by Sarah Bijlsma

A question that inevitably comes up when thinking about (urban migration to) rural Japan is where ‘the rural’ as a unit of analysis begins and ends. To put it differently, is rural Japan defined by population density, municipal borders, the conceptual boundaries of ‘the countryside,’ linguistic terms like chiiki (region), inaka (countryside), or chihō (district), or by a combination of all? In my research on Miyakojima it is the term shima (island) or ritō (remote island) that is used by people to reflect on the space they inhabit. Being a piece of land fully surrounded by water, I often feel that the term is applied to describe an isolated and more or less homogeneous space [1]. Yet, spending time on Miyako I realized that its 159 km² is used, planned, and negotiated by different people in fundamentally different ways.

To begin with, Miyako has a small urbanized area on the west side of the island. This is where most of the 52,814 inhabitants live [2]. However, when I strolled through the narrow streets, I was especially struck by the many multi-story buildings with a different karaoke bar or hostess club on each floor. One night I spoke to a girl named Mika who works in such a hostess club. She told me that she was originally from Osaka and had moved to Miyako three months earlier. On Miyako, only migrants like herself work as hostesses as the job comes with a number of benefits for them. For example, the club provides a dorm to live in, food and free drinks, a relatively high salary, and even pays for a one-way airplane ticket from the girl’s home city to Miyako. Mika had been a hostess for many years but stated that she likes the work way better on the island. In Osaka, her customers were mainly middle-aged salarymen. In contrast, on Miyako her customers are tourists and Japanese construction workers who are more or less the same age. So she gets paid to party, get drunk, and talk to people she would also be friends with outside of her job.

Club Venus and other hostess clubs in the center of Miyako
Copyright © Sarah Bijlsma 2022

The seaside is an area that is marked by the concrete of hotels and resorts. These buildings did not exist until a few years before; the year 2015 marked the beginning of a large-scale construction rush that became known as the ‘Miyako Bubble’. I have been told that the local population hardly benefits from these hotels, as they are built, managed, invested in, and used by people from Japan. Mika’s boyfriend is someone who knows Miyako’s beach areas very well. Originally from Yamanashi-ken, he worked at a real estate company in Tokyo before moving to Miyako in 2021. He started his own SUP business next to Yonaha-Maehama Beach, Miyako’s number one tourist spot. When I asked him if there are any locals who make use of his services, he said that locals do not spend time at the beach at all. For them, the ocean is something ordinary (atarimae). The only locals you see are the owners of jet ski companies, many of whom are yakuza. He does not know the exact reason for this, but since a lot of money goes is turned over in these businesses and customers pay in cash, they seem to be the perfect vehicles for laundering money.

Miyako is known by Japanese tourists for its bright blue sea
Copyright © Sarah Bijlsma 2022

While Miyako’s city center and beaches are the terrains of Japanese tourists and emigrants, the inland belongs to the local population. Miyako has no mountains and these inner landscapes are characterized by wide sugarcane fields. In a small village on the east side of the island stands the house of Hiroto and his wife. The couple, originally from Miyako, run a small restaurant while raising their eight children. When they were still a family of six, they traveled around Japan to learn about alternative ways of agriculture, architecture, and education. When they returned, they could not find a house and decided to build a hut from old cans and clay in a banana field. Their fifth child was born there. After six months, they bought an old house which they fully rebuilt. The roof was taken off to make the house twice as high. A second floor was built, accessible only by log, and it contains so many books that they call it their ‘library.’ There are no separate rooms in the house; everyone can just grab a futon and sleep wherever they want. The walls of the bathroom are made out of corals, and the toilet is largely built of glass bottles that cast a pleasant green light into the house whenever in use.  

The house of Hiroto and his wife
Copyright © Sarah Bijlsma 2022

These three examples illustrate that, far from being a homogeneous environment, the geography of Miyako is organized according to different social groups. As such, the landscape of Miyako can be ‘read’ as text [3]: Taking a close look at the island’s architectural structures provides insights into the fabric and social relationships that are being negotiated on this small piece of land.

Endnotes

[1] Gillis, John R. 2007. “Island Sojourns”. Geographical Review, Vol. 97, No. 2, pp. 274-287.

[2] As of June 2022. Miyako Mainichi. 27.06.2022. Miyako keniki jinkō 35nen buri souka / 20nen kokuseichōsa sokuhō [Miyako’s population increases for the first time in 35 years / 20 year preliminary census report]. Via https://www.miyakomainichi.com/news/post-142738/ (accessed on 19.10.2022)

[3] Cosgrove, Denis. 1989. “Geography is everywhere: culture and symbolism in human landscapes.” In: Derek Gregory & Rex Walford (eds.), Horizons in Human Geography. Barnes & Noble. pp. 118–135.

by Ngo Tu Thanh (Frank Tu)

Buzen is a small coastal city located in the northeast of Fukuoka Prefecture. Despite its small size, both area-wise and population-wise (approx. 24,000 residents), Buzen City has amazed me with its efforts to promote international cooperation and multiculturalism. After fieldwork in Buzen, in this blogpost, I want to share my experiences and the reasons why officials in Buzen are working hard for the city’s internationalization. My first (online) contact in Buzen in September 2021 was with Ms Ngo Thi Nhung, a Vietnamese national working in the City Hall of Buzen, who is a member of the chiiki okoshi kyōryokutai (COKT) Program and also contributed to our blog . I was surprised that Ms Nhung was recruited to work at the city hall and being a Vietnamese national myself, I was also happy to meet a fellow “comrade”. When I connected with Ms. Nhung via Facebook I realized that she is also one of Buzen’s foreigner-friendly official Facebook page admins. Her role in promoting Buzen’s public relations really sets Buzen apart from other localities, as she connects the local government with the public. Thanks to Ms Nhung I could directly arrange appointments with local officials via Buzen’s Facebook page. Last year, I was able to secure an online meeting with both Ms. Nhung and her direct supervisor, who told me that promoting international cooperation is one of Buzen’s main regional revitalization strategies.

Months had passed since our first online interview and when I finally made it to Japan, I attended a diplomatic event between Vietnam and Japan in Fukuoka in July 2022, where chairmen of Vietnamese provinces and their counterparts from Fukuoka Prefecture and other localities in Kyushu came together to promote bilateral partnership. To my surprise, I saw the booth of Buzen City at the event and, more importantly, I also met the official whom I interviewed online. This coincidental encounter was really a joy as neither I nor the Buzen’s official expected to meet each other at an event hosted by the Consulate of Vietnam in Fukuoka. We exchanged contacts and talked briefly. He told me that Buzen is currently trying to strengthen its partnership with Taiwan and Vietnam, and the Mayor of Buzen was at that time on a business trip to Vietnam with Ms. Ngo Thi Nhung to cultivate new opportunities.

In August, I finally went to Buzen. After visiting the city hall and conducting interviews with officials, I learned that the city had just established a new division for international cooperation and multiculturalism (kokusai kyōsei suishin shitsu) with four members, including the official I met online and in Fukuoka, Ms Nhung and another COKT with an international background, who has lived in Switzerland and Taiwan for several years. This new division was established as part of the mayor’s vision to develop the city by strengthening the partnerships with Taiwan and Vietnam and supporting foreign nationals living in Buzen. For instance, Buzen is trying to invite Vietnamese universities to establish local branches in the city, where both international and local students can study. Also, Buzen is looking for business partners in Vietnam who can import Buzen’s local products. Next, in order to promote mutual understanding and support foreign residents (most of whom are Vietnamese technical interns), Buzen also organizes Vietnamese language sessions for locals, and Japanese language courses for foreign nationals. In order for me to directly experience their activities, the officials also invited me to join two events.

I joined a meeting between local officials and a Taiwanese professor who is teaching in Kitakyushu to prepare a Taiwan festival in Buzen in 2023. The event aims at promoting tourism and mutual understanding. The Taiwanese professor came to the meeting with a meticulous plan for the festival and presented his ideas for activities to be conducted at the festival. These included hosting Taiwanese cooking lessons and launching sky lanterns. He also prepared some sample Taiwanese foods for us to try. At the end of the meeting, the officials said they would continue to discuss the plan in the months to come. The officials were very open and flexible with the plan and to test new strategies and ideas. The meeting also made me aware how academics interact with bureaucrats in rural Japan.

The second event I joined was a Vietnamese cooking day organized by Buzen’s local residents and supported by the city hall’s staff. The event featured one of Buzen’s signature agricultural products: loofahs (hechima). Since loofahs are frequently used in the Vietnamese food culture, local residents wanted to learn how Vietnamese people cook it. For this reason, many Vietnamese residents in Buzen joined the event, and together we made six different loofah-based dishes. The event was also a way for local residents and Vietnamese nationals to meet and learn from each other, thereby increasing mutual understanding. After the event, the officials had organized a discussion session where participants could exchange ideas to promote multiculturalism in Buzen. Given that the majority of Vietnamese (and other international) migrants in Buzen are technical interns (ginō jisshūsei), the conversation quickly turned towards this topic. First, Japanese residents acknowledged that the Technical Intern Training program is highly problematic and, in many cases, cruel to Vietnamese participants. While the goal of the program is to provide interns with technical skills that can be transferred back to their home countries, many interns have to undertake repetitive and low-skilled jobs. Ms Nhung made a passionate speech, saying that she had heard of many cases where Japanese firms mistreated and abused Vietnamese interns, considering them only as cheap labor. She hoped the authorities would improve the program. Buzen’s local officials also shared this passion and asked for suggestions to protect and support interns in Buzen by establishing direct hotlines for interns to consult and report cases of mistreatment. That said, some Vietnamese technical interns who participated in the event said that they were personally treated decently, despite the challenging jobs that they were undertaking. During the discussion session, both local residents and officials of Buzen seemed very sympathetic, polite, and willing to take immediate actions.

In summary, Buzen, although a small city, offers great potential for regional revitalization with its efforts in international cooperation and multiculturalism. I personally had a wonderful time in Buzen and very much look forward to visiting the city again. 

Phd research with a kid — part 2

by Cecilia Luzi

It’s been a year since I returned from maternity leave last September. When I wrote the first post for this blog about my experience of raising a child as a PhD student, I talked mostly about what it felt like to return to work after giving birth. I remember being very confused at the time: I didn’t know exactly what to expect or how to approach the various stages of the PhD process with a young child. What worried me the most was the fact that I had to leave Europe to start fieldwork in Japan. Now, I am about to leave for Japan and feel that I am learning to be an anthropologist and a mother at the same time, with all the enthusiasm and anxiety that accompany any new beginning. Although I know that having my son and partner in the field with me is a wonderful opportunity for the mother and anthropologist I want to become, the newness of it all scares me a little.

Over the past year, I have been juggling the uncertainty and insecurity left by the Covid 19 pandemic and the need for constant care and attention that a child in the first year of life requires. My partner and I began preparing all the necessary documents in November 2021, hoping to leave for Japan by the end of the year. For this reason, we decided not to start looking for a kindergarten for our son right away. He was about six months old at the time, and we didn’t want to take him somewhere, let him settle in, and then take him out two months later at that age. However, when the Omicron variant showed up at the end of November and the Japanese government closed the borders again, it became increasingly clear to us that we could not leave so soon. Moreover, we had no idea when and if at all fieldwork in Japan would be possible. After a year of my doctoral work, I was tired of going through the cumbersome bureaucratic procedures to apply for a visa, so in March 2022, we decided to postpone our departure until the fall and I began to collect data with online interviews. At that time, we started looking for a kindergarten for our one-year-old son and only started the Certificate of Eligibility (CoE) application process again in summer. We had to go through the entire process from scratch because our host institutions in Japan had changed. Now the last documents are on their way and soon we will go to the embassy to get the visas in our passports.

For me, organizing a long fieldwork in Japan without knowing the exact start date for months meant learning how to manage an upcoming move by making sure to respect the schedule and necessities of the rigid routine of a child’s first year of life. Specifically, CoE applications alternated with urgent emails to kindergartens in Berlin and pediatrician appointments for mandatory immunizations had to be juggled with Zoom meetings with our host universities in Japan. Today I know that what was for us a long time of postponements and cancellations, fatigue and frustration, was for my son the year of his life, when he ate spaghetti with tomato sauce for the first time, learned to walk around the living room singing songs and making dog noises when he met one on the street. It was a very emotional moment to see him go to to kindergarten for the first time and gradually become independent from me.

Lately I have been thinking about what fieldwork and motherhood might have in common, and this has helped me to see my fears from a different perspective. I am learning to reflect and be aware of my own position, to consider my role and how I perceive myself in contact with others, and I believe this is part of both ethnography and motherhood. Although I realize that the two can be very similar, it scares me that I will have to learn to work in the field and take care of my child at the same time. Will I be good enough to do this for him and for my research? How can I find the time to write notes every night, pay attention to his needs, keep track of what is happening around me, and respond to my growing child’s explosive curiosity? I feel like I’m taking a leap into the void, but perhaps this fear of the unknown is ultimately exactly the feeling one should have when embarking on the field during one’s PhD or becoming a first-time mother.

by Cornelia Reiher

This blog contains several posts about and by members of chiiki okoshi kyōryokutai (COKT).  Launched in 2009 by Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (Sōmushō), COKT provides funding to communities in rural Japan to hire people who move into their communities and promote revitalization activities for three years (Reiher 2020). However, when editing recent blogposts and scrolling through numerous Instagram profiles of urban-rural migrants and local and central government websites, I was struck by the wide variety of English translations for the program. Some examples include “rural revitalization corps,” “local vitalization cooperator,” “local revitalization squadron” and “community building support staff.” Since COKT is one of the central government’s programs aimed at both rural revitalization and urban-rural migration, I think it is important to reflect on the various translations and interpretations of the program’s name itself.

In this post, I focus primarily on the meaning of the term kyōryoku, which means cooperation or “to work together to do things”. But the way how people work together can differ as I realized when I listened to my research participants who are or were members of COKT. Many reflected on their roles as employees of their respective communities and some saw their role rather as supporting revitalization activities while others described their work more as a cooperation between equal partners. Thus, I believe, thinking about “kyōryoku” can help to better understand the relationships between COKT program participants and their host communities.

Certainly, there are many other problems when translating chiiki okoshi kyōryokutai into English (or German). The problem starts with the term chiiki. It is primarily a geographical and sociological term that can be translated as region or regional, but can also mean a relatively small space such as the immediate neighborhood or an inner-city area or all communities outside of urban centers (Morioka 2008). Chiiki okoshi is a concept with its own history. Since the 1970s, attempts to establish new industries in rural regions and greater autonomy for local authorities have been discussed under the term village renewal (mura okoshi) or regional renewal (chiiki okoshi). The mura okoshi movement was strongly inspired by the ideas of localism (chiiki shugi) (Kitano 2009: 22, 23). It is also debated whether the term ‘revitalization’ or ‘vitalization’ should be used as revitalization implies a rather conservative approach of nostalgic longing for a better past (Klien 2009: 221).

Although at first glance it may seem the least problematic term in the program’s name, kyōryoku can have different meanings when COKT members and municipalities work together. COKT participants’ jobs and the way they are treated by the local government that employs them can differ greatly within and between municipalities. While some COKT members are artists and enjoy the freedom to work in their studios all day, others are required to show up for work in the town hall at 8:30 am and to regularly report to their superiors. Some have clearly defined tasks, such as working at the support desk for incoming migrants, creating and updating municipalities’ social media accounts or working in local cultural facilities. Those who report more positive experiences in the COKT often describe their work experience in terms of cooperation. Some told me that they did not plan to join COKT, but when they called the municipal government of the town they wanted to relocate to or visited the place they were offered a position in the program. In some cases, municipal governments look for people who bring new ideas and initiate projects and are happy to support them. In order to find the best people for the job, they go through a careful selection process. Municipalities who select COKT members based on their ideas for the revitalization of their town are more likely to give them a free hand with their projects. With the goal of settling down, some COKT members already establish companies or careers for the time after their three-year contract ends.

Other (and sometimes the same) municipalities provide COKT members with only little agency to realize their own projects. They are expected them to support local activities instead of cooperating on an equal footing. COKT members who are older and have already had careers in other professions find this particularly obstructive. They have their own ideas about revitalization, but not all of these ideas can be realized. Some of my interviewees, however, don’t want to implement their own ideas and are happy to simply support existing projects.

Sometimes COKT members are hired as substitute for municipal staff due to tight municipal budgets. Some municipalities have found very creative solutions to deal with the lack of staff, for example, topping up the working hours of COKT members (they only work 15 days a month) with an additional salary. So, a large part of the personnel costs is financed by the central government through the COKT program. This is the only way cultural institutions can operate in some communities and further increases the dependency between municipalities and the central government.

In summary, the meaning of kyōryoku in chiiki okoshi kyōryokutai varies from municipality to municipality and within municipalities. However, COKT members who experience kyōryoku as cooperation rather than as support report more positive experiences with the program. Municipalities have different reasons for employing individuals via the COKT program; lacking resources is one of many. Future research examining COKT’s contribution to rural revitalization should pay attention to how municipalities actually work with COKT participants.

References

Reiher, Cornelia (2020), “Embracing the periphery: Urbanites’ motivations to relocate to rural Japan”, in Manzenreiter, Wolfram, Lützeler, Ralph and Polak-Rottmann, Sebastian (Eds.), Japan’s new ruralities: Coping with decline in the periphery, London: Routledge, pp. 230–244.

Kitano, Shu (2009), Space, Planning and Rurality. Uneven Rural Development in Japan, Victoria, BC: Trafford.

Morioka, Kiyoshi (2008) „‚Chiʼiki‘ e no apurōchi“ [Approaches to chiʼiki], in: ders. (ed.), Chiʼiki no shakaigaku [Regional Sociology], Tōkyō: Yūhikaku, S.3-20.

Klien, Susanne (2009), „Ländliche Regionen und Tourismusvermarktung zwischen Revitalisierung oder Exotisierung: Das Beispiel Echigo-Tsumari“, in: Wieczorek, Iris und David Chiavacci (Hg.), Japan 2009. Politik, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Berlin: VSJF, S. 217-242.