{"id":1431,"date":"2023-03-24T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-03-24T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/urban-rural-migration-japan\/?p=1431"},"modified":"2023-03-09T13:28:37","modified_gmt":"2023-03-09T12:28:37","slug":"guest-contribution-greetings-from-omori-cho","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/urban-rural-migration-japan\/2023\/03\/24\/guest-contribution-greetings-from-omori-cho\/","title":{"rendered":"Guest contribution: Greetings from Omori-ch\u014d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Shunichi Ito<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hello to all in the \u201cUrban-rural migration and rural revitalization in Japan\u201d Blog community! My name is Shunichi Ito, and I am very happy to be able to participate and share my experiences working and researching the Japanese countryside with you all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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That\u2019s me!<\/em>
Copyright \u00a9 Shunichi Ito 2023<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To introduce myself, I am currently leading a nikyoten seikatsu<\/em> (a two location lifestyle) between Chiba Prefecture as a soon-to-be second year graduate student at Sophia University and Shimane Prefecture as a member of a RMO (regional management organization) for a small town called Omori-ch\u014d (\u5927\u68ee\u753a). As for my personal background, all I can say is that I have lived a quite mobile life. I was born in Los Angeles, but immediately moved to Japan until 4th<\/sup> grade, then moved back to the US (New Jersey), then to California for college. After graduating, I moved to Shimane Prefecture and lived and worked in a town called Omori-ch\u014d for three years, then moved to Chiba for graduate school, and here I am.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My graduating thesis at UC Berkeley was \u201cReimagening a New Generation of Hopeful Lifestyle in Japan: An Ethnographic Study of How a New Generation is finding Alternative Lifestyles in the Countryside\u201d which I admit is quite a mouthful of a title. In the thesis, I conducted ethnographic research of I-turners and U-turners in my field site of Omori-ch\u014d. Specifically, on the conditions that acted as the push and pull incentives for moving, as well as their personal experiences comparing their lifestyles in urban Japan and now in the countryside. I was always interested in what constituted as a mainstream and hopeful lifestyle in contemporary Japan and how people who were disenchanted or could not realize those lifestyles were getting by in life.<\/p>\n\n\n

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My graduating thesis on \u201cReimagening a New Generation of Hopeful Lifestyle in Japan\u201d<\/em>
Copyright \u00a9 Shunichi Ito 2023<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would now like to introduce my field site of Omori-ch\u014d to you all. To be more formal it is Omori-ch\u014d, Oda City, Shimane Prefecture \uff08\u5cf6\u6839\u770c,\u5927\u7530\u5e02,\u5927\u68ee\u753a\uff09<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The streets of Omori-ch\u014d<\/em>
Copyright \u00a9 Shunichi Ito, 2023<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The village is surrounded by mountains on both sides forming a valley, where houses are stretched vertically along a straight road and the Ginzan River that runs through it. The valley, which is 3.1 kilometers long, is dived into two sections with the first 0.8 kilometers called the machinami<\/em> or the townscape, and the rest of the 2.3 kilometers leading into the mountains is called the Ginzan District. This informal division of the town represents where the samurai bureaucracy\/ commercial district was and where the silver miners lived during the Edo period.
Omori-ch\u014d is where the Iwami Ginzan Silver Mines is located, which was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007. Heritage tourism make up a large part of its economy as upon its initial designation, close to 800,000 people visited the village in a year. The main location of visitation is Ryugenji Silver mine, which is a silver mine tourists can enter at the top of the Ginzan District.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Silver mines<\/em>
Copyright \u00a9 Shunichi Ito 2023<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As of 2022 there are 393 people living in the village, where 40% of its population is over the age of 65, 9.67% between the ages of 20-30, and 14.76% are under the age of 14. While Omori has maintained its population of around 400 for the last 10 years, it is part of the population decline and super-aging society like the rest of Shimane and rural Japan. A unique characteristic of Omori-ch\u014d is that there are two companies in the village which employ around about 100 residents who live in Omori-ch\u014d. One is a clothing and apparel and lifestyle brand called Gungendo, and the other is a prosthetics maker called Nakamura Brace. These companies also finance the rebuilding of many Japanese folk houses called kominka<\/em> for its employees to live in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rice paddy in Omori-ch\u014d
Copyright \u00a9 Shunichi Ito 2022<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For my masters I am interested in conducting research on RMO\u2019s (chiiki unei soshiki<\/em>) or regional management organizations, which are organizations of proactive local self-governance run by residents of the town. This is an important area of study because RMO\u2019s can act as a hopeful civic space of strategic planning coupled with implementation towards an uncertain\/ precarious future. This is in contrast to the more nostalgic functions of rural as furusato<\/em> by Marilyn Ivy [1], or the \u201cTreasure Hunts\u201d of neoliberal decentralization of responsibility by Bridget Love [2]. Omori-ch\u014d has created a RMO of its own two years ago called Iwami Ginzan Mirai Consortium and current is going through a period of critical self-analysis where residents are reconceptualizing their position and identity as a town in postgrowth contemporary Japan. I am hoping that my research will reveal how the rural is becoming a location of postgrowth values through the critical engagement with the future, rather than simply protecting or rediscovering the past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m looking forward to continuing sharing my research, as well as my \u201cday in my life\u201d in Omori-cho on this blog, thank you! \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[1] Ivy, M. (1995), Discourses of the Vanishing<\/em>, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[2] Love, B. (2013), \u201eTreasure Hunts in Rural Japan: Place Making at the Limits of Sustainability\u201d, American Anthropologist<\/em> 115, 1, S. 112\u2013124.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Shunichi Ito Hello to all in the \u201cUrban-rural migration and rural revitalization in Japan\u201d Blog community! My name is Shunichi Ito, and I am very happy to be able to participate and share my experiences working and researching the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4973,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allgemein"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/urban-rural-migration-japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/urban-rural-migration-japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/urban-rural-migration-japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/urban-rural-migration-japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4973"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/urban-rural-migration-japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1431"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/urban-rural-migration-japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1431\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1437,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/urban-rural-migration-japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1431\/revisions\/1437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/urban-rural-migration-japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/urban-rural-migration-japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.fu-berlin.de\/urban-rural-migration-japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}