The Slow Life

Increasingly discontented city slickers are fleeing to the country to escape the crowds and claustrophobia. KS slips on its wellies and trudges into the wilderness to investigate life at snail's pace.

After Tachikawa station, there is a woman on the train reading The Japan Agricultural News. After Aoume, all ten people on the car are wearing sneakers, and when the train pulls into the penultimate stop Shiromaru, there are no station attendants to collect tickets.

Welcome to Okutama, where, as resident Rika Suzuki puts it, the air smells different. Suzuki, age 31, has been living in the area for five months. Raised in Tokyo, she decided to leave the city in order to fulfill her dream of becoming a potter and, although she has to work part time in a local soba shop to pay the tuition fees for her pottery classes, she feels quite blessed with her new life.

Her next-door neighbour, Iijima-san, has been teaching her how to grow potatoes and daikon and she feels she has more time to herself these days. Previously, Suzuki says, "I was always subject to everyone else's schedule." Not now: Suzuki lives with a friend who works in Tachikawa and together they pay ¥30,000 in rent for the three-bedroom house, warehouse and field that they share.

Suzuki is one of an increasing number of Japanese who have decided to pack up and move out to greener pastures. When the Japanese economy slowed down but the pace of work didn't, the long held notion that the mega cities of Tokyo and Osaka were Meccas for any ambitious Japanese or foreigner was gradually replaced by the ideal of a slower life away from the city. In a recent survey by Recruit Corporation, an information service company for job seekers, one in ten working Japanese said that they wanted to move to the country.

Suzuki is one of an increasing number of Japanese who have decided to pack up and move out to greener pastures. When the Japanese economy slowed down but the pace of work didn't, the long held notion that the mega cities of Tokyo and Osaka were Meccas for any ambitious Japanese or foreigner was gradually replaced by the ideal of a slower life away from the city. In a recent survey by Recruit Corporation, an information service company for job seekers, one in ten working Japanese said that they wanted to move to the country.

Taro Matsuura, a member of the Recruit division that specializes in rural placement, explains that there are two kinds of slow lifers. Type One slow-lifers really are looking to change down a gear. They have become disillusioned with city life and want to take it easy all day, every day. Type Two slow-lifers however, are simply seeking more satisfying jobs. Fed up with being an anonymous gopher in a huge, city-based corporation, Type Two slow-lifers switch to positions at smaller, regional companies where they can work alongside their bosses and feel that their opinion matters.

Matsuura says that considering the planning involved and their clearly thought-out reasons for moving, it is obvious that "these people aren't just running away." Matsuura affectionately calls the slow-lifers, average age 32, "challengers." He adds, "each story is different, and each has its own drama."

That isn't to say that leaving the city is always easy. Rika Suzuki spent six months just trying to find a house. Since there are few real estate agents outside of the city, she had to explore each area she was considering moving to until she saw an abandoned house. After peeking through the window to double check its vacancy, she would knock on neighbors' doors to ask if they knew if it was available to rent.

Not everyone has to rebuild their lives from scratch however. Some slow-lifers find jobs with rural development projects funded by the Japanese government to revitalize rural communities. One success story is the forestry program run by Wakayama Prefecture.

Hiroyuki Inoue, 35, applied to a forestry cooperative in Wakayama when he found out about it from a friend and last summer he and his wife, Tomoko, moved to Wakayama from Osaka as part of the program. While they had always intended to move to the country, the forestry cooperative that Hiroyuki works for made the process much easier by arranging housing, saving them months of searching.

While the Inoues did not have any particular complaints about specific things they disliked about life in Osaka, Hiroyuki, a native of the city, simply felt that "it was not the place for us." Now, on sunny days, Hiroyuki works outside in the forest and when it rains he stays home and reads or listens to music.

He and his wife both feel that their friendships have improved. His male colleagues and their wives have big dinner gatherings, and he and his wife call the old couple living next-door "okaasan" and "otousan."

There are inconveniences. There is only one small store in the neighborhood and every two weeks Tomoko has to drive to a bigger store an hour away to stock up. Tired of running out of produce, she has started to eat the imperfectly-shaped but perfectly tasty vegetables from her garden and eventually she wants to live off of what she raises. "If I don't have it, I don't care anymore," she says.

When Rika Suzuki first moved to the countryside, she missed being able to just run out at night and buy juice. After a few months, though, Suzuki says, "I realized that everything that I thought was inconvenient I could get by without."

Both the Inoues and Suzuki are satisfied with their decision, and plan to live in their country manors for many years. "You either love the country or you don't," comments Hiroyuki. "It might sound strange, but (life here) is exciting to us."

Slow Food?

The word "slow" is being tacked onto a lot of nouns these days but the catch phrase responsible for all this linguistic lethargy is actually "Slow Food."

Organised by an Italian, Carlo Petrini, in the late 1980s, the Slow Food movement has since spread across the globe and can claim offices in the United States, Korea and Japan, and an international membership of 75,000.

In a (chemical free) nutshell, the Slow Food movement is anti-globalization and pro-organic. You are unlikely to find Slow Food activists inside a Lawson or McDonalds. Each branch of the organisation is independent but the movement is united in the belief that seasonal produce, regional recipes and local ingredients should be cultivated and preserved for the sake of future generations as well as just better dining.

In Japan, for instance, the Japan Slow Food Organization (JSFO) supports the only producer of the Amaguri Kabocha, a pumpkin with a distinctive sweet chestnut flavour, native to Kanazawa. The JSFO acts as a liaison between farmers, sellers, and consumers to ensure that traditional vegetables like this one stay on the market.

Amaguri Kabocha

JSFO's president, Kazushi Kunimoto, explains that the plight of the pumpkin should be viewed in a larger cultural context. In Kanazawa, the Amaguri Kabocha has been prepared as part of an annual winter ceremony auspicious for good health. "If that farmer stops producing the pumpkin, it is lost forever," notes Kunimoto.

Keeping rarities like these off the endangered vegetable list is only one part of a larger philosophy aimed at promoting diversity on all levels. As Kunimoto asks, "lettuce grows to a lot of different sizes, but why is there only medium sized lettuce at the grocery store? Why are all the other lettuces thrown away?" Likewise, he adds, a truly modern society should "accept people's differences as 'all ok'."

In addition to its conservation work, the JSFO is kept busy raising awareness about the movement as well as the extent to which a traditionally food-loving nation has let its culinary ideals slip. As part of this drive, they hold cooking classes for children, bring mothers into school kitchens, host TV shows and web casts, and are currently compiling data on the past 1000 years of Japanese gastronomic history. The hope is that in the not too distant future, Japanese children in Hakodate will not be eating the same processed, preservative-packed food as those in Beppu.

"If we don't work hard now," declares Kunimoto, "the world will not change."

Text and photography: Hanna Kite