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.

by Ngo Tu Thanh (Frank Tu)

As mentioned in one of my previous posts , tourism is one of the rural revitalization strategies mentioned in the flagship Comprehensive Strategy for Communities, People and Work. However, the ambiguous language used in policy documents still left me wonder what the role of tourism actually is. Curious to find out, I tried to reach out to experts in the field. Fortunately, in mid-October, I had the opportunity to conduct an online interview with another Chiikiryoku Sōzō Advisor for the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. The advisor has more than four decades of experience in rural revitalization. Better yet, her expertise lies in the fields of music, arts, culture, and tourism. Here, I present key takeaways from the interview.

Why is tourism a great strategy?The advisor argues that rural areas are extremely closed communities that heavily rely on personal connections. Moreover, she said, those in powerful positions are mostly conservative “grandpas of the Showa generation” and powerful members of the Chambers of Commerce. Thus, it could be a challenge to develop rural economies from the inside given such strong resistance. Tourism is a great way to revitalize rural areas because its main targets are not local residents, but those coming from the outside. Tourism brings financial resources to rural areas without disturbing the status quo too much. Moreover, tourism also creates jobs, mostly for small and medium-sized businesses.

The promotion of tourism can also contribute to amenity-based development in Japan. According to the advisor, this strategy refers to the use and promotion of cultures and amenities for regional development. Personally, she has participated in many of such tourism promotion projects. For instance, she has organized jazz festivals to attract visitors to rural areas; organized water-theater shows on night-view lakes or promoted IR resorts (integrated resorts that have casinos, theaters, nightlife activities etc.).

Moreover, she also believes that tourism styles have been changing in recent years. For instance, instead of going to Kyoto or visiting Mount Fuji, many wealthy Chinese tourists, for example, are now choosing to take their families to rural Japan for lungs-cleansing tours (haisen tsuā), mikan-picking tours or forest therapy tours. To offer this kind of tourism is a potential strategy to attract visitors, both domestic and inbound, to rural areas.

What should be done to further promote rural tourism? First, the advisor mentioned that disseminating information is crucial for rural revitalization. For instance, to promote rural tourism, it is important to create high-impact visuals that appeal to people around the world. Next, acknowledging issues such as the inconvenient public transportation system in rural areas, she believes that the adoption of Uber into rural areas could also be another potential strategy to promote rural tourism and development. However, she is wary that Japan’s Taxi Associations are still very powerful in Japan and will lobby against it.

Personally, this was a very enlightening interview for me. Aside from the insights about tourism, I was able to hear a lot of new perspectives on gender issues, for example. For instance, the advisor said that Japan is currently dominated by old men at both local and central levels, who might have been hindering Japan’s rural revitalization efforts by clinging onto power for too long. Although these old guards might have played a crucial role in rebuilding Japan after the war, they are now falling behind when it comes to tech-savviness and creativity, compared to younger generations. Hence, a good way forward is for a generational change to take place.

Organizer: Cornelia Reiher (FU Berlin)

Time: November 20, 11:00 – 13:30 (German Time)

Link to the event: http://vsjf.net/die-vsjf/fachgruppen/fachgruppentagung-2021/

Webex-Link:  
Meeting-Link: https://fu-berlin.webex.com/fu-berlin/j.php?MTID=m7e03c93e5d853fc8b6bc3ea0fe3495d9
Meeting-No: 2730 816 5330  
Passwort: 4zUzJbbJB64 

Program:
11:00: Miyako-jima Eco Island: between growth, branding, and conservation (Sarah Bijlsma, GEAS, FU Berlin) 

11:40: Finding home and building futures in the countryside: Urban-rural migration experiences in Wakayama prefecture (Cecilia Luzi, GEAS, FU Berlin) 

12:30: The periphery and the center: Support schemes for urban-rural migration and their local appropriation (Ngo Tu Thanh [Frank Tu], FU Berlin)

13:10: Final discussion

by Galina Khoikhina

Today, railway tourism is highly popular in Japan. Tourist trains сan be created on the basis of trains that are no longer in use, or they can be specially designed for a specific project. One of these trains is the luxury cruise train “Seven Stars in Kyushu”. It was launched by JR Kyūshū on 15 October 2013. In a few days, the train crosses Kyūshū’s prefectures. During this journey, passengers can visit local sights, try local cuisine and participate in workshops. In 2014, “Seven Stars in Kyushu” was chosen as an example of a revitalization project in the MLIT White Paper [1]. The designer of “Seven Stars” Mitooka Eiji collaborated with Japanese artists from Kyūshū. For example, artists from Ōkawa, Fukuoka Prefecture, decorated the interior of the train with the Japanese art of woodworking (kumiko). Another example of cooperation is the porcelain used on board of the train. It is made by potters from Arita, Saga Prefecture [2].

This is a promotion video for the Seven Stars in Kyushu on the occasion of it’s 7th birthday

In my bachelor thesis, I studied the impact of „Seven Stars” on the revitalization of Kyūshū’s rural areas. To answer this question, I conducted a qualitative content analysis of articles that appeared about “Seven Stars” in the Yomiuri Shinbun newspaper. I analyzed articles that came out in the time interval from the launch of the train to the beginning of the pandemic. The research has shown a generally positive effect from an economic point of view. The demand for the train is many times greater than the number of available seats. The train is highly popular and attracts wealthy tourists to the region. Since the train passengers mostly live outside Kyūshū, it can be stated that they bring financial resources to the region. In addition, the articles highlighted the growing interest in Kyūshū as a destination. “Seven Stars” attracts people interested in rail transport. The articles mention the growing popularity of the tourist trains that already existed in Kyūshū, especially those whose route intersects with the luxury train. In addition, the popularity of “Seven Stars” has led to the introduction of new touristic trains, which have a similar effect. The analysis of the articles also revealed an increase in sales of local products associated with “Seven Stars“. People want to buy items like those used on the train and try the same meal as the passengers. The increase in sales of local goods also has a positive impact on the economy.

Trains hold a special place in Japan and come in many variations

Furthermore, there is some evidence of the positive impact of the train on society. Articles repeatedly mentioned that for locals the arrival of the train becomes an event. They cheerfully welcome the train and thus show their hospitality. This initiative of the locals is also encouraged by JR Kyushu. It is important to note that the articles also showed an increase in the motivation of local farmers. Thus, the train also has a positive impact on the local people on a social level. Although the train changes its route regularly and therefore cannot serve as a stable revitalization factor for a particular location, it still has a positive effect on the island in general. To summarize, my bachelor’s research showed that, according to the news coverage in the Yomiuri Shinbun, the introduction of the „Seven Stars in Kyushu” project had an overall positive effect on the economic and social levels.

Even small local trains can be a special attraction

[1]
MLIT (Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism) (2014),  Kokudo kōtsū shiro [White Paper of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism],  https://www.mlit.go.jp/common/001113556.pdf (Accessed on 25 October 2021). 

[2]
Cruise Train „Seven Stars in Kyushu” (2021), „The train” https://www.cruisetrain-sevenstars.jp/english/train/ (Accessed on 25 October 2021).

Galina Khoikhina is a student in Freie Universität Berlin’s Japanese Studies master‘s program. She has written her bachelor‘s thesis about tourism in rural Japan.

By Josko Kozic

During my research on rural Shugendō, a Japanese religion focusing on asceticism and mountain worship, I regularly come across temples contributing to their local communities in different ways. This is not a new phenomenon, however, it might be an increasingly important factor, due to several demographic changes which also affect the sphere of religious life. It so happens that Japan currently does not only face a decline in the birthrate or rural outmigration, it also faces a decline of temple successors (kōkeishamondai).

At Manidera temple in Tottori for instance, I got to know the successor priest, who himself is an I-turner and moved to the area from Tokyo only a few years ago. He became a monk at the age of 40, which seems relatively late for dedicating oneself to a temple for the rest of one’s life. It shows how much rural temples rely on successors from far away. At Sanbutsu-ji, a more famous temple in the region located on Mt Mitoku, an I-turner from England is working as a guide, bringing international tourists to the site. He offers one-day ascetic workshops (shugyō taiken) that include hiking to sacred sites, sometimes called “power spots” or meditating under waterfalls (takigyō). Sanbutsu-ji recently updated its website and Instagram page to attract more national and international visitors, also hoping of promote the temple’s registration as a world heritage site. Both power spots as well as waterfall meditations seem to be part of a mainstream interest in sacralized, “Japanese” nature. Forest bathing is also part of this trend. For temples located in areas with forests and waterfalls, including such workshops or “experiences” in tourist campaigns is an important way to contribute to the attractiveness of their local communities.

In the past, most temple economies relied heavily on their parishioners (danka). This is also true for temples in charge of practitioners of Shugendō. Originally, they maintained cofraternities of lay practitioners and parishioners (kō) from whom they received financial donations and other goods. Recently however, both the danka as well as the kō experience rigorous decline. It so happens that during festivities and rituals performed by Shugendō groups, almost no kō associations are left to host the practitioners. Nowadays, members of the Community Building Support Staff (chiiki okoshi kyōryoku-tai) occasionally take over this task.

Another temple I built a connection with is located in the mountains near the small town of Aoya. Apparently, the priest in charge was asked to become a monk by a family member before he entered monkhood. As he mentioned during one of our conversations, there would have been no other person to take over the temple otherwise. He now runs his own YouTube and Twitter account, sharing impressions of his everyday country life and his thoughts on worldly matters. Last month, he kindly invited me to join for a waterfall-meditation. His wife is originally from Saitama prefecture and is a self-employed manga artist. She moved to Tottori as an I-turner after publishing her first manga, ‘Yamabushi Girl‘. In an interview, she told me about pros and cons of living in the rural area, emphasizing though that she is happy with her choice after all.

I always feel grateful being able to get in touch with locals, priests and practitioners who live at the outskirts of Japan. Currently, I am residing in the Tamba region of Hyōgo prefecture where I am conducting further research on this topic.

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 Cecilia Luzi

The first time I arrived in the Wakayama prefecture countryside was in 2016, on a cloudy August afternoon, and the heat and humidity at the beginning of the typhoon season were at their peak. I was welcomed by the cheerful Yukari-san, who came to pick me up at the train station with her white, compact pick-up truck –

an ever-present element in Japan’s countryside. I spent one month as a WWOOFer (see Maritchu Durand’s post) working with her and her husband Āyan-san on their small farm in the southern part of Wakayama prefecture. We became good friends and eventually kept in touch even after my departure.  When I moved to Tokyo with a scholarship in 2018, I took the opportunity to visit them whenever possible, especially, to spend time with one of their daughters, who became a very close friend. We shared space, time, long chats, food, drinks and music. We helped each other a lot and I began to understand her fascinating way of living in the countryside.

Kai is a young woman and a single mother of two daughters. She used to live in Kōbe. When she decided to start a family, she moved back to the place where she grew up. Today, she rents a small field overlooking the ocean, where she grows sweet potatoes. She uses them to make sweets, tarts, and bagels that she sells at the local grocery stores or at occasional outdoor markets. In November 2018, we would wake up at 6 a.m. Kai prepared breakfast while I dressed her older daughter Konoha and dropped her off at the nursery school. I then joined Kai on the field to help her dig up sweet potatoes. When I came back in July 2019, Utaha was born, and we were working around the house to make space for a winter vegetable garden. Kai would put Uta-chan to sleep on a futon inside and leave the shōji all opened to let the summer breeze pass through the house.

While living with Kai, I learned that children are a central part of the life of urban-rural migrants in Wakayama prefecture. They play hide-and-seek barefoot on rice paddies during the harvesting season in September, sink their hands deep into the bean paste when making miso for hinamatsuri in March and run around the house while adults are eating and drinking during long winter nights. Families may have different shapes and compositions, but children are always around. One of the reasons why these people decided to move and resettle in a remote rural area was precisely because they wanted to start a family and raise their children in a better environment. Fresh air, healthy food, wide space to run and play outside is what made the countryside appealing, while the distance from nuclear power plants more specifically explains why they chose this specific area. Escaping from the city means to provide their children with what they believe is a more sustainable and happier future.

As Cornelia Reiher wrote in her last post, local authorities are mostly driven by demographic reasons: they want to attract migrants with young children in order to fight the population decline of rural areas. However, beautiful landscapes and delicious food are not enough for young families and life is not always idyllic for in-migrants with children. Families dwell in old houses far from each other and spend much time isolated; one parent often has multiple and/or seasonal jobs in order to make ends meet, often leaving the other at home with the children. Yet the strong sense of community counterbalances this precarity. Despite the distance, people tend to be supportive of each other: they provide comfort and care when one is ill and recurrently take care of each other’s children.

Earlier this year, Kai finally realized her dream to open a cafe where she can cook and sell her own products. She received a lot of help from the community to renovate the old, abandoned grocery shop where she now works and lives with a friend. Before the Covid-19 outbreak, I was planning to stay some months in Japan to help her out with the construction works and the opening. Unfortunately, I could only follow the developments through Facebook and Instagram. I know it has been hard for her, and the economic environment in which she works and lives today is still precarious. Yet, I sometimes scroll the pictures of her cafe on my phone waiting for the moment I will finally be there with her, chatting and eating a delicious imo-no-taruto while our children play together on the ground.

By Sarah Bijlsma

A little over a year ago, Ryutaro Hagi decided to quit his Tokyo job, to move back to his birthplace in Mie Prefecture, and to become an organic farmer. While growing up on a farm as a child, he had never considered this kind of life for himself. Quite the opposite; Ryutaro studied transnational communication in Kyoto, spent a year in the U.S., has friends living all over the world, and started his career successfully at an international travel agency in Osaka.

Interestingly, it was exactly Ryutaro’s interest in people and media from outside of Japan that inspired him to go local. His business partners, who politely refused Japanese meat and fish-based dishes, the Netflix documentary Cowspiricy (2014) on the global meat industry, a 2018 keynote speech by Rose Marcario, the CEO of Patagonia at the time, made him aware of the large part the food industry plays in contributing to global warming.

Ryutaro tells me that what struck him the most in Marcario’s talk, was that she mentions that soil acts as a sponge for carbon and that if agriculture would be fully organic, the CO2 emissions annually produced would be completely sequestered in the soil. Over time, he became aware that organic farming offers a solution to a wide variety of environmental threats, both globalized issues and those particular for Japan, like water pollution and the countries dependency on foreign food supplies. Being unable to travel because of the Covid-19 pandemic, he took the opportunity to change his life and started Aina Farm on a small plot of land that he borrows from his father. Aina, as he explains on his website, means “soil” or “land” in the Hawaiian language—producing healthy soil without chemicals is what organic farming is all about.

On the website of Aina, people can learn all about Ryutaro’s new life. In a promotion video for the farm, he talks in English about nature and his own dreams of becoming a farmer. Aina Farms Instagram page, which has more than 1000 followers, shows colorful pictures of growing crops, children playing with vegetables, and Ryutaro himself working the fields. In addition, he publishes long articles on his blog sharing his own experiences while referring to American films, books, and theories of human-nature entanglements. Looking at these posts, I think to myself that his life looks very different from the image of a farming life that I know from the Netherlands. Rather than a simple life, it looks like out of a fashion magazine.

When I ask him about this, Ryutaro explains that this is exactly what he is strategically aiming for. In Japan, there is a fundamental need for more agricultural businesses. But farming suffers a negative image; it is difficult, badly paid, and perhaps even seen as backward. Making use of social media, he wants to change this image and show young Japanese that farming can also be fashionable, fun, important, and rewarding. That farmers are “cool” and can speak multiple languages, that they also travel the world.

Furthermore, since Ryutaro moved to Mie he realizes that the older generation of farmers—including his father—have their very own ideas about best practices. Growing crops without chemicals does not make any sense to them. In his heart, he wants to tell them directly to stop destroying the earth. “But that generation is very stubborn,” he says. “And also, this is everything that they know and grew up with. Picking a fight is not the way to reach them. But in the end, it is all about supply and demand. They do not listen to me and do not care about the environment, but if more people choose to buy organic products, also that generation will have to change. That is why I do my best to grow healthy vegetables and post those cool pictures on Instagram.” He pauses and smiles, “you know, I do not want to be negative and against everything. I just want to be an inspiration to others.”

What I find so fascinating about Ryutaro’s story is that it is defined by a variety of interwoven scales. On the one hand, his practices as a farmer are fundamentally local; the crops that he grows and the physical work he performs all depend on the conditions of this one plot of land somewhere in the middle of Mie prefecture. On the other hand, Ryutaro’s story is largely shaped by events and thoughts originating outside of Japan. And on his turn, social media allows him to spread his message to people living in very different parts of the world. This illustrates that the global and the local are neither easily defined, nor simply dichotomous. Rather, Aina Farm can be seen as a place where different sets of relations intersect, and where nature and technology collaborate.

By Cornelia Reiher

The idealized notion of rural Japan inherent in the term furusato is characteristic of discourse on rural Japan. It connotes beautiful nature and traditional lifestyles, nostalgia, warmth and a feeling of security that is constructed in opposition to urban spaces [1]. Although this idealized notion of rural Japan has been mobilized in regional revitalization discourses since the 1970s, the success of such portrayals has been rather limited when it comes to attracting capital, people and jobs to the countryside [2].

But with the increasing popularity of urban-rural migration it is not only the countryside that is represented in such an idealized manner. As prefectures and municipalities compete for newcomers and return migrants (ijūsha), they promote idealized images of their prefectures and of the migrants who should settle down in the respective areas. Prefectural and local governments have specific ideas about who should relocate to their towns. When looking at promotional material prefectures issue, it is striking how they attempt to appeal to different audiences. While some prefectures present themselves as the ideal place to raise children, others target women who want to realize their dreams and yet other prefectures are mainly interested in u-turn migrants.

In promotional material found on- and offline, ijūsha share their experiences and praise their new places of residence for beautiful nature, delicious food, a slow lifestyle or the support infrastructure provided by the prefecture or the municipality. Against the backdrop of population decline, it is not surprising that many prefectures target families with young children. Ijūsha featured in these prefectures’ promotional material stress how easy it is to raise children in the countryside, how children benefit from growing up in close contact with nature and how much easier it is to get access to childcare. Images of laughing children running around in paddy fields, feeding chicken, enjoying outside activities or harvesting vegetables and fruits they have grown in the family garden accompany these accounts. Their parents share their experiences with support for buying or renting land and house construction and talk about how they connect easily to locals through their children. The ijūsha depicted in such a manner mostly have three or four children and women mainly speak as mothers.

But the promotional material does not address the many problems related to education in Japan’s countryside. These include the closing of schools, the small size of classes in some rural schools or the difficulties of long distance commuting to a high school that prepares children for the university entrance exams. When I interviewed ijūsha in Ōita in 2018, many had smaller children and some complained that the number of students in the local elementary school wasn’t even large enough to open a baseball team. Many worried about their children’s future and wanted to move back to urban areas as soon as they would start high school. Nevertheless, after being stuck in an apartment in Berlin with my family during the Covid-19 pandemic for one and a half years, I can imagine that people from urban areas feel attracted to the imaginary of a happy life in the countryside presented in the promotion material by prefectures across Japan. It will be interesting to find out how people considering relocation perceive such material, what questions they ask staff at local support desks and how the imaginaries presented in promotional material affects their decisions when selecting a place to relocate to.

[1]
Ivy, Marilyn (1995), Discourses of the vanishing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p.105-106.
[2]
Reiher, Cornelia (2014), Lokale Identität und ländliche Revitalisierung. Die japanische Keramikstadt Arita und die Grenzen der Globalisierung, Bielefeld: Transcript.