by Sachiko Ishihara

Hej from Sweden! This is Sachiko Ishihara here, a PhD student at Uppsala University, researching about moving to the countryside in Japan, focusing on two remote islands, Yakushima (Kagoshima prefecture) and Goto (Nagasaki prefecture).

I have just gotten back from another visit to Värmland. One of the rare personal benefits for me from the pandemic has been to be able to spend more time in the countryside. Not in Japan, as I had planned for my fieldwork, but in Sweden, at my partner’s family country house in Värmland, in the western side of Sweden. Throughout this pandemic year, we have gone to do work online from the countryside, parallel to the discussions of teleworking in Japan [1].

In my research, I have been interviewing people who moved to Yakushima and Goto. Now that I can’t be in Japan to have a personal experience of Yakushima and Goto at the moment, I think about my own experience of being in Värmland in a new light. Perhaps I can get new insights and have more to relate to them from my experiences here? Although the contexts are different, I am from the city going to the countryside by choice, too. I am not moving there permanently, but more going back and forth, like the idea of kankei jinkō that Maritchu Durand introduced in an earlier blog post.

A barrier: dialects. Even though my conversational Swedish is quite good when talking to people from Uppsala and Stockholm, I notice that I can barely have a short conversation with the neighbors, struggling to understand their Värmland dialect. I remember that my interviewees, coming from outside the regions of Yakushima and Goto, told me that they also occasionally had trouble understanding local dialects once they moved there. For me, this hinders me from trying to communicate with the neighbors. I wonder how my interviewees in Japan deal with this.

In the winter when we were there in Värmland, we used the woodfire stove to cook. For me, it was the first time and it was something I wanted to try since I had stayed with a family in Yakushima during my fieldwork who only used woodfire stoves to cook. In the house in Värmland, they had preserved the old stove, but for daily cooking we used the electric cooking stove.

It was fun to cook with firewood, although needless to say, it is quite a lot of work to do every day. While we were there, news came from Texas about their blackouts [2]. No power in the freezing winter meant that some people froze to death. Since I grew up my initial nine years in Texas and my brother and his partner still live there, this news hit close to home. And although the Texas issue involves complexity I cannot unpack here, for me the woodfire stove symbolized securing resilience, to be able to keep warmth and to cook, even if the larger system fails somehow.

In May, we also started planting some vegetables in the garden. As many of my interviewees in Japan also engage with farming, I think of more questions to ask next time that relate to concrete farming practices, the many decisions you make from tilling, buying seeds, composting and fertilizing, and beyond.

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These are only fleeting reflections about my life in rural Sweden during the pandemic, but maybe they will bring me closer to my interviewees and to Yakushima and Goto somehow. Even if I am on the other side of the world.

[1]
Japan Times (2021, May 3): “Japan to promote relocations outside Tokyo without changing jobs”, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/05/03/business/relocations-outside-tokyo/ (accessed June 1, 2021).

[2]
The guardian (2021, February 18): “Anger mounts over Texas power blackouts as icy cold maintains its grip”, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/17/texas-power-blackout-weather-cold (accessed June 1, 2021).