Renovation & Romance in Rural Japan

A friend of mine once told me that he had resolved never to work in or even to visit Paris. Not because he hated it, but because he loved it so much. He was keeping it, he said, as his bolt-hole. If ever life went extravagantly and irretrievably wrong, he would give it all up and ship out to Paris.

Who knows what sort of scenario he was envisaging. I imagine him streaking through an airport, passport and ticket in hand, pursued by some combination of creditors, ex-lovers, police officers, gangsters and counter-espionage teams - just needing to make it those final few yards to the boarding gate…

I was in my early 20s when my friend mentioned his Paris plan. I hadn’t done much planning towards a first life, let alone a reserve option for when the first one went south. Now, though, I do know where I would go and what I would do. On the admittedly optimistic assumption that the collapse of my present existence will be accompanied by a substantial cash windfall, I’ll move to a remote location in rural Japan, buy a dilapidated kominka – ‘old folk-house’ – and do it up.

Better still, I’ll go and live somewhere decent nearby while someone else does it up for me.

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My first call will be to Jaya Thursfield, a.k.a. ‘Tokyo Llama’. He has had millions of views on YouTube for a massive, four-year renovation project on a house that he and his wife bought in her hometown.

Thursfield is part of a modest wave of people, Japanese and non-Japanese alike, who are buying up old houses in the Japanese countryside and converting them into homes, second homes and rental accommodation.

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Tokyo Llama - Before and After

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The backdrop to all this is mass migration from the countryside to cities like Tokyo, Yokohama and Osaka, which began in the 1950s and has spawned a growing number of ‘ghost villages’ where many or even most houses have been abandoned. With many of them made from timber, and located in communities that appear to be dying, they are viewed as depreciating assets - and priced accordingly.

That means that you can now buy some of these homes, and the surrounding land, for as little as £10,000. You’d need to spend many times that to do it up, of course  – certainly to the breathtaking standard achieved by Tokyo Llama. But some are finding that a cost worth bearing if the chances of owning their own home elsewhere are next to nothing, and their jobs let them work remotely for some or all of the time. Rural life itself may be part of the attraction, with the chance to breathe good air and grow your own food.

For some Japanese, fast and reliable transport makes these homes viable as weekend or holiday homes. Others, eyeing a rapid rise in in-bound tourism and expecting that ‘rural Japan’ might soon become an essential part of any visit, alongside the sights of Kyoto, hope to build an Air BnB business while doing their bit to keep some of Japan’s old architectural traditions alive.

Alex Kerr, author of books including Lost Japan (1993), has been doing this since the early 1970s, when he refurbished a house dating back to 1720 and named it Chiiori. The Chiiori Trust has gone on to do much more besides to support sustainable tourism in Japan, and there are now annual Minka Summits to gather together people – carpenters, developers and others – who are involved in a slowly growing minka restoration movement.

Alex Kerr’s Chiiori, in the Iya Valley on the island of Shikoku

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Quite what you get with a minka depends on whereabouts in Japan it is. All are designed to cope with the local climate – but not to cope with it all the way. That’s part of the charm.

As you’ll see from Tokyo Llama’s renovation videos, it’s common to restore these old houses by adding some mod-cons: double-paned windows, insulation to floors and walls, wi-fi, etc. But, still, you want to see and sense where you are: from partitions that open out onto nature to heating arrangements that mean gathering together around an irori (hearth) or kotatsu (a table heated on the underside with a futon attached) when the nights draw in and turn chilly.

Back in the day, minka would be built using materials available within a few hundred yards of your front-door-to-be. Cypress trees - the first of which, according to legend, grew from the chest of the Storm God, Susanoo - would become pillars and beams. Grasses, rushes and reeds could be fashioned into fences, a thatched roof and fragrant tatami mats. From a mixture of mud, straw and sand, your plaster walls would be formed, either left to dry in earthy shades or covered in pristine white lime plaster.

The main room in many minka from the Edo era (1603 – 1868) would be laid with tatami mats and feature a central hearth sunk into the floor, with a kettle suspended above. Sliding partitions of bare wood and white paper marked the boundaries between this room and smaller, private rooms off to one side. On the other side, nearest the doorway, you’d find a kitchen and work area. And high above it all: steadily-blackening cypress beams, as generations of hearth smoke passed by - disappearing out through the roof and helping to keep it dry and reasonably free of insects.

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As the Japanese came into sustained contact with western architectural styles across the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, much was made of the differences. The philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō liked to claim that the sliding partitions of a Japanese home reflected the way that members of Japanese families considered themselves always connected to one another. The privacy afforded by shutting the partition was only ever partial – few sounds would struggle to cross a barrier made from thin paper – and only ever temporary.

The walls of Western homes, by contrast, were thick, heavy and immobile. To Watsuji - no stranger to politically-charged philosophical commentary - this suggested that family life in the West amounted to little more than convenient, self-interested cohabitation.

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Watsuji Tetsurō (1889 - 1960)

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You don’t have to buy into Watsuji’s ideas, or the novelist Tanizaki Junichirō’s romantic defence of Japanese aesthetics against western encroachment (In Praise of Shadows, 1933), to feel the pull of these old minka and their lush, green surrounds. And yet there are problems…

As second homes or holiday rentals, they are great. But will these restoration projects help to revive Japan’s struggling rural regions? Despite the Japanese government’s best efforts - including offers of substantial financial support - the hoped-for rolling back of decades of urban migration has yet to begin in earnest.

One reason is that Japan’s cities are still overwhelmingly the country’s economic centres of activity. That’s true of culture and entertainment, too, so unless you are actively trying to get away from all that then the countryside remains a hard sell. Even more so if you have children in need of a school, since many rural schools have either gone or are all but emptied out now.

The repopulating of rural Japan is one of a number of possible answers to the country’s ever-pressing demographic troubles, but it will take more than beautiful views and the scent of tatami to make it happen. Still, I hope that if some combination of government policy, private enterprise and civil society activism does manage to reinvigorate the Japanese countryside then it will be done with the sort of love and care shown by the likes of Alex Kerr and Tokyo Llama. I shall certainly expect no less of my own contractors, should that combination of disaster and cash windfall ever come to pass…

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Images:

Minka (external view): Japan Travel (fair use).

Chiiori: Chiiori-Stay.co.jp (fair use).

Minka (internal view): Fukushima Travel (fair use).

Watsuji Tetsurō: National Diet Library (public domain).