Life on a smaller scale, lived at a slower pace
I wrote this for The Japan Times in 2012, almost exactly a year after the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor meltdown that affected the northern part of the country on March 11, 2011 and during the months that followed. I came across it recently and because this is a great time to visit Japan (check the exchange rate!), I thought I would post it here. The features editor had asked me to write something about the Miura peninsula, where I lived, and which is south of Tokyo. Down in that area you can find the beach towns of Kamakura (more than just a beach town; it was Japan’s capital almost 1,000 years ago), Zushi and Hayama, the port of Yokosuka, and a very different vibe to what you’ll find in Tokyo. You can get there easily by train from Tokyo or Yokohama, and southern Miura is famous for maguro donburi (tuna rice bowl). Ping me if you have further interest, but otherwise, enjoy (everything is pretty much the same as it was when I wrote this)!
Last summer [2011] a farmers market called Sukanagosso opened up in my village in western Yokosuka, and the timing could not have been better. A few months after the reactor meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, and with uncertainty and cesium still in the air, there was a good market for local produce. So good that the Sukanagosso parking lot was jammed, and cars were lined up down the road in both directions waiting to get in.
The customers were mostly outsiders, though, some of the many visitors from Yokohama, Kawasaki and Tokyo who come to Miura Hanto to go to the beach, sail, breathe clean air, eat maguro donburi and clog our roads. We locals don’t need to shop at Sukanagosso because we’re the farmers who supply the farmers market. Or we’re their family members, friends and neighbors.
This part of Yokosuka is only an hour’s drive from Tokyo, and just up the coast from Hayama, Zushi and Kamakura, where for centuries wealthy Tokyoites have maintained weekend homes, but my village is mostly farmers and fishermen, and moves to that rhythm. Which is to say it moves slowly, with a spine curved by osteoporosis. The early morning soundtrack is fishing boat diesels and ambulance sirens.
Of the two groups, fishermen and farmers, I know the farmers much better. The fishermen leave at dawn, which in summer is before 4:00 a.m., and they often stay at sea for several days. My neighbor Suzuki-san tells me he usually fishes near Nii-jima, 100 kilometers south of here, and is gone for 3-4 days at a time. When he returns, his wife Keiko is a reliable source of fresh mackerel and sardines.
But as a work-at-home desk jockey trying to keep fit, I often run through the fields during the daytime, and I see the farmers in their fields. Because I’m American, and we’re like that, even when we’re invading your country, I wave and say hello. After six years here, I’ve trained nearly everyone to wave and say hello back. Many people throw in a smile at no extra charge.
The growing season here is year-round; farmers grow cabbage or daikon in winter, and a more diverse range of produce in spring, summer and autumn. They grow broccoli, carrots, onions, leeks, potatoes, Chinese cabbage, cauliflower, kabocha (squash), cucumbers, zucchini, tomatoes, kuromame (black beans), red shiso (perilla), and rice. The rice is mostly for personal consumption, though. This isn’t a commercial rice-growing area.
Thanks to my running, I know more about the area than most locals probably do, and I get opportunities every day to see a Japan that the tourism officials don’t put front and center in their marketing materials, a Japan that even many Tokyoites, only an hour away, can’t imagine.
Those citydwellers know Miura Hanto by reputation, and maybe they’ve been here once or twice, but when I see them on the roads on summer Sundays and during Golden Week, sitting in six-hour traffic jams we locals dodge thanks to our knowledge of the farm lanes, I imagine the sunburned fathers relieved to be heading back to the office the next day.
Village life is lived on a smaller scale than city life; it offers time, and space, to see and hear and smell. My next-door neighbor Saito-san flies his homing pigeons every morning, and I often stop to listen to the whirr of their wings as they loop and swoop around our houses. Occasionally I see one who has gotten detached from the kit and been shut out of the dovecote, sitting on a window ledge, a homing pigeon locked out of his home.
Right outside my front door is a field of cabbage marching in rows toward the sea, only a few steps away, and this morning everywhere I looked leaves were cradling fat, glistening drops of rainwater. Running or walking around the village, I see farmers tilling, sowing, weeding and harvesting. Sometimes I am offered a handful of carrots, or a cabbage, to take home with me. I always say yes, thank you very much.
My old neighbor (I moved last April, to a different house within the same village) Iimori-san used to ask for help with her farmwork now and then, when her son-in-law was unable to take time off from his job. I was always happy to get my hands dirty, to drive the farm truck, water the rice seedlings, and haul boxes of cabbage from the field to a pallet near the road. Now that I live a kilometer away, she doesn’t ask for help anymore, though I’d be thrilled to snap closed my MacBook and dash over there on a second’s notice.
During the tsunami warning on March 11 last year, I saw from my house on a (small) hill that the tide had receded further than I’d ever seen it. I figured I’d be able to see a tsunami coming, and to outrun it (before you think me crazy, given the local geography, that was almost certainly true), so I grabbed my camera and walked down to the harbor.
Most residents had evacuated to the local elementary school, but the fishermen were hanging out down by their boats, waiting to see what would happen. Wandering around snapping photos and chatting to the fishermen I knew, I suddenly noticed that the tide had started to come back in very, very quickly. I managed to take some “before” photos, and when the tide had peaked, a meter and a half above its level of 20 minutes previously, I took some “after” photos.
The fishermen, mostly in their 60s, said they’d never seen anything like it. Here on the eastern coast of Sagami Bay we were shielded from the worst impact of the tsunami by the landmasses of both Boso Hanto and Miura Hanto, and although there are certainly a few people in the village who remember the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, and the ensuing tsunami that devastated the Sagami Bay coast, none of them are still working as fishermen!
Some good friends recently moved to Okayama from concern about radiation and future tsunamis (they have three children and their house was at an elevation of only a few meters), but for nearly everyone else here in the village, life continues pretty much as it was before March 11, 2011. We’re far enough away from Fukushima Daiichi that airborne radiation was never as much of a concern as it was in Ibaraki, Chiba and even Tokyo, and living so close to the sea, summer temperatures are cool enough that setsuden has not been a huge burden.
The farmers have finished harvesting winter cabbage now, and over the past few weeks they’ve been turning their fields in preparation for springtime planting. Over the next few weeks, I’ll run through the fields, just after the first green shoots have poked through the last layer of dirt, and wonder what crops will be identifiable a few days later. Broccoli? Kabocha? Another planting of cabbage, which might push me to make some sauerkraut, as I’ve been threatening to do for years?
Toward the end of April, Mount Fuji, easy to see across the bay for half the year, will disappear until September, in the haze of a humid Kanto summer. I’ll still be able to see it in silhouette at the end of the day, with the sun setting behind the Izu peninsula, but otherwise, looking out at the bay, there won’t be a hint that it’s there. When we first came to this place it was April, and when I remarked at the spectacular view of snow-covered Mount Fuji across the bay, the property agent said, “It won’t be there next month.” I found that nearly impossible to believe, but of course he was right.
With Fuji invisible, the scale of village life becomes even smaller. I’ll spend a certain amount of time this summer pausing to inspect abandoned cicada shells, helping the kids collect periwinkles and mussels from the tide pools just down the cliff from the house, and – I hope – helping Iimori-san harvest her tomatoes.
It will be another summer, like last summer but slightly different. I can’t wait.
If you want to spend a day on the Miura peninsula, you’ve got two options: drive (and if it’s summertime, be prepared to spend a few hours – at least – in traffic) or take the train. The train is the Keikyu Line, out of Shinagawa, passing through Yokohama and Yokosuka, and terminating in Misakiguchi and Uraga. From Misakiguchi or Miura Kaigan (the second-last stop, and last stop on the Tokyo Bay side of the peninsula), you can walk, or take a bus somewhere more remote.
There are plenty of good tuna restaurants, and good hiking through the fields and along the rocky coastline. Misaki Port is worth a visit; if you’re lucky you can see long-haul fishing boats unloading frozen tuna, and it’s impossible to escape the fish market – where the salespeople could sell ice to Eskimos – without buying something. A friend of mine who was flying out that evening surprised the locals by asking them to pack a tuna fish head so he could take it home to Hong Kong! Tell me you’re Chinese without telling me you’re Chinese, hahaha!
There’s a nice old-style marine park in Aburatsubo, and in Kannonzaki, a more recent edition of a Tokugawa-built lighthouse. Kannonzaki is also home to what my limited research indicates is the fastest roller slide in Japan. It’s a 20-minute walk from the carpark in Kannonzaki Park, so it’s never crowded. Grab a rubber mat from the box at the start (to avoid getting a badly blistered bottom) and see where it fits into your personal ranking of Japanese roller slides. Kids, leave your helicopter parents at home!
You’ll need omiyage for your citybound friends and family, or yourself, and Miura daikon is famous throughout Japan (or at any rate, Kanto). For a few hundred yen, a family of four can eat (cesium-free) daikon for days. Can’t beat it.
There are many people who still do not know that Japan is more than the shiny megacities, and that rural Japan is a very important part of the country, although is slowly declining, since its population, which did not emigrate to the cities, is very old (although that is a similar problem in many countries). But you can still enjoy that slow-pace lifestyle, without the stress of missing the crowded train that is arriving at the station, without having to commute for several hours, without working endless days in noisy environments... Maybe work from house allows part of society to live in a more peaceful way, to decongest cities and revitalize small towns, and that on weekends the tourist invasion is the other way around, to visit the city.
"Maybe work from house allows part of society to live in a more peaceful way, to decongest cities and revitalize small towns ..."
Well, that's what governments hope, but it takes more than that, and governments are interested only in Band-Aid solutions. What do WFH "knowledge workers" need in order to move to the countryside? They need restaurants and bars and supermarkets and garages where they can get their cars serviced and they need many services. Rural depopulation is not only caused by aging, but also – for centuries – by the desire of young people to move to The Big City. Knowledge workers alone can't create communities.