“Depopulation” — What it feels like
The memories, blurred by time like the photo, are still treasured
It is now more than forty years since we left the farmhouse in the mountain village where we lived for seven years. Situated at the beginning of the foothills of the Southern Japan Alps, it’s a place that barely manages to show up on local maps.
I’ve kept in touch with my neighbors there, farmers without exception, and on occasion I’ll receive a telephone call from my old friend, Motoyo. Assuming I’ll want to know what’s going on, she calls to tell me what’s changed: “Ōtani-san had an operation for cataracts. She says that at 85 she can see better than she did as a young girl.”
Motoyo, known by her childhood name, Mo-chan, was born in the village, grew up there, went to the village school, married a man from the village, raised a family there, and lives there still.
The last time she called it was to invite me to the Kominkan no Furusato Matsuri (community center hometown festival). I’ve danced in that festival, and once, along with members of the women’s group, modeled reformed kimono.
Although I refer to Mo-chan as my “old” friend, she’s the only adult in the village who could be said to be young. The depopulation of the countryside continues, and many of my visits to the village now to see Mo-chan are also a revisit of the past. It was about 20 years ago when she told me: “There are so few people in our village now. And of the few who are left, most are old.”
On that visit, I went to pay my respects to Ōi-san who had become bedridden. I envisioned her as pale and gaunt after her illness, but her face was as round, brown, and full as ever (“She eats a lot,” her son said).
She’d made a good recovery, but, her son also told me, “She has trouble remembering things these days.” She may have become a little forgetful, but she remembered me — and I hope I can remember anybody or anything when I’m 95.
Another time Mo-chan called to tell me two people from the village were in the hospital. Arai-san, a neighbor whose farmhouse was two houses up from ours, was recuperating from an illness, and another neighbor’s baby was in the same hospital recovering from an operation.
Going to do omimai (hospital visit) I remember Arai-san remarked how strange it seemed that the two of them, one quite old and the other just an infant, were in the same hospital at the same time. It did seem odd, but mostly, in that large hospital in the city, those two people from a village almost hidden from the world seemed misplaced.
The next time I saw Arai-san she said she was feeling much better but still wasn’t well enough to work in the fields as much as before. She apologized because she “only” had a few daikon to give me. Smiling broadly as she told me she and her husband had recently celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary, she added they “didn’t do anything special.” That day her husband came into the yard and seeing me said, “Ah, Anton-san. You don’t forget us.”
No. I hadn’t. And I never will.
The familiar voice on the phone was Mo-chan’s. “I’m sorry to give you this sudden bad news, but I’m sure you would want to know. Arai-san passed away. Just yesterday. The funeral will be tomorrow.” She told me the otsuya (wake) had already been held, but if I could attend the osoushiki (funeral) to meet her at her house and we could go together.
The first time I met Mrs. Arai I’d gone to return a wheelbarrow I’d borrowed from her son the day before. Expressing my gratitude and uttering the ordinary politenesses, I left. Much later she’d confide that when she saw me coming she’d wanted to hide, simply because she didn’t know what she would, or could, say to me. After our brief and uneventful encounter she said she’d felt relieved, and thought to herself that she must be “just an ignorant old country woman”.
Yes, she was a simple country woman, one who had those qualities you’d be happy to encounter anywhere — warmth, kindness, generosity.
At the time we went to live in the village, in 1976, my children were babies — all her grandchildren were not yet born. She lived a long life, and died just before her ninth decade. But in that village, the oldest woman, Ōi-san, the great-grandmother of the baby who’d been in the hospital, lived past 100.
It seems so long ago, a memory now blurred by time, that I with my baby son bundled on my back, ate hot roasted sweet potatoes in Arai-san’s yard while we chatted about the upcoming kindergarten recital of my daughter Mie. Knowing it would be an event that grandmothers would attend, I invited her — Ōtani-san and Oi-san also accepted my invitation. These farm women, ladies of the Taishō era, dressed in kimono for the occasion.
After his wife’s passing, Mr. Arai, who enjoyed the status of being the eldest man in the village, went to live with his son who had moved to town with his family. I can never forget Mr. Arai’s expression after the funeral. He looked lost.
It is not only nostalgia, but melancholy, I feel as I sense that a Japan I knew, remember, and am attached to, is passing for all time. It’s well-known that the rural areas are being “depopulated” — but that word gets caught in your throat when you know the people who populate the countryside.
Depopulation. This is what it is, I thought that day of the funeral. This is what it feels like.
My story begins in New York City. Readers can learn more about my life and experience living in rural Japan in my memoir The View From Breast Pocket Mountain, 2022 Grand Prize Winner of the Memoir Prize for Books. KarenHillAnton.com
