1]
Takikawa has been home to Japan’s largest canola fields for seven straight years.Takikawa City (2021). Nanohana ni tsuite [About Canola]. Available at: https://www.city.takikawa.hokkaido.jp/230keizai/03kankourenkei/10menu/nanohana.html

[2]
“F-Turn” is Fukushima Prefecture’s project at promoting U-I-J turns into Fukushima. Fukushima Prefecture (2022). F-tān [F-Turn]. Available at: https://www.f-turn.jp/

by Cornelia Reiher

A few weeks ago, I went to a rural place in Germany’s north for a holiday. In this area, the internet connection is still very bad and since I was looking for some peace it appeared to be the perfect place to spend some time enjoying the silence. I wanted to experience the simple rural life by taking long walks without meeting anyone, sitting in front of a wood-burning fireplace, waking up to the sound of the birds and ignoring my phone, emails and social media for a few days.

However, a terrible storm raged over Germany and in addition to the bad internet connection, there was a power outage, leaving us with no other heating than the fireplace and without light and hot water. Although I found this romantic at first, I was soon longing for hot coffee, a warm shower and a warm meal and bedroom. Everywhere in the area, electricity went off and only one person in the small hamlet owned a gas oven where he made coffee and then visited every house to share it with his neighbors. We also borrowed candles from our hosts and we got quite inventive in warming ready-made soup on our fireplace and even managed to boil water (it took 15 minutes!) for coffee and the eggs we received from our hosts who raise chickens. Electricity and warm water were finally back after two days and I have never enjoyed a hot shower more in my entire life.

This experience made me think about the comforts of rural lifestyles. Many urban-to-rural migrants want to live a simple life close to nature, but how simple is too simple? What do people need for a good life in the countryside in terms of comfort and convenience? In online interviews I conducted recently I asked urban-rural migrants in Kyūshū if they miss anything in their country life. The majority was satisfied with their current lives and mentioned that the town they live in offers more amenities than they would have thought. The answers, however, differed depending on where research participants had lived before and on their previous lifestyles.

One respondent, for example, missed shopping malls shortly after moving to the rural town he now lives in, because he had spent much of his free time in such places. He however said that he soon realized that there are many other things he could do. His new leisure activities include hiking and taking walks around his neighborhood to discover new places like shrines. One woman told me that she liked to go to the movies when she lived in Tokyo and missed a movie theater in her new place of residence. However, she is busy with farming now and only occasionally visits the small galleries in town and sometimes attends a live concert in the newly built music hall. Other newcomers stressed that they prefer the availability of delicious food, clean water, nature and onsen over the amenities of the urban consumer society. In fact, in many cases, getting away from a consumption-oriented urban lifestyle was the main reason why they relocated to the countryside in the first place.

Almost everyone I talked to emphasized that they don’t need to spend much money in their everyday lives. Often, gasoline is the highest cost. Depending on a car to get around was one of the things most of my research participants were actually critical of. One reason was the high cost, the other was the lack of physical activity. While in Tokyo they had to walk to the train station or when they went shopping. In the countryside, however, they drive everywhere by car. Another problem mentioned by many research participants was the sometimes spotty and slow internet connection that also somewhat ridicules new government concepts like “workation”. This concept combines “work” and “vacation” and aims to increase telework from rural areas in order to create a kankei jinkō – that is people who develop bonds to rural communities and will eventually move to the countryside permanently in the future (Japan Times 2019).

In summary, people who move to rural areas look for a simple life in the countryside amidst beautiful nature. They often decide to leave the convenience of their former urban lifestyle behind, but this does not mean that they can do without a stable internet (and by no means without electricity). For many ijūsha this is a matter of necessity to continue their jobs and to connect with their friends and families within and beyond Japan.

References

Japan Times (2019), Japan’s local governments launch ‘workation’ alliance to boost regional revitalization and work-style reform, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/11/18/business/japan-local-governments-workation-alliance-revitalization-work-style-reform/, accessed December 4, 2019.

by Wendy Wuyts

I am a feminist. I strongly realized this when I lived and did research in Japan and particularly during an onsite training from April 2018 to February 2019. The onsite research training (ORT) was organized by professors from Nagoya University and aimed at teaching students the skills of clinical environmental studies. Together with three other PhD students I was assigned to conduct case studies in Higashi-Shirakawa and Shirakawa-chō in Gifu prefecture. These two towns were introduced to us as suffering from extreme population decline. When we enrolled in ORT in 2018, the professors had already conducted this training for several years in the Ise Bay Bioregion in Japan (Kato et al. 2014). The ‘Onsite research training (ORT)’ is transdisciplinary and stimulates a co-learning and co-designing process. We were encouraged to present both a diagnosis of local problems and then a treatment based on information gathered through interviews and discussions with local experts to understand their tacit knowledge and to combine it with academic knowledge.

During a well-planned three-day visit to the two villages, the professors (mostly male) would present local stories. Our task was to document everything in order to make a diagnosis and to select a problem we would focus on in the next six months.  We met local government officials, visited farmers (pork, green tea, vegetables), tea factories, taxi drivers and other inhabitants of the villages who talked about their problems and ideas. We met long-term residents and newcomers. Interestingly, most of them were Japanese men. We listened to 30 men, and only two women. In addition, women, including female professors, were put in serving roles. The feminist inside me roared.

After these three days, I remarked to the professors that we heard quite biased stories of these villages and asked for more female voices during our next visit. The professors did not understand the need for interviewing women at first, but my experiences in Japan and exchange with feminist students at Nagoya University made me realize the importance of gender analysis in rural or any other place(s) as different gender roles result in different everyday experiences and knowledge about the place people inhabit (West & Zimmerman, 1987). We were later introduced to more women in the field. Their stories and literature on gender in Japanese rural villages and towns provided even more evidence that gender is an important factor when it comes to, for example, community participation.

For our project, we decided to analyze the acceptance of newcomers in the two towns. Rather than attracting newcomers, making them stay, was a challenge in both places. We wanted to find out if this was related to their social acceptance. In October, we designed a questionnaire in order to compare and analyze the acceptance of I-turners, U-turners and people that married locals. We created questionnaires and with the help of the local governments, sent out questionnaires to 800 people (625 in Shirakawa-chō and 175 in Higashi-Shirakawa). The response rate was 40% or more (330/800).

We asked two questions that were inspired by literature on gender relations and previous conversations with men and women in the months before. One question was about community spaces where newcomers and long-term residents can meet. The other was about community events where they could get in touch. We were interested in, if for example, men would answer differently than women. Our analysis found that women more often answered that they think that not enough community spaces are available, while more men said there are not enough community events for newcomers that would foster communication with local residents. These differences are due to the gendered accessibility of community events and community spaces. Thus, our research shows how important a gender perspective is regarding the acceptance of newcomers in rural Japan. By the way: In the following year, the ORT organizers included more “female stories” in the three-day introduction to their onsite research training.

Wendy Wuyts, originally from Belgium, received her PhD in environmental science from the Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Nagoya University. She currently works as researcher in the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her research interests include (social impacts of) circularity, sustainable transitions and territorial ecology. Results of this study are not published (yet), but the author still has all the data, the report and posters for seminars, reflections and other notes. You can contact her (wendy.wuyts@ntnu.no) if you want to learn more.

References:

Kato, Hirokazu, Hiroyuki Shimizu, Noriyuki Kawamura, Yasuhiro Hirano, Takashi Tashiro, Hiromi Yamashita, Keisuke Tomita, Mitsuyuki Tomiyoshi, & Kazu Hagihara. (2014), A Prospect Toward Establishment of Basic and Clinical Environmental Studies by ORT (On-Site Research Training) in Shimizu, H. and Murayama, A. eds., 2014. Basic and clinical environmental approaches in landscape planning. Springer Science & Business Media. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-4-431-54415-9.pdf, Accessed 10 April 2019.

West, C., Zimmermann, D.H. (1987). ‘Doing Gender’, Gender & Society 1 (2): 125-151.