At home and abroad

We’re alive after more than two days of driving around, but I’ll wait to share what it’s been like behind the wheel (and in the front passenger seat.) I don’t want to jinx us before we turn in our little Suzuki WagonR in two and a half days.

We rented the car because we wanted to visit some of the wildest terrain in Japan, places where the trains don’t penetrate, deep within the mountains of Shikoku (one of Japan’s four main islands.) Yesterday afternoon we drove into the densely forested Iya Valley on roads notched out of almost-vertical cliffs, byways that often narrowed to a single lane.

The urban buzz in Tokyo and Kobe and even Takamatsu to me felt more advanced and sophisticated than anything I’ve experienced anywhere else on earth. After 10 days of that, it was jolting to begin passing buildings and one-time enterprises in the Iya Valley that showed signs of decay. Like this facility:

Steve and I were staying in the town of Miyoshi, a base for tourist activities in the area: hiking and mountain climbing. Bathing in hot springs. Walking across bridges that historians think are 800 to 1200 years old, built entirely from vines and planks.

Only about 2300 people live in Miyoshi. If there’s a convenience store in town, we couldn’t find it. It felt like at last we were seeing the effects of Japan’s deadly demographics: an aging population, young people opting not to marry or have children. Countrysides emptying out.

The village of Nagoba, about 45 minutes from Miyoshi, experienced this in dramatic fashion after authorities automated the local dam that had been the town’s biggest employer. From a couple of hundred people, Nagoba’s population plummeted to a few dozen. In 2003 an artist from the village named Tsukiji Ayano returned from living and working in Osaka. Shocked by the change in her home town, she started creating replacement people made of cloth stuffed with newspapers. Since she began, Ayano has made hundreds of the scarecrows (kakashi). She’s brought the village back to life in a manner that’s both charming and eerie, as Steve and I learned when we visited it this morning.

Steve and I wandered around for almost an hour; toward the end of our visit other tourists were trickling in. We never saw any sign of Ayano, however, although we read that she lives in the village and works in her studio there. We were never asked at any point to pay anything; we have no idea how Ayano survives to create her art. It felt like a gift.