By Josko Kozic

Hi there, my name is Josko. I live in Yokohama, and I am currently conducting research for a PhD thesis about contemporary Shugendo, a Japanese religious tradition focusing on mountain worship. I would like to give you some insights into my recent fieldwork in one of Japan’s least populated places: the Sanin region and Tottori in particular.

Tottori is famous for its vast sand dunes, beautiful emerald-green coasts and its huge Mt Daisen. The region also has an abundant agriculture with seafood and vegetables being the main products. Additionally, Tottori has several Sake breweries and indigo plantations used for traditional dyeing. Often, they are located in old and cozy post-station towns (shukuba machi). Apart from this, people in Tottori are proud of the prefecture’s deep and wide forests, mainly consisting of cedar, cypress and breech trees (buna). Hidden inside these forests, there are countless waterfalls with some of them ranked as Japan’s most beautiful.

Whenever I travel to the area, I like to make a stop at a michi no eki, government-designated rest areas including shops selling regional products. It was at one of these shops where I first stumbled upon pamphlets promoting rural life and agriculture in Tottori. After doing some research online, I found out that many communities have their own websites and offer online talks providing information on how to resettle and start a life there. I realized that the image and promotion of rural life through online and print media is changing and rural life has become a popular subject in recent times.

During my stay in Tottori in spring 2020, I approached the biggest agency directed at people considering relocation to the prefecture, providing them with advice and basic information. This agency called Furusato Tottori-ken teijū kikō is a public interest incorporated foundation (kōeki zaidanhōjin) and welcomed me at their bureau, kindly providing me with detailed data collected over the last few years about U- and I-turners who moved to Tottori prefecture in the past. They also gave me a ”Tottori Guidebook” with a vast overview of all towns and districts of the region, including interviews with new settlers and locals, promoting Tottori as the ”kingdom of child-rearing” (kosodate ōkoku). One of the staff members in charge told me that, while there was no remarkable impact on the numbers since the pandemic (interview held in January 2021), things still could be changing drastically soon.

I chose the charming mountain village of Chizu for further investigations, since the place aroused my interest for its self-promotion as an officially approved designation for ”forest therapy”. Chizu has a large number of lush, green forests and almost-abandoned settlements, such as the enchanted village of Itaibara the town proudly promotes as a ‘primeval landscape’ (genfūkei) in their pamphlets. At the municipal office of Chizu town, I had an appointment with a young member of the planning division who handed me several pamphlets and information about upcoming online events where topics like moving to, living and working in rural Japan were explained. I instantly connected and followed all the mentioned pages on social network platforms such as Instagram or Line to get a better understanding of how several options for resettling are being communicated. Up to this day, I constantly receive news and updates concerning settling and living in Tottori. The person in charge at Chizu’s municipal office also introduced me to their special facilities where people can stay for a ‘trial living in the countryside’, while being accommodated in houses and lodges which are administrated by both the town office and by the locals.

Tottori city’s big relocation agency as well as Chizu town’s municipal office show great effort in promoting their regions as places worth to live in. However, their focus lies predominantly on recruiting young couples who they consider as settlers most likely to contribute to the local communities. Keeping in mind depopulation, it makes sense for communities to prefer young families. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that in the course of my research so far, I have met several U- and I-turners who resettled as singles without getting married or giving birth to children, but who contribute to their communities nonetheless.

It remains to be exciting to observe the ongoing tendencies of promoting rural-life in Tottori and I am looking forward to share further insights with you soon.

Josko Kozic (MA) moved to Japan five years ago after graduating in Japanese & Southeast Asian Studies at Goethe University in his hometown Frankfurt. He currently resides in Yokohama while working on his PhD thesis about contemporary Shugendo (a Japanese religious tradition). He is affiliated with the faculty of Religious studies at Heidelberg University.

By Maritchu Durand

Today I would like to share my experience as a wwoofer in Hokkaido, an experience which gave me a unique glimpse into rural life and community in northern Japan. This ultimately sparked my interest for the “other Japan” I had not yet seen as a Tokyoite exchange student.

Wwoof (as in World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) connects voluntary short-term workers (Woofers) with organic farm owners (hosts). The purpose is mutual exchange without any money involved. Browsing through the list of hosts, the Nara family immediately caught my eye. Describing their home as a house in the middle of the woods and warning potential woofers from the summer insects, they seemed to be just what I was looking for. I wrote to them and we arranged the period I would be staying with them the next day. I stayed with Natsumi, Takeshi and their three children in the Hokkaido forest and helped with various tasks around the house and worked with Takeshi as an unskilled gardener-apprentice. In exchange I got my own little hut to sleep, three delicious meals a day shared with the family and the opportunity to be adopted as a member of the family. I learned so many interesting things about their lifestyle, work and community.

Natsumi moved to Hokkaido as a volunteer for a year at the age of 27 – she never left. She told me that she was intrigued by the self-sustaining lifestyle. Heating your oven with the wood you chopped yourself, cooking with what you saw and grew felt more natural to her despite the hard work involved. She and Takeshi eventually build their own house, dug their own well, and now mostly rely on the vegetables they either produce or exchange with their neighbours. Natsumi mostly stays at home where she bakes an incredible variety of breads, cookies and cakes for her bakery business. Besides selling at the local market – consisting of a single broad hall in the village centre, managed by local volunteers – she also takes orders and sometimes travels to Sapporo to sell her produce.

Takeshi, on the other hand, drives around the region for a different job every day. During my stay we trimmed an old woman’s Japanese garden, cut the tree in front of a community centre, helped a neighbour with her fallen plum tree and carried materials around at an onsen-resort construction site.

I was amazed and overwhelmed by this life in the middle of the woods. It seemed to me that the family lived a peaceful, plentiful life within a strong and connected community. I participated in a friendly parent-student reunion at the second son Takara’s middle school. We made omuraisu and played volleyball together. At the town’s onsen, the local women made fun of me because I could not enter the hottest bath. I suffered hard defeat playing badminton against the 8-12 year olds Takeshi voluntarily taught after work at the local school, two of his students being his son Takara and A-chan, his young daughter.

But after a few days I also started to see the fragility of this seemingly untouchable community. Most of the town people seemed to be either working far away or had already retired; the school only had a total of 40 students. Ikkyu, the eldest, had to move three hours away and the family rented a room for him to go to high school, barely seeing his family. Takeshi jumped from day job to day job, and Natsumi said that some months were really difficult.

As a Wwoofer, I became part of the of the family and therefore enjoyed valuable insights into the life of Natsumi and her family as well as into community life from the inside. I felt like I somehow became one of them rather than looking at the locals from the outside. This gave me the unique opportunity to experience a fragment of life in rural Hokkaido. What I found there was indeed a fragile lifestyle. On the other hand the local community was very strong, closely connected and welcomed me warmly. People were ready to share their experiences with me, offered me jobs and invited me into their homes, shared stories about their travels abroad and about their everyday life. Had I not, on a whim, contacted the family that presented itself as living among many many insects in the deep Hokkaido woods, who knows if I would have embarked on this journey of research on rural Japan?

by Chris McMorran

Kurokawa Onsen is a rare bright spot in Japan’s countryside. Since the mid-1980s, it has become one of the country’s best-known hot springs resorts. Prior to the outbreak of Covid-19 and its disastrous impacts on tourism worldwide, this tiny village of a few hundred permanent residents annually welcomed nearly a million visitors who soaked in the springs, purchased souvenirs, stayed at inns (ryokan), and enjoyed the rural landscape.

Located in the center of Japan’s third-largest island, Kyushu, Kurokawa features a few dozen inns, shops, cafes, and homes gathered along the Tanohara River. There is no railway access, so all guests arrive by car or bus on winding mountain roads. Depending on the season, Kurokawa is covered in snow, exploding with the colors of flowers and foliage, or cooler than the sweltering cities below. For most of the year, however, it floats in a sea of green. Straight rows of plantation forests, primarily Japanese cedar (Cryptomeria japonica, or sugi), line the hillsides, while in the heart of the hamlet, mixed deciduous and coniferous species stand amid flowering shrubs that envelope structures and decorate roadsides. Dark wooden signs with Japanese and English script point to businesses, and all buildings follow a similar pattern: built one to three stories high and painted beige or dark mustard, with black roofs and trim. The overall effect gives Kurokawa a timeless quality; vaguely traditional, but not from any specific era.

Most visitors begin at the tourist information center, where they collect maps and ask which outdoor baths to try. Since the late 1980s, the resort’s unique selling point has been a wooden pass, called nyūto tegata, that allows entry to three outdoor baths (rotemburo) at any of the 25+ inns. Between baths, visitors stop by the shop selling locally distilled spirits or café that sells cream puffs, all while photographing themselves next to the tree-lined river and in front of the picturesque inns and shops.

In addition to tourists, Kurokawa has attracted academics, planners, landscape architects, designers, and this Geographer. From 2006-07 I worked at a handful of inns (ryokan), washing dishes, scrubbing baths, and vacuuming tatami mats. In fact, I often welcomed guests and accompanied them through this landscape for the first time. At one inn I drove guests from the bus stop to our inn. My passengers frequently commented that Kurokawa was so nostalgic (natsukashii) and that it felt wonderful to be surrounded by nature. At another inn I swept the paths and parking lot and greeted guests. As I carried luggage through the tunnel of trees to the lobby, guests remarked how lucky I was to work in this beautiful landscape.

In 2007, Kurokawa even received the Japan Institute of Design Promotion’s “Good Design Award,” in recognition for its nostalgic village landscape that “at a glance appears undesigned” (S&T Institute of Environmental Planning and Design 2008, p. 34). In fact, this landscape has been carefully designed to give this effortless appearance. And the efforts are continuous, through activities like tree-planting and design principles established and followed by local business leaders. I have written about these efforts elsewhere, including how, through their active landscaping, local residents embody the rural ideal they aim to produce for tourists (McMorran 2014).

I consider this landscape evidence of the potential of rural Japan to revitalize and thrive in the future. At the same time, I find this landscape problematic for how easy revitalization seems. I put it this way: “Kurokawa’s landscape narrative implies that Japan’s twentieth century story of rural depopulation was not the result of the systematic prioritization of urban development at the expense of the countryside, and that any rural village could be revitalized if only residents were sufficiently cooperative, interdependent, hard working, and innovative” (ibid., p.13). The reality, of course, is that not every village that hopes to revitalize can reproduce Kurokawa’s success. Every place will face unique challenges and must design its own future, and larger structural forces – continued out-migration, demographic decline, increased risk of natural disasters due to climate change – will make revitalization increasingly difficult.

References

McMorran, C. 2014. “A Landscape of ‘Undesigned Design’ in Rural Japan,” Landscape Journal. 33(1), pp. 1-15.

————– 2022 (Forthcoming). Last Resort: mobilizing hospitality in rural Japan. University of Hawai’i Press.

ST Kankyō Sekkei Kenkyūjo. 2008. Kurokawa Onsen no fūkeizukuri (Total landscape design of Kurokawa Onsen).” Fukuoka: ST Kankyō Sekkei Kenkyūjo.

Chris McMorran is Associate Professor of Japanese Studies at the National University of Singapore. He is a cultural geographer of contemporary Japan who researches the geographies of home across scale, from the body to the nation. His is the author of Ryokan: Mobilizing Hospitality in Rural Japan (2022, University of Hawai’i Press), an intimate study of a Japanese inn, based on twelve months spent scrubbing baths, washing dishes, and making guests feel at home at a hot springs resort. He also co-produces (with NUS students) “Home on the Dot,” a podcast that explores the meaning of home on the little red dot of Singapore.

by Shilla Lee

In this blog post, I wish to share a story about a person that I met during my fieldwork.

My first day in Tamba Sasayama was in the middle of a hot and humid summer. Although it was a momentous day that set off my official fieldwork after months of preparation, I was sober from any emotional moments. The intense sunlight hit on everything from gray pedestrian roads to plastic benches at a bus stop, and as I stood under the steamy sun waiting for the host of my first two weeks stay at a central town area, my dreamy thoughts about life in rural Japan were melting on the ground.

A kei-tora (light truck) stopped just before the bus stop. An old lady with long-braided hair wearing an interesting combination of patterned shirt with patterned pants jumped out of the car. “Sheera-san”, she called me. I replied, saying her name with a question mark. 

It was a short ride about 15 minutes to her house, but she was already giving me so much information about the region such as places to eat out and visit. I told her how everything seems yukkuri (restful) as I stared at the tranquil views of vast fields and mountains outside the window. However, she was too honest a person to agree with everything I said, although I was a guest. She said that such a first impression does not last long if one tries living in this beautiful landscape. She was originally from a big city in the Kansai area before relocating to a small neighborhood close to the Sasayama Castle area three years ago, and it seemed that she had already gone through a phase of ‘de-idealization’ of rural life.

Her place was an old house built in the Showa period which, according to her, was almost 100 years old. However, there was no sign of rustiness. Flowers and trees at the entrance were in perfect shapes and the house seemed like a replica at museums. I sat in a tatami room on the first floor. She offered me a cold drink with tsuke-hana (pickled flower leaves), saying that it will cool me down. The first few days at her place were by no means easy. The house got dark around six or seven in the afternoon and fuzzy lightbulbs could not keep up with my late-night activities. In the morning, I was awake before the sunlight fully entered my room due to the sound of sweeping in the front yard.  

Apart from a new routine that changed my body rhythm, her old house felt comfortable enough to help me focus on my research. I was her first guest and she sometimes offered me things that I would not expect from a host of a guesthouse. I was fed full Japanese breakfasts, a cup of tea, and snacks, which were all free of charge. She treated me like her niece and took me to local sites or get me old books that she thought might be helpful for my research.

On a Monday, she suggested giving me a ride to Tachikui, a pottery village in the South-west of Tamba Sasayama. By then, we had formed a good relationship over rounds of beer talk at night, and our conversation was much livelier and more open. While driving, I asked her what it is like to live in Tamba Sasayama as an outsider. She said that inaka (countryside) life has not been treating her so well. She had a part-time job at a local grocery store that sells homegrown agricultural products. Although her work was quite demanding and the pay unimpressive, she was content with her current economic activities. However, having a social life was a challenge for her. The fact that she is an unmarried single woman in her 60s living alone in a big house of her own had somewhat prevented her from building a neighborly relationship with her next doors. She said that people think there should be a reason behind her relocation to the countryside, something uncanny and unconventional. She could not understand why people are so prejudiced about an old female migrant living alone and refered to them as heisai (closed). She said that it has been long enough since she moved into the neighborhood, but she still has no one around that would celebrate her birthday. I knew that she was exaggerating to a certain extent since she did have a group of friends in town. However, her feeling of loneliness seemed to derive not from the physical absence of friends but the general social atmosphere in the area that excluded anyone with a background like hers.

When my two weeks stay was coming to an end, she asked whether I would want to stay longer. I was tempted but I knew that I had to move to a new place where public transportation services were more convenient, and I eventually left her house after finding an apartment close to the train station. She drove me to my new home, and I promised her to visit her from time to time.

A few months later, on one quiet day at the end of December, she invited me to a year-end gathering at her house. I put on one of my best clothes and walked to her place thinking that I might be drinking more than usual. At the kitchen table were different kinds of appetizers to go with beer and they seemed enough for a group of people, but I soon realized that I was the only one invited. I asked whether she is seeing her family or friends. She shook her head. But we had enough stories to consume all the food she prepared. She had much to share about her life experiences and thoughts, and I was there to listen.

I was invited to her place several times afterward for drinks or to help her with her customers who did not speak Japanese. However, as I was getting busy with increased contacts with other informants, I could not visit her so often, or even if I did, I could not sit long enough to have a long conversation. What I regret the most is not being able to say my last goodbye to her in person, as I was overwhelmed with administrative tasks to wrap up at the end of my fieldwork. She did not reply to my last message, and I only found out later that she had shut down her guesthouse business.

However, this lady is not representative of the so-called urban-rural migrants that I met in Tamba Sasayama. Most of the newcomers were welcomed by the locals and were engaged in community events: retirees from adjacent cities that opened shops or restaurants in town; U-turn migrants that worked for local industries; and young and enthusiastic newcomers that started new businesses in the region. They were considered as positive stimuli to the local economy and were offered various public and private support systems. They were treated with care since they carried out the kind of economic and social activities that the locals expect from them. The old lady, on the other hand, did not receive the kind of hospitality when she first arrived in her neighborhood but instead was challenged with misconceptions based on her age, gender, and marital status. Although she was also venturing her creative energies in the region like any other urban-rural migrants in developing a beautiful retro-styled guesthouse, she was outside the local public spotlight. My days at her house lasted a little longer than two weeks, but her stories remained deep inside me throughout my fieldwork.

Shilla Lee is a PhD candidate at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. Her research focuses on the notion of rurality and creativity in regional revitalization practices and the cooperative activities of traditional craftsmen in Japan.

by Cornelia Reiher

It’s been ten months since our project started under Covid-19 conditions and although the situation in Germany has improved a lot due to high vaccination rates and low numbers of infections (at least for now), Japan’s borders are still closed to foreigners.

After reading literature on urban-rural migration and rural revitalization for the project and writing literature reviews with the core research group for the first six months, in March 2021, we launched this blog and started a study group. In biweekly meetings, team members and guests presented their work. What had started out as a group of five people in October 2020 developed into a constantly growing international and interdisciplinary group of students and scholars from Europe and Asia.

Over the course of the summer term, we heard presentations about newcomers to small islands, sustainability and in-migration in a village in Kyōto prefecture, in-migrants’ engagement in local crafts, organic farmers and newcomers in Kansai, human-nature relations of newcomers in Miyako-jima, the Chiiki okoshi kyōryokutai program and the central government’s Comprehensive Strategy. We had inspiring discussions about local differences and our methodological approaches and shared readings with the other group members. Through my own online presentations in Paris, Zurich and Vienna during the summer term I reached out to researchers interested in rural revitalization and urban-rural migration and advertised our blog and study group in our academic community.

One of the highlights of our study group was Susanne Klien’s presentation in late June. We all had read her book Urban Migrants in Rural Japan: Between Agency and Anomie in a Post-Growth Society and were excited to meet the author. Susanne did not only present and discuss her book and answered our questions, but also talked about her follow-up research in rural Japan and how Covid-19 impacted her research. Susanne’s experiences with informal rules concerning Covid-19 in the countryside in Japan particularly helped us to rethink our own future fieldwork and to develop strategies to respond to local residents’ fears and expectations.

For our own fieldwork, we have arranged affiliations with universities in Japan, contacted all the municipalities we want to conduct field research in and hope that visa applications to Japan will be possible again, now that we are all fully vaccinated. And while getting ready for fieldwork we have been constantly thinking about a plan B and therefore conducted first online interviews, searched through myriads of blogs, videos, policy documents and social media accounts of municipalities and prefectural offices. We are grateful for the opportunities the digital world offers, nevertheless, more than anything we hope to engage in onsite fieldwork this year and to meet our research participants in person.

by Susanne Klien*

Hi from Hokkaido! I recently wrapped up my follow-up fieldwork in Tokushima Prefecture. Originally scheduled for 2020, I had to postpone it because of the pandemic. In spring 2021, the infection rates seemed low enough in Kamiyama, a town with 5000 residents in the mountains. However, the decision to go ahead was difficult since my place of living, Sapporo, had high rates of infection, at times outnumbering Tokyo. Also, like most rural places, my field has an extremely high rate of residents older than 65 (50%). A close contact in town warned me that it may be difficult to pursue conventional fieldwork as many events have been cancelled and individual attitudes to the virus vary. Yet, he also shared that there were non-local visitors and some residents went on business trips. I eventually decided to go ahead, but also felt that extreme caution was required as not to risk anyone’s health including my own. Wearing a FSC.F-99 mask at all times, prioritizing outdoor activities and interviews was basic fieldwork etiquette.

During the first five days after my arrival I kept my activities low key, focusing on archival work. In contrast to my worries before departure, I felt my fear of catching COVID-19 dwindle every day – more pressing worries were how to cope with centipedes, giant spiders and heavy pollen exposure. Apart from a few public places that required measuring one’s body temperature, it was almost as if the virus did not exist. Some elderly neighbors who came for a chat were not even wearing masks. A local lady in her 70s whom I interviewed at her house said that I did not need to wear my mask during our conversation. Among the dozens of urbanite settlers I interviewed, only one asked me whether I had taken a PCR test.

That being said, however, there have in fact been a few infections in town. I talked to a settler in her late 20s who caught the virus, having brought it from outside. She said that even after her recovery, she was told by a shop owner to keep away. Social stigmatization has been reported as a huge issue in rural places that seems to outweigh the low risk of catching the virus there.

Most of my interviewees from four years ago were still in town, even those who had stated that they may move to other places. Check out my recent monograph Urban Migrants in Rural Japan: Between Agency and Anomie in a Post-growth Society (Albany, NY: SUNY Press 2020) if you are interested in their stories. Some collaborators have started entrepreneurial activities – in fact, my accommodation was a guesthouse opened by one of my interviewees, a woman from the Tokyo area in her early 30s.

Others were still searching for their ideal lifestyles, just like four years ago. It was reassuring to see so many familiar faces, yet it was all so different. There were many new arrivals. Having featured widely in various media, Kamiyama has gained a reputation as a place for fashionable individuals with special skills: designers, chefs, creatives, IT engineers.

Some long-term migrants observed that these newcomers are not really interested in deeper engagement with the local community; they just want to realize themselves by pursuing activities that make sense to them.

The pandemic seems to have legitimized the lifestyle choices of migrants as rural life as strategic both with regard to infection rates and food access. A couple in their 30s who have lived in Kamiyama for six years joked that their parents in Tokyo had always questioned their decision to leave their corporate jobs until the pandemic, when all of a sudden, they were praised for having made the right choice.

With inquiries about relocation having increased notably since the pandemic, Kamiyama – and many rural towns – have clearly seen a rise in interest by individuals from all walks of life.

*Susanne Klien is associate professor at Hokkaido University. Her main research interests include the appropriation of local traditions, demographic decline and alternative forms of living and working in post-growth Japan. She is the author of Urban migrants in rural Japan: Between agency and anomie in a post-growth society (State University of New York Press, 2020).

By Antonia Vesting

Apart from small projects at school and later at university, I had little experience in field research. By conducting my first fieldwork in Japan one could say that I plunged into the field headfirst. During my time at Waseda University, I learned about methods for conducting interviews. This however did not reduce my worries as a rather inexperienced fieldworker. Fortunately, I was not alone. My professor for rural development at Waseda University, who happened to be familiar with the region from his time as a student at Kyōto University, agreed to accompany me. This was truly a lucky coincidence!

As we stayed in Kyōto, we had to drive back and forth to the interview locations every day. Initially I had planned to stay at my friend’s house in Miyama but due to the advancing Covid-19 pandemic, she was worried that her neighbors would be anxious about having people from Tōkyō visit. Luckily, my interlocutors and my friend did not share this opinion and we could meet in person to conduct the interviews. As I have a driver’s license but no routine in driving, I was especially thankful for not having to drive the winding mountain roads that lead to Miyama and which are often frequented by deer at night. Taking these 70 minutes drives to and from Miyama also had their upsides: aside from long and interesting talks, I learned a lot about rural development and the practice of interviewing.

Returning from a long day in the field, creeping into my hostels dormitory late at night and collapsing on the futon with utter exhaustion, I found that field research and interviewing can be a very positive and enriching experience. Having completed all obligatory language-classes before going to Japan, my Japanese improved drastically during my half a year stay in Japan and transcribing the interviews further boosted my language-skills (not to mention personal growth and unforgettable experiences and insights). Still, there remain points for improvement.

Considering that I conducted research only for my bachelor’s thesis, my sample of interlocutors was very small, and I gained access to them through only one gatekeeper which induced some bias in my study. Furthermore, one of the interviewees only agreed to an interview for a small monetary compensation, which, as I learned afterwards, could negatively affect the credibility of the interview’s content. After returning to Germany, I found that there had been other studies on I-Turners to Miyama in Japanese, which rendered my research less relevant regarding novelty of findings and insights (not relevant for bachelor’s thesis but for later academic research). Nevertheless, this scholarship proved useful to compare my findings. I also was very conscious about the handling of interview data in respect to data security and the protection of privacy of my research participants.

Being now in the second semester of my master’s studies at Freie Universitāt Berlin, I have come to look back at the time of conducting interviews in Miyama in a new light. With my experience from visiting Miyama for the first time in 2016 as a backdrop and with the new knowledge and input, I gathered during my research in 2020, I now reevaluate my first experience of doing fieldwork in Japan. Reflecting on this first fieldwork experience and learning more about qualitative methods as parts of my master’s degree curriculum, I will hopefully enhance my research skills and avoid some of my initial mistakes in my upcoming projects.

I am very much looking forward to putting this new knowledge into practice when doing fieldwork in Japan again in the (hopefully) near future.

Antonia Marie Vesting is a MA student in Freie Universität Berlin’s Japanese Studies program. She received her bachelor’s degree from Hamburg University with a BA thesis on lifestyle migration in  Kyōto Prefecture. She has presented results from this research in an earlier blogpost.

by Ksenia Kurochkina

This is Ksenia Kurochkina here. In this post, I share how I started studying rural Japan and how my personal journey contributed to my research.

I came to Japan to study in 2009 with the main interest in contemporary society and younger generation’s working styles. I started visiting rural areas, first as my hobby, volunteering at organic farms. Interestingly, during my trips to villages, I had acquainted many young people from a social cohort I have not heard of before: young urbanites who recently migrated to the countryside to live and work. After witnessing high unemployment rates for youth, uncertainties of irregular employment, and psychological traumas of social withdrawals in the cities, I was very enthusiastic to see many young people with positive agendas, dreams, and revitalization projects on the outskirts of metropolitan areas. These people held different ideas on work, leisure, and the future from what I have seen in urban life. From my fascination with these people grew my research interest for the MA and Ph.D. theses on urbanites migrating to rural areas in Japan. Also, in the following twelve years since the beginning of my research, we all observed “how rural settlement in the ‘post’-productivist era has moved from ‘dropping out’ of the agenda to heading it” [1].

As a part of my dissertation project, I did long-term fieldwork in the Japanese countryside. I stayed for one year in a village in Kansai, renting a rural house, raising chickens in the backyard, and also getting ready to giving birth to my first child. Doing ethnographies, especially in sparsely populated remote areas, challenges researchers to investigate personal boundaries and engagements with informants. On the one hand, the immediate neighborhood with my informants gave me plenty of advantages in gathering valuable insights for my research. Through daily errands, I could closely observe the everyday lives of rural newcomers around their houses, paddy fields, and community. For example, because I was pregnant during the fieldwork and gave birth to my daughter in the local hospital, I could access the village’s young mothers’ community and learn a lot about their natural childbirth and child-rearing practices and how this contributed to their quality of life in rural environments. Caring for my backyard chickens with the advice and tips of my neighbors gave me valuable insights into newcomers’ routines of organic homesteading, sustainable cooking, and their deeper motivations for rural life.

On the other hand, I experienced that close interactions with some villagers may prevent a researcher from quality conversations with other villagers, as human relations in rural communities are loaded with many histories, rumors, and conflicts. For example, after some weeks in the fieldwork, I found out that two I-turn neighbor-newcomers have broken relationships and do not even greet each other. Therefore, I took measures to balance my relations with the informants to avoid bias. 

When doing fieldwork in the countryside, building up trust with the informants is a big part of successful interviewing and participant observation. Although a researcher should take an independent stance in the field, personal relationships and experiences always contribute to the research path we are walking.

[1]
Halfacree, Keith. 2006.  “From dropping out to leading on? British counter-cultural back-to-the-land in a changing rurality”, Progress in Human Geography 30, 3 (2006), pp. 309-336.

Ksenia Kurochkina is an associate researcher at Sociological Institute, Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation. She received her PhD from Waseda University in 2021 with a thesis on lifestyles of young rural newcomers in Japan.

by Tu Thanh Ngo (Frank Tu)

Policies to revitalize rural areas are nothing new in Japan. Revitalization policies date back to the 1930s when the Farm, Mountain and Fishing Village Economic Revitalization Campaign (1932–1941) was initiated that was followed by a series of laws and policies, such as the Promotion Services for Home Living Improvement (1940s–late 1950s), the Basic Agricultural Law (1961), the Mountain Village Promotion Act (1965), the Emergency Act for the Improvement of Depopulated Areas (1970) or the Law on Food, Agriculture and Rural Areas (1999) [1].

However, a new policy has been introduced in 2014 by then Prime Minister Abe Shinzō that became the epitome of rural revitalization. According to a Chiikiryoku Advisor for the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, “Regional revitalization (chihō sōsei) was born under the Abe Cabinet” (personal online communication, 16 June 2021). According to Hijino (2017) and Yoshizawa (2019), the Abe administration did not only introduce the term chihō sōsei, but also framed rural revitalization as a flagship policy. The term chihō sōsei refers to a policy titled “Machi, hito, shigoto sōsei” and its policy framework “Machi, hito, shigoto sōsei sōgō senryaku” [Comprehensive Strategy for Communities, People and Work] [2].

The Comprehensive Strategy’s intention is to centralize all strategies used for rural revitalization, decentralization of population in Tokyo, and anti-depopulation under one single framework [2]. The Comprehensive Strategy consists of four objectives [3]:

1. Create a stable economic environment in rural areas
2. Strengthen the ties between rural and urban areas to attract new in-migrants
3. Provide support for marriage, childbearing, and child-rearing in rural areas
4. Create a safe living environment 

In essence, the Comprehensive Strategy “aims at reversing the population flow into the greater Tokyo area” [4]. To be specific, by the end of the first five-year phase, the government expected to reduce the number of in-migrants to the Tokyo region by 60,000 people and to increase the number of out-migrants from the Tokyo region by 40,000 people [5]. In addition, the Comprehensive Strategy is expected to “make it easy for young couples to live and work full-time with support from the local government” [4] by creating 300,000 new jobs in rural areas [5]. On how to achieve the goals that the Comprehensive Strategy sets out to do, the MIC advisor quoted earlier wrote: “From my point of view, regional revitalization needs to consider transportation, living standards – including education, income, etc.” (personal online communication, 16 June 2021).

However, as mentioned above, policies to revitalize rural Japan existed long before Abe’s Comprehensive Strategy. Thus, although all existing policies have now been centralized to constitute one regional revitalization policy framework, is this new policy a breakthrough or just merely old wine in new bottles? This is what we want to find out through our project that studies the implementation and the impact of the Comprehensive Strategy in four municipalities in Kyushu. In addition, we will also pay attention to how the implementation of the Comprehensive Strategy differs across different levels of government (national, prefectural and municipal).  

[1]
Feldhoff, T. (2013) ‘Shrinking communities in Japan: Community ownership of assets as a development potential for rural Japan?’, Urban Design International, 18(1), pp. 99–109.

Nakama, Y. and Uchida, K. (2010), ‘Seikatsu Kaizen Fukyū Jigyō no Rinen to Jittai: Yamaguchi ken wo jirei ni’, Nōringyō Mondai Kenkyū, 178, pp. 1–13.

Smith, K. (2003), ‘Building the model village: Rural revitalization and the Great Depression’, in Farmers and village life in twentieth-century Japan. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, pp. 126–155.

[2]
Hijino, K. V. L. (2017), Local Politics and National Policy: Multi-level conflicts in Japan and Beyond. London and New York: Routledge.

Yoshizawa, Y. (2019), ‘Chūō Seifu ni okeru “Chihōsōsei” no Seisaku katei to seifu kan kankei’, Seiji Keizaigaku Kenkyū Ronshū, 4, pp.1-20.

[3]
Office of the Prime Minister (2014), Machi, Hito, Shigoto Sōsei Sōgō Senryaku ni tsuite, Shushō Kantei. Available at: https://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/singi/sousei/pdf/20141227siryou5.pdf.

[4]
Kumagai, F. (2020), Municipal Power and Population Decline in Japan: Goki-Shichido and Regional Variations. Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore.

[5]
Nakamura, Y. (2015), ‘Chihō Sōsei o meguru Sōgō Senryaku to Chihō Jichitai: Kokusaku kara Jichi e no Tenkan wa Kanō ka’, Utsunomiya Daigaku Kokusai Gakubu Kenkyū Ronshū, 40, pp. 43–48.