by Cecilia Luzi

From the very first day of my fieldwork in Japan, I knew that this would be a great adventure. After a long ride on the Shinkansen from Kyoto, I found myself tired in a hotel in Buzen, but my child was crying to go out and play somewhere. This was just the beginning of a series of intense months spent between field research and the need to create a new routine for myself and my child. Soon I was spending endless hours in public parks in rural Japan and making some interesting discoveries. First, I noticed that there were public parks that were only for the elderly, with equipment for back and leg exercises. This is a clear sign that the Japanese population is aging at a dizzying pace, especially in rural areas. Second, in rural Japan, there are some stunning parks! Having lived in Berlin for two years, I thought that Germany held the record for the most spectacular public parks, but I had to revise my opinion. The parks here in Japan are generally well maintained, with beautiful gardens and large playgrounds for children. I also noticed that parents often play with their children, whereas in Europe, parents often sit on benches and watch their children play. But in Japan, parents climb the slides together with their children, and everyone seems to be having a good time. However, this can also lead to some awkward moments when you’re stuck on a slide tower with another parent that’s meant for kids between the ages of 5 and 10! But in the end, it’s all part of the fun.

Playing with leaves in autumn
Copyright © Cecilia Luzi 2022

I also had many interesting encounters during my stays in parks. In front of the hotel where I stayed during the first days of my fieldwork, there was a clearing with a pavilion and some benches. On the evening of my arrival, I decided to take a walk and came across some strange fitness equipment in the park (which I later found out was for elderly people). While I was trying to make sense of it, a man walking his dog approached me and my son. He seemed intrigued by our presence. We exchanged a few words, and after 10 minutes we were sitting in his living room eating cookies and talking with him and his wife about the increasing desolation of the city with more and more empty houses and a rapidly aging population.

Collecting acorns in fall and enjoying springtime in public parks
Copyright © Cecilia Luzi 2022, 2023

During fall, the parks turned into a veritable sea of color. Every day was like discovering a different landscape, and my son filled my pockets with colorful leaves, acorns and chestnuts at every turn. On a sunny December day, we met a family at the slide who had recently moved from Tokyo to the nearby village. The mother was Japanese, the father Senegalese, and they had a 5-year-old daughter who was cheerful and lively and quickly gained my son’s trust. We immediately struck up a conversation as we were curious about each other. I soon discovered that their move to the countryside was more challenging than expected, as the mentality was different than in the city and communication, especially in the workplace, was less direct. “At the moment we are saving, and as soon as our daughter starts elementary school, we have decided to move to Senegal,” explained the mother.

Public parks in Japan are often shaded by large cherry trees of all kinds. This year, they bloomed between late March and early April at my field site. So when I had to organize a meeting with one of my research participants, we did not hesitate to organize a hanami with our children. She came with her parents and we spent an hour eating strawberries and talking about her ten years in Japan as a potter, while the children played and screamed non-stop.

Slides in Japan are very long
Copyright © Cecilia Luzi 2023

When I moved to my second field site, I stayed in a trial house provided by the municipality for the first ten days. It was only a two-minute walk from the largest park and playground in town. Every day we went to the slides and met many different families. What surprised me most was that many people I spoke with were not from the city, but had moved here after marriage because their spouse was originally born here. Whether they were men or women, whether they came from nearby cities or from big cities like Nagasaki or Fukuoka, many moved to this small town of 15,000 people after deciding to get married and have children.

The beach is our second option if we don’t want to go to the park.
Copyright © Cecilia Luzi 2023

When I arrived in the field months ago, I quickly realized that I had to face many challenges: finding the right people to socialize with, adapting to a new place, and most importantly, finding a way to give my child the serenity he needed in a completely different context than he was used to. All the initial phases of participant observation, which were very important to my research, took a back seat to the need to make the move as easy as possible for my child. Anyone who has dealt with babies and toddlers, as well as older children, knows that they need constant attention, constant presence, and a good dose of daily entertainment. And when you just want to flip open the futon and enjoy an episode of some show before you start preparing dinner after a busy day of meetings and interviews, you need to get out and play. Doing fieldwork with a young child in tow means leaving the house every day, even when you’re tired and exhausted. Some days this can be very exhausting, but there are also positive aspects to this situation. I have spent many happy hours in the parks watching my son play, grow, and interact with adults and children, but most importantly, even on days when I would have preferred to stay home and avoid people, my child has forced me to go out. As time went on, I became more and more confident in going out every day. Now I enjoy chatting with the other moms and dads in town, and what is just a playground for my child has become a new source of observation for me every day.

by Ngo Tu Thanh (Frank Tu)

National politicians play an essential role in the making of rural revitalization policies. However, their competing demands for limited resources can lead to conflicting priorities. Through interviews with Diet members in Tokyo, I found that politicians’ responsibilities include establishing directions for rural revitalization, revising laws and debating the effectiveness of particular policies. They can also use their influence to shape proposals from the Cabinet Office and relevant ministries. Studies by McElwain (2012) and Sasada (2013) suggest that rural areas tend to be overrepresented in the Japanese Diet. The large number of rural representatives might lead to fierce competition between politicians at the national level, who try to procure more funding and policies favorable to their constituencies, given that municipalities prioritize different revitalization strategies based on their specific needs.

The office where I conducted an interview with a Diet member in Tokyo
Copyright © Ngo Tu Thanh 2022

Leading and opposition parties in Japan have many conflicting interests when it comes to rural revitalization policies. A Diet member from the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP) strongly criticized the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP) approach to rural revitalization in our interview. Unlike the LDP, he and his party emphasize the importance of a bold immigration policy to revitalize rural areas. However, this puts the CDP at odds with the LDP, which has traditionally been conservative on immigration policy to appeal to older voters who tend to be more conservative. My interview partner’s criticism of the LDP is especially aimed at the Technical Intern Training Program (gaikokujin ginōjisshū seido) that recruits immigrant workers to compensate for the lack of labor in rural areas and at the LDP’s lacking vision to attract and retain foreign talent from other Asian countries. He believes that the LDP’s reliance on cheap labor is hindering rural revitalization efforts.

He also criticizes the LDP’s current policies, which tend to provide a large amount of funding for public works which are not effective in revitalizing rural areas. Overinvestment in public works has resulted in the construction of unnecessary infrastructure, such as bridges and roads, which do not directly address the underlying economic and social issues facing rural areas. This practice is often referred to as pork-barrel politics. Pork-barrel politics is a recurring theme throughout my fieldwork at all three levels of government. This type of politics involves politicians using their power and influence to bring government money and projects to their own districts or states, regardless of whether those projects are necessary or not, to win over voters.

The construction of new roads and bridges has been criticized as pork-barrel politics
Copyright © Ngo Tu Thanh 2022

This interview with a member of the national diet highlights the tensions between the ruling party and opposition parties over how to revitalize rural areas. In addition, research on political behavior indicates that politicians are often motivated by self-interest, which is most importantly to win elections (Callander 2008; Fredriksson et al. 2011). This view is also supported by bureaucrats involved in rural revitalization at the Cabinet Office I have interviewed. One of my interview partners said that politicians are more concerned with campaigning than with legislation. In some cases, politicians may not prioritize rural development but still feel the need to present themselves as doing so and tend to make empty promises before elections and neglect them after getting elected. This election-focused behavior creates a void for other policy actors, such as bureaucrats and interest groups to step in.

In conclusion, conflicting interests among politicians can hinder effective policymaking for rural revitalization in Japan. The competition for limited resources can result in pork-barrel politics and overinvestment in public works projects that do not address the underlying economic and social issues facing rural areas. Moreover, politicians’ self-interest and election-focused behavior allow other policy actors to step in. In my PhD thesis, and upcoming blog posts, I will also explore the interactions between politicians with policy secretaries, bureaucrats and interest groups.

References
Callander, Steven. 2008. “Political Motivations.” Review of Economic Studies 75: 671–97.
Fredriksson, Per G, Le Wang, and Khawaja Mamun. 2011. “Are Politicians Office or Policy Motivated? The Case of U.S. Governors’ Environmental Policies.” Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 62 (2): 241–53.
McElwain, Kenneth. 2012. “The Nationalization of Japanese Elections.” Journal of East Asian Studies 12: 323–50.
Sasada, Hironori. 2013. “The Impact of Rural Votes in Foreign Policies: The FTA Policies under the DPJ Government in Japan.” Asian Journal of Political Science 21 (3): 224–48.

by Lynn Ng

In December 2022, I wrote a post on the struggles of my first week back in the field – the countryside with shivering winds and empty phone signals in Fukushima. I worried gravely what returning to the field would be like and how ill-prepared I had been. To come full-circle, I want to share the last week of my field work in Fukushima here. During this week I had a starkly different experience in a different but deeply similar site (countryside, mountainous, cold). In January, I participated in a farm-stay in another part of rural Fukushima. Given that it was mid-winter and taking place just after Japan’s worst snowstorm in a decade, I worried that this farm experience would be cancelled, or worse, unfruitful.

The snow-covered vegetables, from which we freely picked out our vegetables.
Copyright © Lynn Ng 2023

Luck would have it that the days immediately after the storm were sunny and bright. While still cold enough for the snow to stay, I was immensely glad to see blue skies. Regular farm work aside, my research participant was also hosting a community hotpot party in the evening and our task for this day in particular was simple: salvage and harvest whatever vegetables we could get from the snowy fields. Booted and gloved up, I walked hesitantly towards the row of lettuces, wondering what could actually have survived the snowstorm. I knelt down at a bundle of lettuce, poked its frozen leaves, sighed, and prepared to get up and abandon this section. At that moment, an old lady from the neighborhood trudged over and squatted beside me, telling me in slurred Japanese to pluck them out. I was confused but tried nevertheless, but alas the soil itself was frozen and the lettuces would not budge without me completely ripping the ball apart.

My little lettuce baby and our delicious yield
Copyright © Lynn Ng 2023

The old lady muttered impatiently, conjured a knife from out of nowhere, and started stabbing the frozen soil to dislodge the lettuces. She showed me then how to gently peel apart the frozen outer leaves to reveal fresh lettuce cores. I was in awe. I had fully planned for the dinner party to be of scraps, since it was mid-winter. Yet, now I knelt on frozen soil cradling a palm-sized lettuce core so fresh I wanted to bite on it there and then. Midway through our farm efforts, a middle-aged man drove up along the driveway and, with some distance from us, started poking his knife at the tree roots. What could it be now? I was curious and excused myself from the group and walked over to the man, all the while hoping he would not turn around and stab me with his knife. “Ah, look, Daikon,” he said. I crouched cautiously and saw what he was poking at– the frozen soil around a tiny sprout of what appeared to be radish leaves. He told me that tiny leaves meant larger radishes, and so together we plucked at the tiny sprout and heaved and dug. Our strenuous efforts were rewarded with a stick of thin, palm-sized radish. “Maybe this can just be grated,” he comforted himself. After hours of harvesting, we were pleased with our yield – a healthy mix of lettuces, cabbages, onions, and other greens I could not identify. We wheeled our finds to the car and set off to prepare for the hotpot.

Food somehow tastes best when made with self-sourced ingredients.
Copyright © Lynn Ng 2023

Now back in Berlin, I reflect upon those three months in Japan and how things have come full circle. I look back at those pictures of lettuces and hotpots, and wonder how little I thought about radiation at all during the whole farm-to-table process, even though I spent hours harvesting vegetables grown in the soil of the former exclusion zones. I wondered again if that’s what the newcomers here experienced too: the forgotten radiation displaced by the warm hotpot parties and cheeriness of the rural wide blue skies.