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!