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Vanguard(archive)
2011.11.16

Taking on Questions That Have No Fixed Answers: Revitalizing Marginal Settlements and Reconstructing Disaster-Stricken Areas

Taking on Questions That Have No Fixed Answers: Revitalizing Marginal Settlements and Reconstructing Disaster-Stricken Areas

For about a decade Associate Professor Tomohiro Ichinose has been researching how to restore dynamism to rural villages that have lost their vitality. In tackling this question of marginal settlement revitalization, he has developed a counterintuitive approach called “strategic rural reorganization.” In addition, Associate Professor Ichinose now also spearheads the Kesennuma Reconstruction Project. We asked him what is needed to bring vitality back to rural villages and to help disaster-stricken areas reconstruct.

 

ICHINOSE, Tomohiro

Associate Professor
Faculty of Environment and Information Studies

 

If Japan’s Rural Villages Continue to Depopulate As They Have Been . . .

 

Vanguard:ICHINOSE, TomohiroFor the past decade, I have researched marginal settlements¹ experiencing ongoing depopulation. My academic degrees are in agriculture, and the ecology of living organisms was my area of specialization. I studied the ecology of birds in the hills of Sayama and elsewhere until I received my doctorate. After being a visiting researcher in Germany, I joined the faculty at the University of Hyogo from 1999 where I taught mainly at the Hyogo Prefectural Awaji Landscape Planning & Horticulture Academy on the Awaji Campus. I conducted research on dragonflies living in irrigation ponds on Awaji Island, and at that time, the scope of my research interests was limited to living organisms. As I conducted this research on living organisms in rural areas, though, I came to have interest not just in living things but also in human lifestyles, which have a great impact on the environment, and in rural villages and their structure. Awaji Island has many irrigation ponds—in fact it has about 10 percent of the irrigation ponds in Japan. During the nine years or so that I was in Awaji, more and more of the irrigation ponds came to be left unattended as no one was able to maintain them. As depopulation advances and population decreases, these kinds of environmental preservation problems arise as well. Today I am a member of the Long    -term Perspective committee which is under the National Land Council of Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. The committee recently announced its midterm report on the outlook for Japan in the year 2050. Based on last year’s statistics, we estimate that about 20 percent of currently inhabited land will be uninhabited by 2050 and an additional 20 percent or so of Japan’s land will have fewer than 10 residents per square kilometer if trends continue at their current pace. In other words, we project that about 40 percent of currently inhabited areas will have virtually no residents in 2050.

[1}Marginal settlement: A Japanese term used to describe settlements that have experienced depopulation and are in danger of disappearing altogether, largely because more than half of the people living in the settlement are over the age of 65.

 

Institute of Strategic Rural Reorganization

 

Vanguard:ICHINOSE, TomohiroIt is hard to live in a marginal settlement where the community is hard pressed to maintain and manage the land. Most of the people remaining in marginal settlements say that they want to continue to live there. Of course, most are people who do not want to leave the area because it is where they were born and raised and they have become deeply attached to it. But there are also those who would like to relocate from that place but must continue to live there for various reasons and so just press on with their lives there. When I visit the local communities and listen to the people’s stories, I hear people say they are tired from the revitalization efforts. That made me think that there must be a way for people not to force themselves to keep living in those villages but to give up in a positive way. I took that idea and set up the Institute of Strategic Rural Reorganization.

The literal meaning of the Japanese name of the institute is “institute for rural planning by vacating the land.” I took quite a bit of flack over the name because it sounds scandalous, but we are not telling people to give up altogether. We are saying that we need to step back and create communities that can be solid over the medium to long term. To be more specific, we are proposing that we go about revitalization as follows. First, we will create river basin residential zones based on the flow of rivers and other bodies of water. Second, we will have people vacate, in a planned fashion, villages that are hard to sustain, and relocate them to villages that are sustainable for the next 20 to 30 years. Returning the vacated land to nature does not mean simply leaving it idle. This step also requires some kind of action and this will require funds and labor. We are looking into whether we can create good, complementary partnerships with urban areas located downstream. For example, several rivers flow into the National Capital Region and these river basins represent a large area. We are thinking that city people will get involved in the preservation of the environment in upstream areas to the extent that they realize their lifestyles are being supported by the water resources and various other gifts of nature in those areas.

 

Kesennuma Reconstruction Project

 

Vanguard:ICHINOSE, TomohiroOne of the students (Kenyu Shimizu, a third-year undergraduate in the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies) at my lab is from Kesennuma City in Miyagi Prefecture, and his home was severely damaged during the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11. I was in contact with him via Twitter in the days after the natural disaster, and we decided to set up the Kesennuma Reconstruction Project at the Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC). Interested faculty members and students have been divided into about seven groups, and each group has been charged with a different task. As part of my strategic rural reorganization work, I have been looking at Iwate Prefecture as a case study so I fully understand how hard reconstruction will be for the area along the Sanriku Coast, which suffered the greatest damage.

For example, the government is talking about having people move, at government expense, to higher ground, but it will take five to ten years to prepare the area to relocate all the villages. What does that mean? The population is already aging and decreasing. By the time all the preparations are made, it might very well be the case that there are very few people to relocate. The Kesennuma Reconstruction Project is doing research into how best to revitalize communities in such condition. We are also handling the reconstruction plan for city infrastructure, but there are many other specialists in addition to us who are discussing that. We are focusing on topics that are not covered in regular reconstruction plans and on support for people who are having trouble right now.

Vanguard:ICHINOSE, TomohiroLet me describe some of the Project’s activities. One of our groups is called the Information Transmission Group. Today the media is full of information on people in the areas affected by the earthquake, but this information will likely gradually decrease in amount as time passes and then even the topic of people directly affected by the disaster may be mentioned less and less often in the National Capital Region. What can we do so that the people affected by the earthquake can release information themselves at that point? What will probably be useful at such a time are Twitter, Facebook, and other social media. The Information Transmission Group is holding workshops in the disaster-stricken area on how to use Twitter and is doing other activities to make it easier for the people to release information themselves.

In addition to the Kesennuma Reconstruction Project, various other social contribution projects have been set up at SFC since the Great East Japan Earthquake and there are many opportunities for us to work together. For example, Professor Ikuyo Kaneko of the Graduate School of Media and Governance is working on a telemedicine system. The lack of medical doctors is a serious problem now in the areas hit by the earthquake so the introduction of a telemedicine system is very much needed. Preparations are now being made under Professor Kaneko’s project to introduce such a system, but there will need to be support for how to use the system once it is installed. We are now looking into whether the Faculty of Nursing and Medical Care students involved in our project could collaborate in and support the telemedicine project.

 

Approaches Only SFC Can Make Possible

 

Vanguard:ICHINOSE, TomohiroThe most attractive aspect of SFC for me is that there are few barriers between the faculty members and it is easy for us to exchange information with each other. One of the ways that I have benefited from this unique characteristic of SFC is a project based on an agreement between Keio University and Nagasaki Prefecture. It is a project for the students and faculty of SFC to support community building in the municipalities of Nagasaki Prefecture. Several times a year, there is a study tour where students and faculty actually visit the communities in Nagasaki and conduct field work there to study the process of identifying the problems the community faces and then formulating policies. Professors and other experts in public policy, tourism, business administration, and city planning are on the tour so I can hear views on rural communities from the perspective of fields outside my own specialty. It is very educational. I make various suggestions from the perspective of agriculture, and others then state their views on any weaknesses in my proposals from the perspective of business administration, for example. I feel this approach has great potential for the future because faculty members think about problems together by sharing the wisdom of their particular specialization with each other.

 

Think by Yourself, Investigate by Yourself, and Present by Yourself

 

Vanguard:ICHINOSE, TomohiroThe Kesennuma Reconstruction Project is a group project, but my lab focuses on individual research. SFC students tend to be good at group work and our discussions are quite dynamic. The students are also talented at giving presentations. I find that quite a few of them, however, are not able to show their best in their individual research work. That is why individual research is the base for instruction at my lab. I tell them I want them to learn to find a topic by themselves, research it by themselves, and then deliver a presentation on it by themselves. Many of the students are bewildered when they encounter issues that do not have a set answer. Perhaps this is because the questions they studied through high school all had definite answers. How do you tackle an issue that does not have a set resolution? This is basic, but it is critically important that you research the issue or seek out the views of experts yourself. The ability to identify issues is also vital. There are many problems in the world, and students have plenty of time to identify and research such issues. I would like to see them approach issues at their own initiative and tackle them with gusto, not because they want the academic credits, but because they think the issue truly is a problem. This kind of experience is sure to help them when they enter the work world.

 

Profile of Associate Professor ICHINOSE, Tomohiro

 

Associate Professor Ichinose received his bachelor’s degree from the Faculty of Agriculture of the University of Tokyo in 1992. He went on to receive a doctoral degree (agriculture) from the Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences of the same university in 1997. He was a visiting researcher at the Academic Faculty of Agricultural and Horticultural Sciences of the Technical University of Munich in 1996. He was a research fellow at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, associate professor at the Institute of Natural and Environmental Sciences of the University of Hyogo, visiting researcher at the School of Planning and Landscape of the University of Manchester, and visiting researcher at the Centre for Forest, Landscape and Planning of the University of Copenhagen. In 2008 he was appointed associate professor at the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies at Keio University, a position he continues to hold today. He has been a member of various committees and research groups, including the National Land Council expert advisor (Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism), the Association of Rural Planning, and the Institute of Strategic Rural Reorganization (founder). Today his main research interests are rural planning and landscape ecology. His major publications include Shakai inobeta e no shotai: henka o tsukuru hito ni naru (To social innovators: how to create change) (jointly authored; Tokyo: Keio University Press, 2010) and Noson inobeshon: hatten ni muketa tettai no noson keikaku to iu apurochi (Rural innovation: the “strategic rural reorganization” approach to development) (Tokyo: IMAGINE Publishing, 2010).

 

(16 November 2011)

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