by Gina Bresch

In 2019, after finishing school, I decided to go to Japan for a few months to do voluntary service. I ended up in Tokushima City, the capital of the prefecture of the same name on the smallest of Japan’s four main islands, Shikoku. While many of my fellow volunteers, who came through the same agency, were the only ones at their placement, I was lucky enough to become part of a large team of volunteers who worked, ate and lived together. For three months I was part of the NPO “Bizan Daigaku” where I did a lot of hard but rewarding work. 

One of the people I met during that time was a former volunteer who worked at one of the nurseries we sometimes worked at; a Russian woman named Zhanna. After her volunteer work ended, she had traveled a lot in the Tokushima area and liked the tranquility of it more than the big cities in Japan, so she decided to stay. I didn’t see her very often while I was working in Tokushima, but I learned that she had later secured a position as an English teacher. Even after Zhanna left the volunteer program, she remained close to the close-knit community of the Bizan Daigaku organization. We saw each other from time to time, and I was very impressed with her Japanese language skills and admired how she lived in Tokushima, away from her family, and found her own way. I hoped that one day I would be able to come to Japan for a permanent stay like she had.

When I returned to Japan in late 2022, I met Zhanna and found out that she had moved to Kaiyō, a small town on the south coast of Tokushima. She seemed very busy with her work. She told us about her work and what made her move to remote Kaiyō. After living in Tokushima City for a while, Zhanna had begun traveling to Kaiyō on weekends. She saw it as an escape from her busy work life in the city and began to wonder what it would be like to live in this place, which she came to appreciate more and more. At the same time, Zhanna had started taking surfing lessons in Tokushima City, and since Kaiyō is known to have the biggest waves in the prefecture, she thought it would help her improve her surfing skills if she moved there. When I talked to her, she even called it “Surfers’ Mekka.

Zhanna lives in Kaiyō, but works in a town called Minami, which is 40 minutes away by car. She works in the Regional Revitalization Division of the Tokushima Southern Prefectural Office, which includes Kaiyō City, Minami City, Anan City, and others. Of these, I was only familiar with Anan City because one of the nurseries where I volunteered was located there. As you might expect, these are very remote areas that are struggling with depopulation. Zhanna is responsible for the English versions of the prefectures’ social media sites, as well as photographing “the best views and local traditions,” all with the goal of revitalizing the region. Through her work, she hopes to help promote some of the region’s specialties and its appeal to attract more (foreign) tourists to visit the southern, rural part of Tokushima Prefecture. It also involves a lot of translating and interpreting Japanese promotional material into English, such as brochures. Finally, her SNS work consists of appearing on the prefectural government’s YouTube channel, showcasing various places and activities in the area.

On the other hand, she participates in tourism fairs and conventions and speaks at the annual “Silver Daigakko” event, which is designed to help recruit new volunteer guides in Tokushima City. Her presence as a foreigner helps the cause of revitalization by adding another perspective to these rural areas that can be attractive to both Japanese and foreign visitors. Zhanna calls Tokushima a “treasure chest for exploration” and would like to share this place with many people so that they can experience a different side of Japan. As for her hopes for the future, she hopes that the infrastructure of southern Tokushima will be developed and that her work will help the area become more popular to attract new tourists. That way, the money they earn from tourism could help local people improve their lives and live more comfortably. In particular, she wants to promote the various unique festivals that take place between August and November, such as the Anan Danjiri Kenka Matsuri. I wish her and her work all the best for the future and hope to see her soon, perhaps when visiting Kaiyō myself.

Gina Bresch is a student in the BA program in Japanese Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin.

by Cornelia Reiher

Rural Japan is not only an interesting field of research, but also an attractive topic for teaching Japanese Studies. In the summer of 2024, I taught a course on recent social, cultural and political dynamics in Japan’s rural areas to students of the BA program in Japanese Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. In this course, we talked about cultural aspects of local crafts and arts and discovered several interesting initiatives to attract artists to rural Japan, realize art projects together with locals, and promote tourism through traditional crafts. Other course topics included the mobility of people as tourists, urban-rural migrants and transnational migrants and their experiences in rural Japan. We discussed differences and similarities in the lives of Japanese and foreign newcomers to the countryside and attempted to define tourism, migration and kankei jinkō through the perspectives of weblogs and social media accounts of tourists and migrants. Finally, we talked about rural revitalization policies, agriculture and municipal mergers, and followed policy developments at various levels of government to better understand central-local relations in Japan.

Not only did the students read secondary literature and analyze a variety of primary sources such as videos, websites, white papers, blogs, and social media accounts, but I also asked them to write a post for this blog on a topic they found interesting. In order to get to know the blog and the different topics and perspectives that blog authors have contributed to this blog on urban-rural migration and rural revitalization, I asked them to present three blog posts to the group. As a next step, they drafted their own posts based on the primary sources we analyzed in class or based on their own experiences in rural Japan. Over the next few weeks, we will share their posts on topics as diverse as remote work, foreign residents in rural Japan, art projects in the countryside, spiritual tourism, renovation of abandoned houses, and migration stories to Okinawa.

Since I invited students to contribute to this blog last year, this year’s students were very impressed when they read their peers’ posts. This inspired and motivated them to write their own posts. By incorporating student contributions into this blog, it has become both a resource and a method for teaching about rural Japan. I hope you will enjoy our students’ new posts!

by Nakako Hattori-Ishimaru

Ishigaki-shi, Japan’s southernmost city with a population of about 50,000 people, is located on Ishigaki-jima. The semi-tropical Yaeyama islands, the main island of Okinawa, Tokyo and other areas are connected by this transportation hub, which has attracted tourists and migrants. On the location of a former golf grounds, conservative city mayor Nakayama Yoshitaka claimed in 2016 that he had reached an agreement with the Ministry of Defense to build a new camp for the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force (JGSDF). Ever since, Yamazato Setsuko (born in 1937), a native of the island, has been leading the weekly standing protests against the military facility development. For the members’ average age of 74, the group is named the Ishigaki Grannies’ Society to Protect Life and Livelihood (Ishigaki no kurashi to inochi o mamoru obā tachi no kai). As the name suggests, Yamazato san’s actions go beyond just opposing the establishment of a military base. Years of continuous public protests can be time- and energy- consuming, and even sour relations within small communities. But why does Yamazato san feel the need to engage in peace activism so strongly?

I first learned about Yamazato san through a YouTube video that showed her and her fellow protesters chanting in Ishigaki Port in March 2023. They were protesting against the missiles that had been brought to and installed at the recently constructed Ishigaki Camp without the locals’ permission. In the following year, the documentary film director, Mikami Chie, published the film Ikusa-fumu (The War Clouds), which illustrates how the state-driven fortification efforts since the mid-2010s had gradually and dramatically altered rural societies and landscapes of the southwestern areas of Okinawa, including Ishigaki. Prominent locals are shown in this film, including Yamazato san, who is crucial to native narratives. During my first fieldwork in Okinawa in 2023, I had the opportunity to meet Yamazato san at her home. During a follow-up visit, I attended the documentary film’s premiere screening in Naha. The screening was followed by a talk with the director, where Yamazato san made an appearance as a speaker. Her journey as an activist demonstrates a deep commitment to her native island which runs through her professional endeavors and her personal worldview.

The motivation for Yamazato san’s lifelong commitment to protect island life has been a deep sense of regret. She is from a farming family and after the Pacific War on Ishigaki-jima in 1945, she and her grandmother were the only two survivors of their eight-person family. The years during the post-war American occupation were “another battlefield for survival” (interview with the author in September 2023). Nevertheless, in 1955, she was able to secure a respectable position with the U.S. Military Geology Survey (USGS) as a local field assistant. Leading the survey was female geologist Dr. Helen Foster, who recognized Yamazato san’s strength and appreciated her advice to safeguard the team from natural dangers. In return, the young Yamazato san gained valuable work experiences: She improved her English skills, learned how to collect data, took a jeep to all the creeks on the island and spent some time in Tokyo to finish the colored maps that were to be sent to Washington. Her interests, however, gradually turned towards reviving the traditional lifestyles she had learnt firsthand from her grandmother. These included farming, writing songs in regional ballad forms and recovering the customs of local silk weavers.

In the late 1970s, she was involved in an environmental movement to oppose a plan of new airport construction on the Shiraho Shore, which would have devastated the rich coral reef. While researching the project’s background, she was shocked to discover that the blueprint was based on the geological inquiry she was working on. “I still feel a strong deal of regret for what I did back then. Even though I was working for a salary, I was contributing to a process that would eventually result in the destruction of my native island” (interview with the author in September 2023). She then understood that any significant initiatives for external development on Ishigaki-jima are inevitably linked to military objectives. In 1989, the group appealed to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to lobby the Japanese Government, whereupon construction of the airport was halted but moved to another location on the island. She considers this to be only a partial victory as their ultimate goal was to stop construction completely.

Yamazato san’s lifelong exposures to various foreign institutions gave her profound ideas for protecting her native land. When I asked her to define peace, her answer was clear: the ability to pass on her inherited way of lifestyle and livelihood to future generations. The quality of peace, she is seeking for, is to preserve her ancestral homeland as intact as possible. Developmentalism is often linked to state-led military buildup in order to counteract rural depopulation. On Ishigaki-shi’s 75^th city anniversary, Mayor Nakayama proudly declared in July 2023 that the population had surpassed 50,000, citing the deployment of Camp Ishigaki in addition to general local economic revitalization as the primary drivers (Ryūkyū Shinpō 2023). Countering this dominant discourse of a military-driven economic boom, Yamazato san and her friends warned that the military bases have the potential to take away local autonomy once again. And Yamazato san is aware that many people on the island morally support her group’s protests despite the fact that they appear to be alone when they protest on the street.

References:

Haino, Akira (2022), “Tokushū otome-tachi no sensō 3: Setsu-chan oba no sensō (Special Series: The war of the maidens No.3: Setsuko grandma’s war),” Gekkan YAIMA 334, 6, pp.14-25.

Mikami, Chie (2024), “Ikusa-fumu: Yōsaika suru Okinawa, Shimajima no Kiroku (War clouds: The fortification of Okinawa and its records on the islands),” Tokyo: Shūeisha Shinsho.

Mikami, Chie (2024), “Ikusa-fumu(War Clounds) (Documentary Film)” 2024, https://ikusafumu.jp/ (retrieved on 3 July 2024).

Oaten, James, Lisa McGregor, and Yumi Asada (2003), “There is no end of war for us,“ ABC News, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-16/japan-ishigaki-military-base-remilitarisation-counter-china/101869542 (retrieved on 3 July 2024).

Ryūkyū Shinpō,  ”Ishigaki-shi no jinkō ga gomannin o toppa”(The Ishigaki City population has exceeded 50,000)” on 10 July 2023, https://ryukyushimpo.jp/news/entry-1744966.html, (retrieved on 9 July 2024).

Nakako Hattori Ishimaru (nakako.hattori2@fu-berlin.de) is a research assistant at the Institute of Japanese Studies at Freie Universität Berlin (FUB) and a doctoral candidate at the Graduate School of East Asian Studies (GEAS). Her main research interests include international cooperation, welfare states, security politics of Japan, war-peace narratives and collective identity formation.