Letter from Itoshima

After four days in Nagasaki, I hop on a 7:14 AM northbound train for my next destination, Itoshima, a rural city of 100,000 that occupies one side of a peninsula an hour west of central Fukuoka. Nestled between the ocean and the mountains but nearby the big city, Itoshima has in recent years become a popular destination for overworked urbanites seeking the freedom of rural living.

I am traveling with the “Youth 18 Ticket,” which allows five days of unlimited nationwide travel by local train for 11,800 yen ($100), but because the trains stop at every station and I have to transfer twice, the journey takes about five hours. After I wake up with a can of coffee, I manage to enjoy the sunrise over the Ariake Sea and read a book as we traverse the foggy hills of Saga.

At 10:30, I disembark the second train to transfer at Karatsu and notice a traveler in his forties with a warm jacket and backpack sitting at the front of the carriage. He is holding the same ticket as me and I can make out the title of his book: Genkai Shuraku, a term used to describe hyper-aged rural settlements on the road to extinction. Definitions vary, but thousands of communities inhabited by only a handful of elderly residents can be found in the folds of mountain valleys or perched along the coasts of the country.

I imagine the man is journeying around the area by local train to explore such settlements. Ruins tourism has become a popular pastime for many Japanese and foreigners, who trek to abandoned villages, bankrupt bubble-era resorts, disused rail lines, and “Battleship Island,” the collapsing fortress-like concrete city built atop a coal mine off the coast of Nagasaki that was the first ruin in Japan to be chosen as a World Heritage Site earlier this year.

One minute after noon, I disembark my last train at an unattended station along the coast. On the road next to the platform, I spot Chiharu Hatakeyama waving from a familiar car.

I first visited Chiharu last November, after I had heard about her activities and asked a mutual friend to introduce me. In her early thirties, Chiharu wears simple, colorful clothing and has gold streaks in her long hair. Her airy presence and obvious energy for everyday adventures make her immediately likable.

Chiharu grew up in a typical suburban bedtown outside of Tokyo and attended a good university in the capital. She was working at a company and living in Yokohama when the Tohoku Earthquake struck on March 11, 2011. In the panic over possible nuclear fallout from the accident at Fukushima, food and supplies evaporated from convenience store shelves. Chiharu came away from the disaster convinced of the fragility of the systems providing the food, energy, and resources necessary for sustaining modern life. Soon after, she decided she wanted to live closer to nature and began learning how to slaughter animals. Three and a half years ago, she moved to Itoshima, started a sharehouse, and became a hunter.

She writes a popular blog about her off-the-grid lifestyle, DIY experiments, and her experiences learning to hunt, which she edited and published as a book in 2014. Her posts are written in a familiar voice and warmly matter-of-fact language that give readers the sense of a friend excitedly sharing what she’s been up to (“We planted our rice paddies!” “My book is coming out!” “I slaughtered a boar in the kitchen.”) She has 55,000 followers on Instagram. Hunting and slaughtering animals are not exactly ordinary pastimes in Japan, so the story of a fashionable urban girl giving up her comfy life and choosing to post her hunting exploits on the Internet drew attention.

When I first visited last year, Chiharu and I drove about two kilometers up the winding road from the train station to her house. The gently-sloping valley was terraced with rice paddies and fields and a smattering of large, traditional houses built on tall stone foundations. She and her roommates had found a local owner who agreed to rent them a 70-year old house in excellent condition, with a traditional glass-enclosed veranda looking out onto a garden and koi pond. The new residents were gradually undertaking renovations, removing the ceiling above the entranceway to reveal the enormous wood rafters supporting the roof, and inviting a craftsman from Korea to build an Ondol furnace under the floor of their living room to provide radiant heat. I helped to apply plaster to the walls in the attic, where they were building a library and guest room.

When I first walked into the house, a deer’s head was poking out of a plastic bag full of salt, sitting in a box on the floor of the entranceway. Chiharu had just returned from a hunt in Yakushima to the south of Kyushu, and the pelt, still attached to the skull, had just arrived by courier. She invited me to help remove the skin, so I soon found myself standing in the cold at a sink in the house’s outbuilding, holding a knife, face-to-face with the milky eyes of the animal’s lifeless head.

As I tentatively slid the blade underneath the cheek and peeled back the skin, I began to ask her about how her way of thinking changed as she adopted her new lifestyle. I got stuck trying to separate the skin around the eyes.

“The eyes were always hard for me at the start,” she said as she took the knife and more forcefully sawed the flesh.

I found myself transfixed by my own discomfort. Like Chiharu until the eathquake, I was aware of how my life in the city is made possible by exploitation and destruction of nature hidden to me. A sense of guilt or responsibility drove me to try to consume less or engage in “ethical consumption” and eat less meat, but Chiharu had chosen to confront her relationship to nature head-on. My trepidation at facing the reality of death behind my diet felt dishonest in comparison.

“When you’re cutting up the carcass, are you able to focus on the work or do you think constantly about the fact that you killed this animal?”

“I used to think a lot about it, but not so much anymore.”

I try to get her to clarify, “I guess it’s something you get used to?”

“You don’t get used to it, you simply grow more determined,” she said as she cut through the final piece of skin around the left eye, peeling back the pelt to reveal the shiny and smooth skull.

She continued, “You start to realize that animals are just a part of nature, and humans as well. The boundaries between life and death start to feel less absolute. All it takes is the slightest pressure on a knife to cut right through that boundary. I used to think of death as a huge event, but now I feel more that it’s just part of the cycle, and humans dying doesn’t seem like such a big deal anymore.”

Chiharu has gained a following on her blog because she reflects honestly about the intimacy of sustaining one’s life directly from nature. She has a license to shoot a gun but does not have permission to own one, so she mostly hunts wild boars by setting traps in the hills. When she returns to the trap and finds a boar, she holds the injured animal from behind, apologizes, and slits its throat with a knife before draining the carcass of blood and dragging it home. In one blog post, she wrote about how much more difficult it was to wring the necks of chickens after she had given them names and raised them with love.

Her appreciation for the lives she takes is often expressed with a joyful excitement that is sometimes misunderstood. A post titled “Rabbits taste cute” documented a hunt in snowy Niigata and subsequent slaughter with graphic pictures, including a picture of her grinning while holding the lifeless body of her catch. The post generated hundreds of outraged comments declaring her an attention-seeker with no regard for animal life. The spirited debate on Twitter and other web media helped to make her well-known.

She defended herself in a follow-up post:

At the most basic level, killing animals and eating food are connected. We kill, slaughter, and put meat on the table as a meal. It’s not possible to draw a line somewhere in this process.

If smiling with a dead rabbit means that I think nothing of living things, that means that we must also maintain a solemn face at every step in that process. I love eating too much to deal with the pain and sadness that would ensue if I had to repent at every meal. (Still, I do often feel the need to repent when I am hunting).

So instead of living with the thought that taking a life is a crime, I choose to recognize that it is impossible for me to live without taking life from others, to give thanks, and to eat things that I kill myself.

For me, this way of life, aware of my own needs, is the best way to be faithful to living things.

Chiharu frequently uses the phrase “inochi o itadaku.” The word inochi can signify the idea of an individual life, but it also carries a transcendent meaning of the life-force that resides in all living things. When you receive another life with gratitude (inochi o itadaku), it means in equal measure to take an individual life and to receive life from the natural world as a whole. Chiharu’s debate with those outraged over her killing a rabbit hinged on how much the responsibility of the first meaning outweighs the necessity of the second.

A conception of humans and nature intertwined is still embedded in many of the rituals and ceremonies that mark the calendar of rural society. Nature is considered an integral part of the traditional idea of community (kyodotai), a relationship mediated through offerings at local shrines and the ritual consumption of nature’s bounty. Self, food, and nature are inseparable.

***

This time, the house’s entryway is decorated with a few animal skin rugs — including the pelt of the deer I skinned, she points out— and filled with half a dozen large sacks of rice from their autumn harvest. When I arrive, Chiharu’s roommate Koichi, whom she married earlier this year, is sitting at the kitchen table cutting a duck they had received. There are currently five residents who share in the farming and domestic labor while also pursuing different work — some locally, some remotely. They prepare most of their meals together, and earlier this year Chiharu celebrated in a blog post that as their farming output has improved, their monthly food cost had fallen to less that $30 per person.

I and four of the residents sit down for a meal of rice and green curry. Koichi is soft-spoken and wears his long hair pulled back in a bun. He worked for a number of years in Tokyo as a chef and enjoys making Thai, Chinese, and Indian food. After quitting his job, he moved back to his native Yamanashi Prefecture to learn farming for a year, then decided he could figure the rest out on his own and moved to Itoshima.

In the alcove of their living room, there’s a special issue of the magazine Spectator featuring a Japanese translation of the Whole Earth Catalog, the 1970s DIY eco-living publication that Steve Jobs called the precursor to the Internet. Fast forward 40 years, and the catalog on how to live is all available for free online. Sitting around the table with their smartphones, the residents talk about the next things they want to try to make or cultivate: koji mold, kinako, genmaicha. Koichi says they get most of their info from the Internet, books, asking their neighbors and attending occasional seminars in Itoshima on natural cultivation. Their life is an ongoing experiment.

In the evening, I ask Chiharu about the community as we drive into town to do some shopping for dinner. Her settlement of Hori would qualify as a genkai shuraku: there are 17 houses, and besides the sharehouse members, no children and no residents in their 20s, 30s, or 40s. A man in his fifties who has a small grandkid is considered young here. There still aren’t any empty houses in the settlement, but even if there were, many countryside people are somewhat reluctant to rent — if the new residents can’t grow accustomed to rural living, or if they cause problems or don’t cooperate with local events or groups, then the landlord will be blamed.

It’s nearing dusk as we round a bend along the shore. “I’ve been living here for three years now, but I really have started to feel like it’s going to be tough to stay here permanently if we don’t get more young people to come. The local residents are very supportive of us and I think most have a sense of wanting the village to survive, but without more young people to share in maintaining the infrastructure and local rituals, things will start to get hard.”

Among communities in rural Japan, of course, Itoshima is one of the lucky ones. Kyushu University just moved its campus to the eastern edge of the city, which has provided an influx of new residents. “It’s cheap, near the ocean, and you can get to the city in an hour on the subway,” Chiharu says as she points to the train headlights coming the opposite direction along the coast.

With its good farmland, beaches, and summer music festival, Itoshima tends to attract natural-living types seeking the slow life. Other towns have become magnets for craftspeople or artists, while the mountainous community of Kamiyama in Shikoku has become famous for attracting a community of tech entrepreneurs working out of offices in renovated houses.

Life design magazines like TURNS and Sotokoto churn out a constant stream of information about people finding fulfillment in the regions, and are supplemented by a large genre of “migration diaries” on the Internet. In 2014, Hayato Ikeda, a well-known blogger in his mid-20s who mostly writes about life-hacking, decamped to Kochi on Japan’s sunny southern coast and provocatively renamed his site “Why are you still suffering in Tokyo?” He soon began taunting his readers with posts about how he could live so much better in a small city while continuing to do his work.

After returning home, we sit down for dinner of miso soup and rice with duck. One of Kochi’s friends has biked over from down the coast. Originally from Fukuoka, he spent a decade in Tokyo before returning three years ago. “You get worn out in Tokyo!” he says with a laugh. He’s now planning to start driving a taxi for the elderly. One of the other roommates is a translator of French originally from Ibaraki, she quit job in Tokyo this year and decided to move here after spending six months traveling around Japan and working on farms. A resident I met last year was working at a local sake distillery and has since moved to Chiba Prefecture to train at one of the best traditional sake makers in the country. Rural migrants span the spectrum from highly educated urban knowledge workers to local residents returning after a decade of working exploitative jobs for “black corporations” in the city. Most cite the motivation to live more comfortably and freely.

As we eat, Koichi discusses his intention to file a petition with the city council in the fall in an attempt to prevent the restart of the Genkai reactors some 30 km away. Five years after Fukushima, the government is finally making some headway in its legal and political battle to restart nuclear power plants. Two reactors in southern Kyushu started up in August, and others are expected to follow next year if the safety certifications can withstand legal challenges filed by local residents. Public opinion remains overwhelmingly against nuclear power, but except for residents in the immediate vicinity of plants, the issue has receded from the consciousness of many urban Japanese. The earthquake was a turning point for people like Chiharu, but whether it will end up changing the course of Japanese society remains to be seen.

***

We go sleep early in order to get ready for the event the following morning. Chiharu had invited me to attend the house’s mochi making event. Mochi are pounded rice cakes traditionally eaten around New Years, and the ceremony is an important part of the rice cultivation cycle, together with the planting of the fields in the spring and the harvest in the fall. At new years, household shrines are decorated with an offering of round cakes said to resemble mirrors, one of the three sacred treasures of the gods.

The mochi event is part of what Chiharu calls their practice of “sumibiraki,” or open living. Sumibiraki is a term coined by Wataru Asada to describe the many sharehouses that have sprung up spontaneously across Japan in the last five years where residents see their lifestyles as containing a strongly performative element. They create Facebook pages for their houses (my own house’s page is here), post updates and host events that allow fans to see and participate in how they live. Sharing living spaces was not previously a common practice in Japan, but sharehouses have exploded in popularity in the last five years, thanks in part to the rise of social media and a popular reality TV show. For many, though, the point of sharing is not simply to split costs, but to design a lifestyle. Open living allows people to deconstruct the rigid and gendered postwar domestic living arrangements that once demanded a new salaryman climb the ladder from company dorm to one-room apartment to a new “My Home” on the suburban fringe where he could keep his wife and kids. People growing up in an era of social media prefer to express their identities by intermixing with others and creating unique spaces, curating their lives like a real-life Pinterest wall.

In the morning, we wake up before eight to prepare: 7 kilos of mochi rice are soaked overnight, and a large stone mortar is placed in the yard and heated up with boiling water. A fire is made in an outdoor rice cooker, and the rice is set to steam for 1.5 hours. Around ten, a stout, round-faced woman named Takako-san saunters down the slope in an grey apron and red boots (there are only four last names among the original residents — Seto, Aoki, Shinto, and Hamada — so everyone goes by their first names). She lives in the blue-shingled house next door and will help out with making the mochi. Unable to farm on her own anymore, she lends out her land to the sharehouse. “For me, it’s a great help to have them living next door!” she says with a laugh.

Soon, the guests begin to arrive. A man who works in e-commerce and his wife, an elementary school teacher, are attending from Saga for the third time, after coming for the planting and harvest. A British man from Fukuoka brought his family visiting for Christmas. A couple drove up from Kurumei in southern Fukuoka Prefecture. One of Chiharu’s fans, a university student studying English at at a university in Tokyo, came after reading her book and connecting to her on Facebook.

A few minutes later, Daisuke Suga shows up together with his wife and young son and daughter. I first met him in November at a co-working office in Tokyo’s trendy Shimokitazawa district, where the organization he runs, Fukuoka Migration Project, was hosting an event. Suga lived in Tokyo, where he was a web designer, before moving to Itoshima three years ago. The choice of Itoshima was completely by chance: he had happened to visit once while in Fukuoka and realized that it had everything that he wanted: the sea, the mountains, access to a big city (and to Tokyo by plane). Like Chiharu, the earthquake made a big impact on him. His oldest was 2 years old at the time. He had seen images of disasters on the TV like the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake, but having it happen nearby really drove the danger home. “Maybe one day we won’t be able to buy stuff with money. The convenience stores were all empty after the earthquake. It’s only a matter of time before one hits Tokyo, too,” he tells me, recalling his feelings at the time.

Suga started the Fukuoka Migration Project about a year after he came here, and they run events in Tokyo and other big cities in conjunction with the eco-news site Greenz and other groups. He says a lot of people show up, “most around 30, pondering the next stage of their lives, perhaps thinking of starting a family and feeling that Tokyo is not a place where children can grow up fully, so they’re looking for ways out.”

I ask if the project’s goal was to increase the population in Itoshima. Suga shakes his head. “That’s the local government’s job.” Just about every local government in Japan has a section in charge of encouraging inward migration and many run vacant house banks that register empty properties and introduce them to potential new residents. Some Kyushu University architecture students I met last year were working with the Itoshima government to renovate empty houses and attract new residents.

“What we try to do is simply tell our story and propose a lifestyle,” Suga continues. “Japanese people’s values are changing. The earthquake played a big role, but I think more people are realizing that the single-minded focus on working for a company or laboring for the country that was dominant in the postwar era doesn’t lead to happiness anymore. People want to spend more time with their families, they want to value things outside of work.”

We all take turns hammering the mochi in the mortar and split it up into bite-size pieces. As we eat, I continue to ask questions.

Since last year, Suga has helped run a share office and event space called Rise Up Keya. Housed in a renovated building, the space is intended as a base for migrants to Itoshima to design new lifestyles and work collaboratively, while also learning new skills through seminars (Chiharu has taught classes here before).

I ask Suga if most of the migrants at the office use the Internet to work remotely. “There is some of that, but there are also a lot of people who want to make their own work in Itoshima.” Juggling multiple activities is the norm. One of Chiharu’s former roommates who attended the event works as a teacher at a nature-immersion nursery, an instructor, and also dresses people in kimono, in addition to doing farm work. Many of the people who migrate from the cities to the countryside aspire to practice lifestyles like the “Half-farmer Half-X” model espoused by Naoki Shiomi or Hiroshi Ito’s model of earning a living from the combination of numerous small crafts (nariwai) instead of staking everything on a single profession. The goal is to get away from the singular idea of life=work.

Ito often says that there were around 2000 occupations recognized by the government in the 1920s — things like sericulture, blacksmithing, paper-making, or charcoal-making—and most people made a living through a combination of many trades (the word for peasant in Japanese, hyakusho (百姓), literally means someone who does a hundred things). Economic modernization and specialization has reduced the number of professions to just around 500 today, including a plethora occupations that David Graber would describe as “bullshit jobs” that serve nobody and leave the workers drained of life. Post-bubble youth don’t have the job security of the older generation, so for many taking a risk to pursue what they love seems a better option than giving their lives to a company that will leave them unfulfilled and may end up laying them off someday anyway. The idea of making work with their own hands and designing their own lifestyles appeals as a way of overcoming their insecure condition.

After we finish with the mochi and take a tour of the fields, we return to the house and sit down for lunch in the living room. Everyone jokes that the group of 25 mostly strangers linked through social media looked like an extended family home for the holidays. I sit down next to a young couple visiting from Tokyo with their two-year old son, whom Suga had brought along. The father is a graphic designer originally from Sapporo, and the mother originally from rural Saitama Prefecture. They live in Setagaya in western Tokyo and had attended a recent event that Suga had hosted. The father says if they could figure out the work aspects then they would like to move, but decided to come visit first and see what it’s like.

I ask the mother why she wants to leave Tokyo as her son tries to peel one of the mandarins from a bowl on the table. “I grew up in a pretty rural area, so I can’t really picture my son growing up in Tokyo. He wouldn’t be able to have any of the experiences that I took for granted —things like playing by the river and in the fields.”

The couple says that their first impression of Itoshima is great. Chiharu nods in agreement. “Everyone who moves here says its great, but everyone who is from here says so too. I was really impressed by that when I first came, because I have no attachment at all to where I was born in Saitama. I grew up in a nuclear family in a typical suburban bed town, so I have no special memories there. For me, Itoshima is like my hometown now.”

Most people in the postwar generation maintained a connection to their ancestral homelands (Japanese modernization largely took place in a single generation — 50% of Japanese were still farmers at the end of the war). But many people in the younger generation have grown up completely in the rationalized, homogenous environment of the big city, as digital natives who spend much of their time absorbed in virtual worlds. The architect Kumiko Inui said at a seminar I attended last year that she notices many of her young students, who grew up in placeless suburbs like the Tama New Town, are naturally drawn to small, old, and local things. Participating in regional revitalization projects have become a means for many urban young people to gain something that they can’t find in their native environment. For some, the desire for authenticity and a local place to anchor their identity and livelihood draws them to live in the countryside.

Undoubtedly, there are similarities to the flow of Brooklyn hipsters declaring the rent to be too damn high, grabbing their copies of Modern Farmer and boarding the next train to Hudson. But especially in the last five years, the phenomenon of rural remigration in Japan has taken on a much stronger social significance as the government and media link migration to the urgent task of saving the regions from extinction. Tokyo has by far the lowest birthrate in the entire country, so without rebalancing the economy away from ever more concentration in the capital, there will be no end to the population implosion. And among people in all sectors of society, there is a widespread awareness that the postwar social contract and model of economic growth is gone forever, and a new purpose and set of social values needs to be created.

From an individual perspective, however, the motivation can simply be the desire to live more fully. The countryside’s low costs and freedom from the rigid customs of corporate Japan give people room to experiment with less economic lifestyles and more active forms of citizenship. NPOs and social businesses are popping up in every small town and city as residents and migrants try to design a new future. At the same time, migrants tap into the enduring strength of community life in rural areas, often with a sense of urgency to pass on local history and tradition to the next generation.

Listening to the different people describe their motivations for leaving the city, I recall something that a friend of mine working at an elite corporation in Tokyo told me over coffee a few months ago. Being a salaryman in the postwar Japanese system is like being a pet, she said: you are owned by your company and you’ll get fed no matter what. This system worked (in a way) when everyone was eagerly chasing material wealth, and rising corporate wages could deliver their dreams. But it is no longer attainable for the majority who are shut outside the system, nor satisfying for those inside.

Surviving and finding happiness in the post-growth society requires a certain kind of wildness and creativity that was discouraged in the past. In Chiharu’s case, she literally goes into the forest and hunts for her survival. But others are discovering their own forests, and drawing on the wealth of DIY knowledge on the Internet and the power of social networks to find solidarity in bottom-up communities and invent their own “wild” lifestyles. In the process, they are discovering new forms of happiness and learning a new set of social mores and cultural values.

Before leaving, Chiharu takes the guests to the community’s shrine. Two small buildings sit serenely under a towering tree at the edge of the fields. The grounds are well-kept, and Chiharu says different members of the village clean the shrine each month. In preparation for the new year, the community recently weaved a new shimenawa rope out of hay, which hangs from the gate on a piece of fresh bamboo to ward off evil spirits. A pile of ashes nearby marks the spot where they made a bonfire after making the rope and shared sake heated in fresh bamboo cups. The residents will gather on New Year’s Day to give thanks for the last year and ask for protection and bounty in the year to come. I toss a five yen coin into the offering box, ring the bell, bow twice, clap twice, and bow again.