The Last Window for Fieldwork: Rural Japan Before It Disappears

Today I was drawing up the plan for a research journey that begins at the end of this month, and now that the times have changed so greatly across the world, I can feel that going about fieldwork with the same mindset I had five years ago no longer works. It was right around 2020, just as the pandemic began, that I started surveying regions across Japan in earnest, and as I visited one place after another at the time, there was one thought on my mind: ten years from now, it will probably be impossible to make this same kind of research journey.

Every country, city, and people is entering a time of great upheaval, but if anyone is hoping to experience Japan to the full, I strongly urge you to move your schedule well forward from what you have in mind.

The reason is that most of the provinces are in steep decline, facing an unrelenting outflow of people and a super-aged society, while the nationwide infrastructure built during the era of high economic growth from the 1970s onward is about to reach the end of its lifespan all at once. Even recently, roads have caved in in Saitama and Tokyo; if urban infrastructure is already in this state, it goes without saying that the provinces will be far worse off. What is more, the countless local governments that are already technically bankrupt have no budget to maintain or repair this infrastructure.

Having seen and heard these realities firsthand, I concluded that by around 2030 we would enter an age when the kind of research journeys I am making now cannot be done at all.

What has proved decisive above all is the climate change of the past few years—and especially this summer. Japan once had four distinct, beautiful seasons across the country, along with the spaciousness of mind to savor them at leisure, yet as this summer symbolizes, the four seasons have now collapsed completely; when we consider how exceedingly short spring and autumn have become, I feel it has grown quite difficult to enjoy that sense of the seasons from region to region.

Because I had been thinking along these lines for some time, I spent two autumns, in 2019 and 2020, traveling to every place I could think of to see the beautiful autumn foliage unique to the vegetation of eastern Japan and unseen in the west—and even that scenery may soon be gone from view.

Furthermore, although the present moment looks like warming, historical climate cycles tend to swing toward warming just before a period of cooling; if cooling begins around 2030, northern Tohoku and Hokkaido face the risk that for a way of life dependent on the blessings of modern civilization, living there itself will become impossible. As I touched upon in my recent survey in Wakasa, the Jomon people of that era were survivors who lived through such violent swings in climate, and I feel anew both the blessings of civilization and the harshness when those blessings reverse. When that happens, people will gather all the more in urban centers in search of convenience, hastening the day when the provinces are emptied of people.

And the greatest problem of all is a massive earthquake, which could strike at any moment. Just as recent earthquakes in the Tokara Islands and near Japan in Kamchatka had a noticeable effect on Japan as well, an earthquake and tsunami that could come at any time carry the potential to sweep away historical traces in the lands I plan to survey, above all along the coast, so I must do what can be done before they strike. As a realistic risk in particular, if an earthquake directly beneath the Tokyo metropolitan area or a Nankai Trough megathrust earthquake occurs, the Tokaido belt along the Pacific coast that supports Japan's economy could be paralyzed as a whole, with much of it wiped out.

Extreme impoverishment in Japan is also worsening, and when we look at the accelerating decline in births, there is no possibility that things will take a turn for the better over the next twenty or thirty years; it can be said that this place has entered its final time limit. That is why, as my personal mission and the mission of a generation born in Japan, I have let go from the outset of thinking about the future of this place at the level of the state or society, and feel keenly that we have entered a grave era in which each individual must think and act in earnest looking hundreds or thousands of years ahead.

Although there is no way to move until late August or so, when the fierce heat should abate a little, precisely because we are in an abnormal season when one hesitates even to step outside, this moment has become the catalyst for me to resolve to move in earnest.

This decision will very likely prove a vital turning point in my own life as well. Grounded in that large-scale fieldwork, I will continue presenting my own reflections to readers in the days ahead. Please continue to keep me company on an uncharted journey across time and space.