by Sarah Bijlsma

Demographic issues like aging and depopulation in rural Japan are intertwined with the geographical features of remote areas. In most cases, the less accessible a region is, the more pressing the situation becomes. This is particularly striking in remote island regions (ritō). Small island populations are highly dependent on the educational, economic, and healthcare facilities of other areas, but their mobility is limited due to high costs and long travel times. Therefore, revitalization policies treat remote islands as a separate category. The framework of “remote islands” was first introduced in 1953 in the context of the Remote Islands Development Act (Ritō shinkō-hō), hitherto the most important set of legislative measures aiming to support remote island regions in overcoming their disadvantages and barriers to development. The Act is revised every ten years, with recent revisions emphasizing the urgency for the development of human resources in addition to advancing tourist services and public works [1].

One of these remote islands is Miyakojima, located in between Okinawa Main Island and Taiwan. Over the past few years, the local government has approved a number of large-scale construction projects, like the Irabu Bridge (2015), Shimojishima Airport (2019), a munitions storage facility for the Japanese Self Defense Forces (2020), and a new government building that will be finalized later this year. These public works projects are an addition to the continuous construction of beach resorts on the island [2].

The reality of this situation is explained to me by Masato Tokura [4], a man in his late fifties who moved from Yokohama to a small village on Miyakojima. Masato worked his whole life for a major pharmaceutical company, decided to invest in the Chinese stock market at age 35, and retired early when he was 47 years old. He tells me he and his wife traveled the world to do free diving, which is what they love to do the most. Yet, as they did not find a sea more beautiful than the one surrounding Miyakojima, they decided to emigrate in 2013.

But Miyako changed tremendously in the years that followed. Where in 2013, annual visitor numbers were ca. 400,000, they topped one million in 2018 [3]. Also, while the island turned into a construction site, there were not enough local workers to carry out all of the work. Therefore, the Japanese construction companies that are largely in charge of the projects flew in their own employees. At first, the workers were hosted in vacant apartments, but soon all properties became occupied. Masato tells me that while it is illegal to raise rent with more than a certain percentage of the previous price, that is exactly what property owners did as construction companies pay for the housing of their employees in any case.

With the sharp increase of Japanese tourists, workers, and other migrants, local media introduced the term “Miyako Bubble” to capture the negative consequences of this trend. In 2019, the price of a rental unit on Miyako was about the same as in Tokyo, while local wages were less than half of the national average. As a result, many local residents were forced to leave their houses throughout the previous years. Masato tells me that especially young single men found themselves in great financial difficulties. Many of them left to one of Japanese metropoles, where rent is the same as on Miyako but at least salaries are higher.

Hence, the social fabric of Miyako-jima is not the same anymore as when Masato arrived. But to him, an even more pressing issue is the way how the environment of Miyako has been changing. He tells me that tourist resorts have the habit of discharging used water into the ocean that is full of chemicals and other toxins. Further, many tourists touch the corals or step on them when entering the sea. Masato gets obviously upset when he talks about how he witnessed the sea dying within a period of only five years. “I know many eco tourist initiatives in other countries, and the most important thing is always to keep the environment as it is. But in Japan, people only want to make money, even though everything will be destroyed in the end. Even if then, nobody will come to Miyako. It makes me so angry, I just do not want to see that anymore.”

Masato has been taking that last point literally; a year ago, he decided to buy a new apartment in Yokohama and moved back to his previous hometown. Now, he spends half of his time in the city, and half of the time on Miyako, in what he now calls his “holiday house.”

My conversation with Masato made me think of whether there is something like too much rural revitalization. In the case of Miyakojima, revitalization attempts did not just attract tourists and urbanite migrants, as in other areas in Japan. They also forced local residents out of the island. This illustrates, I believe, that rural revitalization is not just a matter of attracting human and financial capital, but also of fostering social and ecological equity. As such, it makes me wonder whose future it actually is that is being promoted through Miyakojima’s development strategies.

References
[1]
Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism. 2016. Ritō shinkō-hō/ritō shinkō-hō sekō-rei [Remote islands development act/order for enforcement of the remote islands development act]. Retrieved from https://www.mlit.go.jp/kokudoseisaku/chirit/kokudoseisaku_chirit_fr_000003.html

[2]
Japan Times. “Worker influx ignites Miyakojima rent bubble.” 22 April 2019, pp. 3.

[3]
Miyakojima City. 2020. “Miyakojima-shi no nyūiki kankōkyakusū suikeichi” [Estimation of Miyako Island’s incoming tourist numbers]. Via https://www.city.miyakojima.lg.jp/gyosei/toukei/files/R31201.pdf

[4] Masato Tokura is a pseudonym.

by Cornelia Reiher

Rural areas in Japan are connected with transnational networks in multiple ways. This transnational connectedness is not static, but can change over time as the example of Arita’s porcelain trade with Europe in the 17^th and the 19^th century shows. Transnational networks of the past can become an integral part of rural places’ history and identity and are often employed for the promotion of tourism and other revitalization strategies in the present [1]. In addition to these historical transnational connections, many non-Japanese citizens dwell in rural Japan. Some just stay there for a short period of time to study or work in Japan’s countryside, while others settle down, renovate abandoned houses, get married and raise children. Previous blog posts have already mentioned artists in residence from Europe, technical interns and members of the Chiiki okoshi kyoryokutai program from South- and Southeast Asia or Buddhist priests from England who reside in rural Japan. They all contribute to the revitalization of rural Japan in various ways and connect Japan’s rural towns and villages with other parts of the world.

But this is not the only way migration connects Japan’s rural areas transnationally. Many of the U-turn or I-turn migrants (and of course many of the long-term rural residents) have travelled and/or lived abroad before moving to the countryside. In her book on urban-rural migration, Susanne Klien [2] mentions that twenty of the 118 urban-rural migrants she worked with had lived abroad before. During my own research on urban-rural migration in Kyushu, I made a similar observation. One woman who now lives in Oita prefecture, for example, studied in Italy and fell in love with an Italian man. When their children were about to enter elementary school, the couple decided to relocate to Japan, because they wanted them to grow up in Japan. Although the Japanese wife is from a big city, they decided that they wanted to live closer to nature and relocated to a small town in the countryside where they now run an Italian restaurant, thereby contributing to the culinary diversity of the area.

Other urban-rural migrants are former members of overseas volunteer programs. These include programs initiated by the Japanese government like the Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers (JOCV) or by non-Japanese NGOs that provide assistance to developing countries via local projects. As of 2020, JOCV had dispatched 45,776 young Japanese between the ages of 20 and 39 to 98 countries for a period of two years [3]. Experiences abroad can contribute to greater awareness of social problems and inequality and to engagement for social change and a better world after volunteers’ return to Japan [4]. Based on this experience, some former volunteers want to contribute to the revitalization of Japan’s countryside. While participating in such volunteer programs in developing countries is evaluated as positive for the individual experience and growth of young Japanese adults and Japanese society, volunteers struggle with finding employment when they return to Japan [4,5]. This is one reason why many former volunteers move to the countryside and join another government sponsored program, the Chiiki okoshi kyōryokutai (COKT), that hires young adults who work in the countryside in Japan for three years and support local governments in activities aimed at rural revitalization [6].

These examples show how the mobility of people, their experiences and skills can impact Japan’s countryside, create and deepen transnational networks, inspire ideas and introduce new practices to the countryside. Instead of only focusing on urban-rural migrants and the migration from urban areas to rural areas within Japan, research on urban-rural migration should pay more attention to previous mobility experiences of urban-rural migrants to fully understand their impact on rural Japan and their migration trajectories.

References

[1]
Reiher, Cornelia (2014), Lokale Identität und ländliche Revitalisierung. Die japanische Keramikstadt Arita und die Grenzen der Globalisierung [Local Identity and Rural Revitalization. The Japanese Ceramic Town Arita and the Limits of Globalization], Bielefeld: transcript.

[2]
Klien, S. (2020), Urban Migrants in Rural Japan: Between Agency and Anomie in a Post-Growth Society, New York: SUNY Press.

[3]
JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency) (2020), JICA Volunteer Program: Leading the World with Trust, https://www.jica.go.jp/english/publications/brochures/c8h0vm0000avs7w2-att/jica_volunteer_ en.pdf, last accessed October 30, 2021.

[4]
Iwai, Y. (2010), “Borantia taiken de gakusei wa nani o manabu no ka: Afurika to jibun o tsunageru sōzōryoku” [What Students Learn through Social Service Experiences: Awareness of the Connection Between Themselves and Africa], Hosei daigaku ningen kankyō gakkai [The Hosei Journal of Humanity and Environment] 10, pp. 1–11.

[5]
Kawachi, K. (2013), Constructing Notions of Development: An Analysis of the Experiences of Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers and the Peace Corps in Latin America and Their Interaction with Indigenous Communities in Ecuadorian Highlands, University of Texas [PhD dissertation].

[6]
Reiher, Cornelia (2020), “Embracing the periphery: Urbanites’ motivations to relocate to rural Japan”, in Manzenreiter, Wolfram, Lützeler, Ralph and Polak-Rottmann, Sebastian (Eds.), Japan’s new ruralities: Coping with decline in the periphery, London: Routledge, pp. 230–244.

by Wendy Wuyts

My Japanese and Belgian friend Miwako came to visit me in Nagoya in January 2018. She lived mostly in Belgium, but she was visiting family and friends in Tokyo and decided to visit me on her way to Onomichi, a place that I had not heard of before. Miwako is a filmmaker, whose short movies are about identity, home and family. Her personal documentary project was about the history of an empty family house in Onomichi. She showed me photographs of this beautiful traditional house and mentioned that it was used for commercials (as Onomichi is apparently a town with artists and filmmakers). She also told me about the town. Onomichi is a rural town characterized by industry and art.

Ten days later, my friend greeted me in the train station of Onomichi. We walked in different alleys, some of which she did not know yet, and we peeked inside long abandoned houses. It was strange to walk in these wastescapes. It almost felt apocalyptic. By walking there, I could understand why people would not remove these empty constructions, because some houses were not accessible via roads suitable for motorized vehicles. The paths were narrow, steep and partly stairs.

We had lunch in a renovated house which was abandoned before. I heard about an NPO and activist movement that reclaims abandoned houses, the cultural heritage and identity of this place. I contacted them; but they had no time and asked me to come back later. That would be the start of getting to know this place and its lived experiences of the circularity potential of wastescapes for the next 1,5 years.

When I first visited Onomichi, I had already lived in Japan for almost four months, more specifically in Nagoya, one of the largest, more conservative cities in Japan. To most people outside of Japan, Nagoya means nothing, so I usually introduce it as the city of Toyota. I spent three years in Nagoya working on my PhD in sustainability. Due to my encounter with Onomichi, the wasted potential of short-lived and vacant houses became the focus of my project which I approached through the concept of circular economy. Circular economy is an umbrella term for practices, principles, and ideas that ensure that we keep materials in society for as long as possible and that the value or functionality is preserved for as long as possible [1].

In Nagoya, my professor was researching empty houses as well, but his focus was rather on the reuse of abandoned houses’ materials, also called urban mining [3]. However, what I came to realize was that urban mining would not be the most desirable strategy: repurposing the houses, preferably for the intent they are made for, would be more circular, and would also be better in terms of identity, belonging and other social impacts. When my friend Miwako introduced me to Onomichi, which seemed to be an appealing place for her as an artist to learn more about identity, I was intrigued. The geographer in me was interested in the context of Japan and what circularity could mean in reality and which social impacts, for example on identity, it can have. Often, we talk about circularity as an abstract concept, but what exactly are the lived experiences of circularity [4]? What does it mean for people who really reclaim empty houses? What are the barriers and challenges in Japan?

Later, during a revision of my PhD thesis, one of my supervisors asked me about the motivation of selecting Onomichi as a casestudy. “I did not choose it, it just came to visit me”, I wanted to say. The same is true for another study in Gifu that I will introduce in my next post. As a researcher, we have our networks and other resources, and this influences our knowledge production (and biases) a big deal, while allowing to illustrate the plurality of Japan in research.

References:
[1]
Kirchherr, J., Reike, D. and Hekkert, M., 2017. Conceptualizing the circular economy: An analysis of 114 definitions. Resources, conservation and recycling, 127, pp.221-232.
[2]
Tanikawa, H. and Hashimoto, S., 2009. Urban stock over time: spatial material stock analysis using 4d-GIS. Building research & information, 37(5-6), pp.483-502.
[3]
Wuyts, W., Sedlitzky, R., Morita, M. and Tanikawa, H., 2020. Understanding and Managing Vacant Houses in Support of a Material Stock-Type Society—The Case of Kitakyushu, Japan. Sustainability, 12(13), p.5363.
[4]
Wuyts, W., Marjanović, M. The Development of Spatial Circularity Discourse in Japan: Ecomodernist, Territorialised, or Both? The Story of Onomichi’s Wastescapes. Circ.Econ.Sust. (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43615-021-00146-6

Wendy Wuyts, originally from Belgium, received her PhD in environmental science from the Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Nagoya University. She currently works as researcher in the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her research interests include (social impacts of) circularity, sustainable transitions and territorial ecology.

Our team will take a break over the holidays. The blog will be back on January 14.

Thank you for following and supporting our activities.

Happy holidays.

by Lynn Ng

There are over 1,000 michi no eki in Japan. These are Japan’s adorable roadside stations scattered across the nation’s rural regions. Michi no eki were first established in the 1990s as part of the government’s strategy to revitalize the countryside through increasing tourism. The government’s concepts for these roadside stations are three-fold: To provide comfortable resting areas for road travelers; to disseminate important information on road conditions and services, as well as local tourism; and to facilitate interactions between travelers and the local communities [1].

Japan’s roadside stations are thus unique places for travelers to learn about a region and its community and hopefully buy something there to support local producers. Many municipalities, therefore, take their michi no eki very seriously and often decorate the space with their local mascot, serve unique variations of food or desserts with the region’s produce, and host festivals and events there. In my time in rural Hokkaido, I attended several events, including flea markets, Halloween, and tours at the local michi no eki. I am thus unequivocally a huge fan of Japan’s many roadside stations.

In the spring of 2021, after completing my MA amidst the pandemic and tremendously drained from life in Tokyo, I canceled my apartment lease and began living in a car. My plan was simple: I wanted to slowly drive towards Hokkaido while visiting as many michi no eki as possible along the way. For a month, I drove through northern Japan – Tochigi, Fukushima, Yamagata, Iwate, Aomori, Akita – and across the strait to Hokkaido. With a car, I had the freedom to traverse some of the more neglected places – the inconspicuous shrines, the small onsen, and the bakeries awkwardly located between paddy fields.

But more importantly, I could visit my favorite place in Japan – the michi no eki. These roadside stations, small or big, were crucial for my journey – 24-hour washrooms, emergency phones, maps, vending machines, free Wi-Fi, and anything else you might need at 2:00 am in the middle of nowhere. On top of road services and local foods, michi no eki were also a social space for me to converse with the people of the regions. My Tokyo car plate drew increasing attention the further north I went. While I was nervous that its origins would be unwelcome in this pandemic, people approached me with curiosity instead.

At a roadside station in Hokkaido, a kind older man I encountered became very concerned with my car arrangement and worried that I would not have enough food. He asked me to wait, ran off, and returned a while later with a bag of snacks and energy drinks to help me get to my destination. Elsewhere in mountainous Yamagata, I ran into a michi no eki on a sleeting spring day for shelter and rest, and a group of old ladies immediately ushered me into their circle – where the gas heater was located – to warm up and talk. Often times, some would recommend their favorite hidden onsen and local spots.

Michi no eki are indeed wonderful social spaces dispersed across Japan. I do not know much about the income and job opportunities roadside stations have generated for the rural communities, but these facilities are undoubtedly spaces of great social value.  These small government-funded projects for rural revitalization have contributed much to constructing a social space for locals to gather and for travelers to understand the place they are visiting. After a month of car-life that promised back pains in ten years, I departed Japan. The friendly encounters, unique foods, and intimately silent starry nights at michi no eki become small yellow stars on my Google map. Like many here in Berlin, I also await the opportunity to return to Japan and often wonder how many of the stars are places where I may again set foot someday.

[1]
MLIT (Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism) (2008). Michi no eki to ha? [What are michi no eki?]. Accessed 11 December 2021 at https://www.mlit.go.jp/road/Michi-no-Eki/outline.html.

Lynn Ng is a first-year Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate School of East Asian Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. She completed her MA at Waseda University, studying people’s movements into disaster-hit Fukushima. Before her MA studies, Lynn lived in rural Hokkaido for three years as an Assistant Language Teacher.

by Cecilia Luzi

When I started my PhD, the original plan was to leave for fieldwork in Japan around June 2021. Since entering Japan was still not possible at the time due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the whole group decided to postpone fieldwork. We were excited about the announcement of the reopening of Japan’s borders in the beginning of November 2021, just like many other researchers who study Japan. We prepared all the paperwork, but due to the emergence of the new Omicron variant, the government decided to extend the entry ban. This decision left us disappointed and discouraged, as we will need to drastically change our research plan.

In this context, I started a “digital ethnography” of social media profiles and websites of people living in northern Kyūshū in order to move on with my research. It took me some time before adapting my gaze to this new territory, and still today, when I scroll down in-migrants’ Instagram profiles and YouTube pages, I sometimes hear a voice on the back of my head telling me that I should get back to work. As Góralska (2020, 46) put it: “It is my fieldwork, but an unaware observer would probably assume that I am just wasting my time before bed”. Maybe this is the reason why it is so hard to fully commit to this kind of ethnography. Working in the digital world and using it as a field of research requires a set of tools and principles that are codified, selected and debated, as well as a training for the ethnographic eye, which needs to learn anew how to single out important information from the abundance on the internet.

However, after the initial irritation of not being in the physical field discovering bizarre shops, ordering delicious meals at restaurants or sipping a fresh roasted black coffee in a café, I learned how to domesticate the digital space and gather useful data from it. For instance, I discovered a strong network of temporary markets and fairs attended by in-migrants both as vendors and as costumers. They are held all year long and are distributed within the four prefectures of northern Kyushu, which makes them a fascinating field to explore the social structure of in-migrants’ communities. I also learned that the rhetoric of renovation and re-use of abandoned spaces such as empty houses, studios, warehouses, schools and post offices, is pervasive in the experience of in-migration. Thanks to Instagram, I now have some contacts that can potentially become gatekeepers once I will arrive in Japan.

I enjoyed reading blog interviews, looking at pictures and watching interesting videos, but in the end, I cannot help feeling a bit nostalgic and frustrated. I wonder if what we call now “digital fieldwork” (Góralska 2020), “virtual fieldwork” (Robinson and Schulz 2009) or “online fieldwork” (Howlett 2021) can really be considered fieldwork in the original anthropological sense of the term. Fieldwork is the “intimate participation in a community and observation of modes of behavior and the organization of social life” (Keesing and Strathern 1998, 7), and has been characterized by the extended presence of anthropologists within the community they study, whether next-door (e.g. Fassin 2011) or in another continent (e.g. Tsing 2004). The aim of fieldwork is at the same time “to understand the inside view of the native peoples and to achieve the holistic view of a social scien­tist” (Powdermaker 1969, 418). Yet, how can we have powerful insights about the people we study if we cannot immerse in a community and try “learning as far as possible to speak, think, see, feel and act as member of its culture and, at the same time, as a trained anthropologist from a different culture” (Powdermaker 1966, 9)?

Analyzing travel and food blogs, studying social media profile and examining prefectural and municipal websites has been a crucial work for my thesis development in the last months, and prepared me for my future fieldwork. I was able to discover places and come up with new questions that I probably would have missed if the pandemic did not force me to work with my computer for a much longer period than planned. However, I have the feeling, now more than before, that this is just preparing me for the actual fieldwork, as Anthropology requires the prolonged sharing of space and time with the people met in the field. For my project, this means that I will have to organize a different ethnography than the one I had in mind. Originally, I wanted to conduct interviews at a later stage, but I will now try to schedule online interviews from Berlin during the upcoming weeks. At the same time, I am still working as if I was preparing for my fieldwork, because I am not giving up on the idea of being in Japan soon to do my ethnography as fieldwork is the “central activity of anthropology” (Howell 1990, 4) and the “source of anthropology’s strength” (Keesing and Strathern 1998, 7). “Digital ethnography” lacks this as “there is more to fieldwork than just the fact that it is a sci­entific method of gathering data” (Sluka and Robben2007, 14). In my opinion, online fieldwork is lacking the intimate full-immersion that characterizes the ethnographic craft.  So, I keep my finger crossed that those digital profiles will become actual persons I can spend time with.

References

Fassin, Didier. 2011. La force de l’ordre: Une anthropologie de la police des quartiers. Paris: Seuil. (Translated by Rachel Gomme as En-forcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing. Cambridge:Polity Press, 2013.)

Góralska, Magdalena. “Anthropology from home: Advice on digital ethnography for the pandemic times.” Anthropology in Action 27.1 (2020): 46-52.

Howell, Nancy. 1990. Surviving fieldwork: A report of the advisory panel on health and safety in fieldwork, American Anthropological Association. No. 26. Amer Anthropological Assn.

Howlett, Marnie. “Looking at the ‘field’ through a Zoom lens: Methodological reflections on conducting online research during a global pandemic.” Qualitative Research (2021): 1468794120985691.

Keesing, Roger M., and Andrew J. Strathern. “Fieldwork.” Cultural Anthropology: A Contemporary Perspective (1998): 7-10.

Powdermaker, Hortense. 1966. Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist. New York: Norton.

————1969 “Field Work”, In: The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. D. Sills, ed., pp. 418-24.

Robinson, Laura, and Jeremy Schulz. 2009. “New avenues for sociological inquiry: Evolving forms of ethnographic practice.” Sociology 43.4, 685-698.

Sluka, Jeffrey A., and A. C. G. M. Robben. 2007. “Fieldwork in cultural anthropology: An introduction.” Ethnographic fieldwork: An anthropological reader 2, 1-48.

Tsing, Anna. 2004. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

by Antonia Miserka

As part of my research regarding well-being and social relationships in rural Japan, I am conducting interviews with migrants in the Aso region in Kumamoto, Japan.

On a hot summer day at the end of July 2020 I met with Sachiko, a self-proclaimed city-girl in her late twenties, who moved to Aso for her work. She grew up in the countryside, but never felt at ease there. She dislikes insects and anything that crawls or stings for that matter, so she was excited to move to a major city after high school to gain further education and obtain a job. However, the countryside never completely relinquished its claim on her, and so – a few years after fleeing her home amidst woods and fields – she finds herself back among nature.

Anticipating hearing about the discomforts of living in the countryside, I ask her the same question I pose to all my interlocutors: “How do you think your happiness is influenced – positively or negatively – by this region?”

“This region? Well, I think it does not only influence my happiness, it is my happiness. It’s strange I would say that, but it’s true. Not everything’s great, of course, but the good and the bad altogether, it gets you closer – like in a relationship. *laughs* When I first came here, I thought the people living here had a strange relationship with their surroundings – kind of reverential but also affectionate. Like nature is everything, you know. Now I’ve been here for a while, I think I understand why. Through the best and worst of times you are forged together.
Like last week, when the rain fell so heavily, we received a ‘prepare for evacuation’ notice. I hate those, they always make me nervous. Then I sit there, wrapped in blankets, looking out of my bedroom window, up the slope of the mountain, and I feel afraid. But then, you know, a few days later I drive through the woods with my windows open and I smell the moss and leaves, and hear the water run down a stream and I feel joy. It never gets boring.”

“You said you like driving through the woods, do you spend a lot of time outside?”

“No, not really. I’m an indoor type after all. I enjoy reading and watching TV and stuff. But then, every few days or so, I get kind of restless at home, so I pack my things and go out.”

“Where do you go then?”

“Oh, all sorts of places. But I enjoy riding my bike on the paths between the rice paddies the most. I love the smell of the fields, of the dirt and the plants and the wind. I love the sound the wind makes when it rushes through the fields, making the rice plants rustle… I once sat beside a rice paddy for over an hour watching the dragonflies fly from flower to flower besides the waterway, observing the water fleas hop around on the water surface surrounding the rice plants. Do you know the sound of water splashing down a boulder? The sound of semi (cicadas) chirring nearby? The smell of mud and blooming grass? The feeling of the sun on your skin? That’s peace for me.”

“That sounds really relaxing.”

“Right? It’s so relaxing it gets mesmerizing. Have you been to the sōgen (grassland) yet? Like when the deep-green grass stands waist-high and the sun tickles your nose and then the wind gushes through the grass like waves, like an ocean of green… When I’m out there, I could just stand there for ages, watching it move, wave around.”

“For someone who says she’s an indoor type you sure seem to enjoy being surrounded by nature a lot, eh?” *laughs*

“I do, don’t I?” *laughs* “I don’t know why, but since I came here, I started to appreciate nature more. When I was younger, I thought nature was boring – boring, dirty and inconvenient. But now I realize it can also be relaxing and even fun. Since I moved here, I noticed my own senses starting to expand. Like being able to sense the wind. Well, I guess I sensed it before as well, but I never really noticed it, like its sound or its smell or how it feels swiping over my skin. Coming here showed me a whole new range of feelings and impressions, you know?”

Listening to Sachiko’s experiences I reflect upon the meaning of happiness, about what kinds of happiness exist and how they may be experienced. Sachiko did not talk about the importance of friends and family like most of my interlocutors, even though I have no doubt she derives happiness from those, too. Instead, she kept describing her sensory impressions, the things she heard, smelled and felt while being among nature – the sensory side of happiness. Which gets me thinking, maybe we all might benefit from concentrating more often on our senses and the experiences they may offer?

Antonia Miserka is a PhD student at the Japanese Studies Department at the University of Vienna. She is part of an interdisciplinary research project dealing with social relationships and subjective well-being in rural areas, sponsored by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. As part of this research team, she focusses on the role of locality – both local places as well as local communities – for the subjective well-being of residents in different hamlets within the Aso region.

by Julia Gerster

As every morning, a large bus travels the almost empty streets of Minamisanriku. Every now and then it stops in front of a damaged, empty building. Sometimes the building is still intact but abandoned. Sometimes only the skeleton of a building is left. The passengers listen in silence to their guide, while they take pictures of the scenery in this town where more than 3000 houses were destroyed and over 800 people lost their lives.

This bus and many more are part of a post-disaster tourism program in Minamisanriku, one of the coastal municipalities that was heavily hit by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami. Every morning they take their passengers on a tour through the city to keep alive the memory of a community in danger of being forgotten. While population decline was already a problem before 2011, the disaster only accelerated the dwindling of the region’s citizens. Besides its educational purpose, post-disaster tourism in Minamisanriku was therefore introduced to raise the so-called “related population” (kōryu jinkō), a term that describes people who have connections to the region without living there. Building on previous revitalization programs (Ivy, 1995; Robertson, 1988), some of which are described in this blog, tourists are not only expected to generate income in the disaster-affected areas and turn Tohoku into a hub for disaster education, but also to economically support the recovering regions. By 2016, several campaigns supported by the national Reconstruction Agency in fact raised visitor numbers, even surpassing those of pre-2011, to areas of the Tohoku region that previously only received about 1 percent of the international tourists to Japan (Reconstruction Agency, 2021).

However, several challenges remain regarding disaster tourism. During my ongoing field research about cultural and collective memory of the 3.11 disasters, many local residents shared their concerns about tourism initiatives. Those concerns refer to visitors joining tours through devastated communities and taking pictures of places where friends and family lost their lives. They point to an ongoing debate about visits to places connected to death and disaster, also known as “dark tourism” (Foley and Lennon, 1996; Ide, 2018; Martini and Buda, 2018). Many tourism scholars have stressed ethical concerns regarding dark tourism, including early visits to disaster-stricken places. Consequences could be tourists hampering rescue or recovery efforts, voyeurism and inappropriate behavior of non-locals, such as littering or entering dangerous places or private property (Bornemann, 2018; Rolfes, 2010), as the controversial “Fukushima” episode of the Netflix series “Dark Tourist” showed (Ryall, 2018). One of the most debated aspects of dark tourism is the negative image of tour organizers and participants at places that experienced tragedies. “Some people blamed me for marketizing the disaster,” told Shun Ito, who survived the 2011 tsunami and today guides guests of the local Hotel Kanyo on bus tours through the still recovering Minamisanriku. “Can you imagine how hard it is to be told something like this by friends? But I still believe that we must keep talking about this disaster as to not repeat such tragedies again.”

Yet, the constant risk of natural hazards that Japan faces underlines the educational merits of post-disaster tourism. At the end of his tour, Ito would always explain to visitors: “I want you to remember the distance between the shore and the evacuation centers, and the markers that show the run-up heights of the tsunami. It is because you came here and experienced how long it would take to evacuate to the rooftop or to the mountains that you understand the difficulties of making fast decisions during an emergency situation. It is easy to read about a tsunami of 17 meters height, but you hopefully won’t forget the feeling standing next to a building showing the damage of the tsunami. I want you to remember these impressions so that they will be useful for being better prepared when another disaster occurs.”

Noriko Abe, the owner of Minamisanriku’s Hotel Kanyo further stresses the economic meaning of the hotel industry for the region. “If we stay in business, there will be jobs for butchers, farmers, tea merchants… The fewer people continue to live here, the more important it is to have visitors who support the residents.”

However, the COVID-19 pandemic proved once more the problems connected to what Littlejohn (2020) calls a museumification of Tohoku and a tourism centered reconstruction. Due to the threat of future tsunamis, residential reconstruction is not allowed in the former town center of Minamisanriku. Instead, the San San Shotengai, a shopping area featuring local products and delicacies, was constructed. It stands on top of several meters of artificially raised land right next to the ruins of the disaster management headquarters (bōsai taisaku chōsha) where 43 people died in the tsunami. Disconnected from the residential neighborhood and isolated because of requests to avoid travelling during the COVID-19 pandemic, this shopping area remained mostly empty from 2020 to 2021. The hopes of Noriko Abe and her staff now rely on plans of the government to restart the so called “Go To travel” campaign that yet again tries to use tourism as a recovery method – this time recovery from financial damage caused by the pandemic. Meanwhile the challenges of negotiating post-disaster tourism, concerns of residents, revitalization and disaster education are likely to continue.

References

Bornmann, N. (2018). The ethics of teaching at sites of violence and trauma. Student Encounters with the Holocaust. Palgrave Pivot. New York.

Foley, M. & Lennon, J.J (1996). Editorial: Heart of darkness. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2(4), pp. 195-197.

Ide, A. (2018). Dark Tourism. Travel related to sad memories. Tokyo, Gentosha. (In Japanese).

Ivy, M. (1995). Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Littlejohn, A. (2020). Museums of themselves: disaster, heritage, and disaster heritage in Tohoku, Japan Forum, https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2020.1758751

Martini, A. and Buda, D. (2018): Dark tourism and affect: framing places of death and disaster. Current Issues in Tourism, 1-14.

Reconstruction Agency (2021). The Process and Prospects for Reconstruction. https://www.reconstruction.go.jp/english/topics/Progress_to_date/index.html

Robertson, J. (1988) Furusato Japan: The Culture and Politics and Nostalgia. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 1 (4), pp. 494-518.

Rolfes, M (2010). Poverty tourism: Theoretical reflections and empirical findings on an extraordinary form of tourism. GeoJournal, 75(5), pp. 421-442.

Ryall, J. (2018), Fukushima episode of Netflix’s Dark Tourist sparks offence in Japan South China Morning Post:https://sg.news.yahoo.com/fukushima-episode-netflix-dark-tourist-092531516.html 5.September.2018

Julia Gerster received her PhD in Japanese studies from the Graduate School of East Asian Studies, FU Berlin. She currently works as assistant professor at the International Research Institute of Disaster Science at Tohoku University. Her research interests include the collective and cultural memory of disasters, the role of local culture in disaster recovery, and post-disaster social relations. 

by Maritchu Durand

In recent years, the akiya phenomenon in Japan [1] has received a lot of attention and the renovation of vacant houses has increasingly been associated with rural revitalization in Japan. When researching akiya for my master’s thesis, I found many examples of abandoned houses recently renovated by newcomers on social media. Although all of these houses are unique in their final conceptualization, a significant number share similar designs, colors and materials. In many cases, discrete pastel colors were used for the walls made of natural plaster. Pictures show old refurbished furniture or new sleek and minimalist tables, chairs or countertops of light wood. A clear and high ceiling is another shared feature of many houses and laying the framework bare, highlighting the raw wood structure seems to be another common strategy.

When scrolling through all these pictures, I felt strongly reminded of my grandparents’ house in the southern French countryside and especially of their most recent renovation. When they first moved to the old family house in 1978, the house had stood empty for several decades, and after rewiring the entire house with modern electricity, they installed heating and renovated the rooftop to insure its longevity. But it was not until recently that they decided to renovate the kitchen, which is the heart and soul of the house. It showed many signs of use. The plaster was falling off the walls and the furniture could hardly keep up with a house full of guests during the holidays.

With the help of friends and family, they stripped down the entire kitchen, laid bare the old stone wall, retiled and plastered the sink with pastel colored natural materials. They decided to keep the ceiling as is with the wooden structure visible. Finally, they returned the fireplace to its original look, and refurnished the kitchen with new cupboards and counters made of wood from an old tree they had cut and dried years ago.

When I asked my grandmother about their choices, I realized that their decisions were mostly made for aesthetic, but also for pragmatic reasons. Since they laid the stonewall bare they decided to keep the same color panels on the opposite wall to give the kitchen a soft, natural atmosphere. The  kitchen’s centerpiece, a century old wooden table, inspired the material for the new furniture. The choice for the ceiling, however, although it also gives the kitchen a raw and natural look, was more pragmatic: they mainly wanted to gain a few inches from the already low ceiling in order to get more natural light in the room.

I was surprised that my grandparents’ aesthetic choices during their renovation in many ways resembled those of young urban-rural migrants renovating akiya in Japan. These similarities in aesthetics can be summarized as raw, natural and simple. Although I cannot make any conclusions regarding the reasons that motivated young Japanese to choose these aesthetics, yet, I think it is fascinating to see these similarities in taste across borders and generations. It raises questions about how these ideal images of rural housing emerge, how they spread globally and why they are appealing to such diverse people in different parts of the world.

The personal connection I immediately had with the images of renovated houses, reminded me of what I have learned in the social science method courses in my Japanese studies MA program [2]. I realized that researchers always bring their own experiences to their research projects. It is therefore important to be conscience of this positionality and to reflect on how it will influence one’s research. It might open up new perspectives or introduce researchers to new aspects of their research topic. For me at least, I realized that decisions about how an akiya might be renovated do not only include aesthetic choices, strongly connected to the “natural” or “organic”, but might also be very pragmatic and practical.

[1]
for more articles on akiya, see the article by Jyoti Vasnani or a previous article by Maritchu Durand.

[2]
Please check out the blog “Forschungswerkstatt” led every year by the course on methodology at the Free University of Berlin.