Reading Inaka: Portraits of Life in Rural Japan
by Chad Kohalyk

In a small city in western Canada — which one might call inaka by dint of the high ratio of giant pickup trucks and the 95% white demographics — a group of immigrant moms from Japan, most married to Canadians, decided to band together. Their goal: expose their children to their heritage Japanese culture and language. My spouse is active in this group and I attended often with our children. Each month the group gathers to sing songs, practice writing hiragana, and celebrate the Japanese holiday of the season. At these gatherings one can appreciate the diversity of Japan.

Celebrating tradition is rooted in the local. Yet in faraway Canada, the Japanese community is made up of people from Hokkaido to Okinawa. What at first the moms thought would be simply showing their kids the culture of “Japan”, soon became a discussion of how to accommodate all the local variations in tradition.

Witnessing this diversity is one of the reasons we moved our family to the remote island of Ikijima for a year. We wanted our kids to experience a different Japan than Kyoto — which my family calls “home.” Living a rural island life has certainly been a learning experience for each of us. I never knew the crucial relationship between wind speed and the amount of bread on the shelves at the shop. Weather is a constant concern on a remote island. While Iki is a self-sufficient place, growing its own rice (as well as tobacco and barley for shōchū) it depends on the mainland for packaged foods, like the pastries on display in one of our two convenience stores. When the weather acts up, as it often does, ships and planes are cancelled and mainland sundries like the national daily newspapers are delayed. There is a sort of “bank run” on the shops as everyone rushes out to get the last bread products for the next couple of days.

Another surprise was how people in the countryside are trying to reverse the nation’s population decline. The elementary school my children attend has just 48 students (who share only about four surnames!). Most come from families of three to five children, and there is a remarkable number of twins on Ikijima. Considering there is no movie theatre here, and most shops are closed by six, I suppose it makes sense. The root of the depopulation problem is that once kids finish high school they must go to the mainland to continue their education. Over there they find work opportunities and they almost never come back.

Thus, I was curious to pick up the new anthology Inaka: Portraits of Life in Rural Japan to see what other foreigners have learned living in “the sticks.” The book is a collection of eighteen essays from provincial areas of Japan. In the introduction editor John Grant Ross points out that 91% of the population of Japan live in urban areas. Thus, the stories are from a disappearing Japan. This makes them all the more valuable as records of the diversity of experience in Japan. Contributors vary from visitors, to JETs, to “lifers” in the countryside. Many of the essays are about discoveries made in the less-travelled areas of Japan, rather than the day-to-day experience of making a life there. However, some writers have married into local families and are raising kids in the inaka, which makes the book more than a travelogue.

Declining and aging populations, closing businesses and the loss of local traditions and knowledge are common themes across many of the essays. These are the realities of the inaka in Japan, a forewarning for other countries undergoing massive urbanization, centralization, and standardization as prescribed by influential cities.

Living on Ikijima I gravitated towards the chapters in Inaka featuring islands, especially those of Kyushu. Considering Japan is made up of 6,852 islands (though only 421 are inhabited), one could likely dedicate a whole series of books to island experiences. Remote island inaka is different from the countryside on mainland Japan — a simple fact of geography. In her chapter on Tanegashima, Silvia Lawrence writes about her experience of a tsunami warning:

No one seemed to be organizing an evacuation, which suggested we weren’t in any danger, but then again on a flat island reaching just ten kilometres across at its very widest point, where would we even go?

The remote islands closest to the Asian mainland have played an important role as ancient bridges to the archipelago, predating the cultural splendour of the “old capital” of Kyoto. Austin Gilkeson hikes through the wild nature of Tsushima, near Korea, that is also a hike through Japanese history, from the birth of the mythical first emperor to the country’s first defeat of a western power. Gilkeson describes Tsushima’s annual Arirang Festival, a testament to Kyushu’s long standing relationship with the Korean Peninsula, not all of which is antagonistic. 

Loneliness is a common theme. The two Kyushu chapters were written by ALTs, who by the nature of their jobs often struggle with integrating into local communities. Despite feelings of isolation both authors extended their stay, their essays expressing how much they value their time in the inaka.

Feelings of loneliness are not just the domain of isolated foreigners. Amy Chavez’s chapter features interviews from longtime residents of Shiraishi, a small island in the Seto Inland Sea with a population of 450. The island was home to 2300 at one time. Her essay is part of a larger project documenting the island’s oral history through interviews with elders. We learn about some innovative fishing methods, but also the painful feelings of being left behind, surrounded by empty houses. Chavez reflects:

I consider for a moment what it must be like to live alone in a house of memories but no one else to share them with.

These island chapters, as well as others in the book, show both the delights and difficulties of the Japanese countryside. It is an additional window into the “real” Japan beyond the oversaturated filters of Instagram, another modern weapon of uniformity.

Near the end of the book Mei Ling Chiam visits a tea plantation in Shizuoka where farmers are trying to build an appreciation for single-origin tea, a retaliation against the overwhelming modern corporate strategy of “blended teas” which standardizes flavours for “brand identity” and mitigates financial risks in production.

The cup of tea I was drinking now would not be the same as the next. Even with the same production method, the taste of a tea varies… To me, this variety makes every tea worth tasting, because you never know what you’ll discover about it. The distinctiveness is something to be cherished.

Similarly, each chapter of Inaka highlights the variety of experience in Japan. Even while addressing some common challenges of rural life, the essays are easy reading. Inaka is not a dour tome of political and economic analysis (although such a book would be very valuable at this juncture). Rather, you can feel free to skip around here and there, and enjoy each chapter’s unique flavour.

*********************

For the amazon page of Inaka, click here.