Japan’s paradoxical neighbourhoods
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 18: In the Neighbourhood
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Tony Barrell (dec.)
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Japanese people are very aware of their densely layered past and how much of it informs the present, so despite the extravagance, complexity, super-modernity and rampant kitsch of the urban terrain, which infects the way we ‘see' Japan, older models may be more potent. The neighbourhood is certainly one of them, but its manifestation and manipulation are paradoxical. There have been many kinds of neighbourhoods which people defend or resist. They may be deep in the mountainous countryside, part of the urban sprawl, or the virtual neighbourhoods created by a generation of young Japanese people talking to each other via PCs, laptops and mobile phones.
The neighbourhood about which the Japanese are most ambivalent and confused is the region of which they are part: for a long time Japanese nationalists insisted North-East Asia was theirs, but since 1945 it's been a region in which many Japanese feel they have not been welcome. In the 1970s, the Japanese corporate thrust back into Asia was too aggressive, and in more recent years hubristic displays of nationalist recalcitrance – official visits by politicians to the notorious Yasukuni shrine, and denials that the Imperial government had anything to do with the organisation of sex slaves for the military in World War II – have made Japan's neighbours angry enough to take to the streets.
So once again, many Japanese prefer to see themselves benignly pursuing their own business in their own islands. It might be temporary, but this withdrawal reflects what happened nearly four hundred years ago, when the Tokugawa shoguns decided to retreat from engagement with their neighbours both near and far.
This might explain why Japan's most important neighbourhood is still the local built environment you can more or less walk around in an hour. A territory which exudes the most distinct and lasting resonances for almost every generation: the rural farm-village community, based on paddy rice farming, where up to fifty houses and other residences are built on raised ground, usually at the intersection of forested hills and wide flat rice fields. This is the archetypal ‘home' for millions of people. Even though they have never been there.
Often these hamlets house only a hundred or so people; the dwellings close together and quite separate from the surrounding cultivated land.
Before the mechanisation of Japanese agriculture in the postwar era, the land would have been ploughed, irrigated and harvested communally, and what machinery there was would have been shared amongst neighbours. Although many of these villages are remote and secluded, some of these neighbourhoods are now semi-urban, stranded within the outer reaches of expanding towns. It's quite a surprise to stare out of the window of a fast-moving shinkansen (bullet train) and see a man and his wife stooping to weed a small green or yellow field right next to a huge cement works, a pachinko (pinball) parlour or a housing estate stacked with twenty-storey towers.
The pressure on the sub-urban farming villagers to ‘unlock' this precious land, for the benefit of developers who want to build more apartment blocks or golf courses, is intense; but this view is balanced by a common, perhaps contradictory, national affection for people who continue to live the traditional farm lifestyle. Growing wet paddy rice is still widely believed to be the iconic heart of Japan's national culture. Without a diet of their own homegrown ‘sticky' rice, many say, they would no longer ‘be Japanese'. This goes with a widespread feeling amongst city and suburban Japanese that they all originally come from the country; that the place where their great grandparents were born is their true or spiritual home – their furusato, the Japanese equivalent of the German concept of heimat, the neighbourhood in which everyone feels they really belong. In reality, the farm village community is relentlessly withering; thousands of villages have lost a third of their population over the past four decades.