by Sarah Bijlsma

For the past few months, I have paused my doctoral research due to the birth of my daughter last December. It took me some time to adjust to this new reality, as I went almost directly from fieldwork on Miyakojima to days spent feeding, changing diapers, and reading picture books. Besides this weblog and the occasional academic papers I read, one channel that keeps giving glimpses of life in the Japanese countryside is the Netflix series “Love Village” (“Ai no Sato”).

Watching “Love Village” while the baby takes a nap
Copyright © Sarah Bijlsma 2023

“Love Village” aired in early May and has 18 episodes at the time of writing. The show contains some elements common to modern dating shows. For example, eight single men and women are given a living space outside their normal lives where they get to know each other on a day-to-day basis. When someone falls in love, they ring the “love bell” (ai no kane), confess his or her love and leave either together or alone if rejected. What is new, however, is that the participants of “Love Village” are between 35 and 60 years old, so they have all passed 30, which is about the average age of marriage in Japan [1]. A second new element of the show is that the contestants do not live in a stylishly furnished apartment, but in a 152-year-old kominka (traditional Japanese house). While living in the countryside, the contestants are tasked with growing their own vegetables and renovating the house together during episodes of the show.

Watching “Love Village” makes me miss the Japanese countryside
Copyright © Sarah Bijlsma 2023

These two unique elements – the age of the participants and the task of restoration – are fascinating to me because they directly reflect the two major problems facing Japan today. The first is the aging of the population. With 28.4% of older Japanese in 2018, Japan has the oldest population in the world [2]. The second problem is the shrinking population, especially in rural areas. As several authors have pointed out in this blog, the restoration of akiya (vacant houses) by urban Japanese newcomers is a new trend used as a strategy to combat rural migration [3]. Accompanied by a soundtrack of high-energy Backstreet Boys hits from the 1990s, “Love Village” portrays life in the countryside as great fun. Members cut bamboo in the forest and eat flowing noodles (nagashi sōmen), they happily remove spiders from bedrooms and they simply move their dinner inside when it starts to rain. In addition, daily life seems both convenient and cheap: many vegetables are picked directly from the field, and there is a grocery delivery service that brings the rest of the food into the house. Restoration also seems to be going on without much of a hurdle, and week after week one can see members successfully restoring the wooden floor and shoji paper windows in the house. Most importantly, the restoration of an old Japanese house actually turns out to be a recipe for finding true love.

Under construction: it takes some time to renovate an old country house
Copyright © Cornelia Reiher 2023

**the next paragraph contains spoilers**

The first “Love Village” couple is Junpei and Okayo. Junpei is 42 years old and has lived his life as a free spirit both in Japan and abroad. After his father’s death, he returned to Shizuoka to take over his carpentry business and is now looking for a woman to help him. Okayo, 39, works part-time at a grocery store. After the two spend days together renovating the woman’s room, Okayo confesses her feelings to Junpei. She emphasizes how important it was for them to work together on the sleeping area and that “I wanted to help someone I liked in my own way” [4]. Although Junpei admits that he was initially more attracted to another female roommate, he chooses the introverted Okayo and leaves the show with her. According to their Instagram profiles, the two are still together. Many viewers have wondered where the kominka from “Love Village” is in Japan, which has led to heated discussions on the Internet. The most widely accepted theory is that it is located in Minamiboso-shi in Chiba-ken. This conclusion is drawn because viewers have found that two company names dropped in the broadcast could belong to a restoration company and a real estate company, both of which operate in Chiba-ken. In addition, the website of each real estate agency notes that they currently sell only traditional houses in the Minamiboso-shi area.

Many newcomers renovate abandoned houses in rural Japan like this one
Copyright © Cornelia Reiher 2023

I like Japanese dating shows because they are so real. A European version would focus mainly on the arguments during the long working days and the jealousy among the contestants. Love Village, on the other hand, shows everyone cheering each other on and working together in many ways. As I myself float on a pink cloud during these months, it’s nice to see relationships forming between people who had long given up on love.

References
[1]          https://www.statista.com/statistics/611957/japan-mean-age-marriage-by-gender/#:~:text=Men%20and%20women%20in%20Japan,when%20they%20first%20got%20married.
[2] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/09/15/national/elderly-citizens-accounted-record-28-4-japans-population-2018-data-show/
[3] See or example this blog, “Vacant houses in rural Japan: From empty space to potential places for newcomers” by Jyoti Vasnani (2021), “Renovating old houses: Between Japan and France” by Maritchu Durand (2021), and “A gallery in the middle of nowhere: reusing abandoned houses as art spaces in Japan’s countryside” by Cornelia Reiher (2023).
[4] Love Village, 2023, episode 8.