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I moved to Keihoku village nine years ago when my first child was born. I had always lived in a city before.
My husband and I grow our own rice and vegetables, and sell the rest of the harvest directly to our customers who signed up to receive the same bounty as we receive from the land every other week. I farm part-time and my husband full time.
Here in the mountains outside Kyoto, edible wild plants tell you that spring is just around the corner.
The earliest is butterbur scape, which you can dig out of snow mid-February. I turn it into miso paste to accompany a bowl of rice and its early spring bitterness wakes up the body after a long winter.
Horsetails, warabi bracken and mugwort follow, which our kids love to collect and bring back home proudly to be cooked with their parents. Newly assigned urban-raised teachers are fascinated to see how young children here get connected to nature as well as rural culture.
Now is the time to wake up both farmers and paddy fields. Farmers prepare paddy seeds or seedlings, as well as the field to be ready for rice planting and the sound of tractors echoes in the village again.
The first communal works are to clean up irrigation systems, which extend to 400,000km across Japan – that’s 10 times the earth’s circumference.
I’m impressed every year to see our neighbours, who are all over 75, hand-digging the sediment accumulated over the year. Nevertheless, I wonder how many more years we can have them doing this hard work.
Paddy fields will then be filled with water until the rice seedlings are planted in early May. This is when our neighbours’ children and grandchildren, who live in the city, visit to help with rice planting – one occasion when our village has more children than usual.
Agricultural modernisation and industrialisation started after World War II has brought drastic change to rural society in Japan, encouraging many young people to leave.
Depopulation and ageing is one of the most serious problems for rural areas. Our village’s population has dropped from 10,194 (1964) to below 5,000 (2017), and 41.2% of the population is over 65.
The elderly farmers still cultivate the land to produce rice and vegetables, complaining that “it is far cheaper to buy rice than grow it”. They don’t give up out of respect for their ancestors.
Yutaka Une, a farmer philosopher, claims that the “paddy fields produce not only rice, but also small creatures such as tadpoles and dragonflies”.
According to him, a bowl of rice provides a nest for 35 tadpoles and three bowls of rice the habitat for one dragonfly. Our ecosystem relies on farmers’ work that is now on the shoulders of 1.25% of population, with two-thirds of them over 65.
Our neighbours left the village recently to provide higher education for their children. Our kids’ cosy and welcoming school will be closed in two years, merging with another one further away. This will be another reason for families with young children to leave the village.
Rural life has given us an enjoyable learning process to discover our own food culture while achieving food security through traditional and modern farming methods.
I believe we can turn the tide for rural areas with small initiatives that make small-scale farming valuable and offer attractive lifestyles and careers to our children.
Watch: Japanese grain grower makes his own popcorn
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