Back-to-Land Ideal Is Taking Root in Japan

TAKAHATA, Japan —  Yoko Adachi could be sipping cappuccino on the Ginza, or planting imported rosebushes in a suburban garden. Instead, each spring this elegant daughter of a Tokyo doctor wades barelegged into her rice paddies, stooping to press the delicate seedlings into the mud.

“I like the feeling of going into the rice paddies barefoot and planting the rice by hand,” Adachi said. “I feel that the field and I are becoming one.”

Adachi, 32, is a pioneer in Japan’s new Great Escape: Well-educated, affluent Japanese, fed up with the crowds and conformity of Tokyo, have begun abandoning the capital in search of a better lifestyle in the depopulated countryside.

With 11.8 million people packed into one of the most densely inhabited and expensive cities on the planet, Tokyo has been expanding for more than a century to accommodate wave after wave of impoverished farmers arriving in search of jobs, higher wages and the good life.

But now, affluence is making urban Japanese less willing to put up with the cramped housing, the pollution and the rat race. Since 1993, the number of people moving to the provinces has for the first time exceeded the number of those moving into Tokyo, and the trend is expected to continue, according to the Japan Land Agency. In 1995, the net exodus was 18,300 people.

A nascent back-to-the-land movement has drawn hundreds of idealistic young people, as well as some intrepid retirees, to rural Japan. Like Adachi, many have no farming background. But that is no deterrent to the dying towns and villages so desperate to attract new residents that they are offering incentives ranging from abandoned farmhouses to moving expenses, free use of farmland, cash payouts to people who stay at least a year, even fishing boats and dairy cows for anyone willing to use them.

Many more denizens of Tokyo’s concrete jungle are not prepared to take up farming but still fantasize about a slower-paced, less costly, more spiritually satisfying life in the countryside. Last fall, for example, 5,200 Tokyoites showed up for a weekend job fair sponsored by rural companies seeking to lure skilled workers away from the capital.

There are no reliable statistics on how many of these people will do more than dream of picking up stakes and moving. But the phenomenon is notable enough to have earned a name. “U-Turn” is the term for people born in the provinces who come to Tokyo to study or work and then move back to the countryside. “I-Turn” refers to Tokyo natives who decide to move out and make a one-way trek to the provinces.

Recruit Co., Japan’s leading employment company, has even launched a quarterly magazine that provides information on rural jobs and lifestyles. Called U-Turn I-Turn B-ing, the inch-thick magazine is crammed with ads from rural employers and a yellow-page listing of the hundreds of small towns and villages that are seeking to attract city dwellers.

Each issue sells a remarkable 75,000 copies. The typical reader is male, lives in Tokyo, has some work experience and is looking for a good job in the provinces, said assistant editor Midori Matsuzawa.

“Everyone’s dream is to be able to do the same work they’re doing in Tokyo but to live in the countryside,” Matsuzawa said.

Although the average provincial job pays only about 70% of a Tokyo salary, housing and entertainment are more affordable, and the quality of life is often higher, she said. Rural Japan offers the prospect of homeownership, fresh air, pretty scenery, short commutes, less pressure on the job, neighborly relations and sometimes the quality that Tokyo seems to lack most: charm.

Tokyo is more than Japan’s capital. It is the financial, intellectual and political center, the brain stem, the perceived source of all glamour, power and innovation. In American terms, Tokyo is equivalent to Washington, New York, Boston and Hollywood all rolled into one.

Trains traveling to Tokyo are said to be “climbing up” to the capital, even when they are heading south. Major Osaka corporations cannot function without a branch there. And to middle-aged managers, a transfer to the provinces has long been considered tantamount to a demotion.

But the image of rural Japanese as second-raters or hicks is fading, Matsuzawa said. “In the past five years or so, it’s been replaced by a positive image of U-Turners,” she said.

“It’s only very, very recently that people have become interested in moving to the countryside,” said Toshio Kawahara, a Tokyo native who has helped build a small community of about 40 organic farmers, all urban transplants, in Takahata, a hot-springs town of 27,000 tucked in a pretty valley in Yamagata prefecture in northern Japan. “People did not even think that it was possible to have a good life in the countryside. But our life is clearly more civilized, and better.”

For all but the super-rich, the cost of living in Tokyo is certainly daunting.

Real estate prices have fallen since Japan’s high-rolling “bubble economy” collapsed, but the average single-family home still costs more than $512,000. Despite the higher Japanese wages, earning enough to purchase this Tokyo home requires 62,088 hours of labor, while Americans have to work just 16,584 hours to buy the average home in Los Angeles, according to the latest government white paper on Japanese lifestyles.

Meanwhile, many workers live in faceless suburbs and must commute for up to two hours each way stuffed into trains as tightly as sushi rolls in a small lunch box. In 1992, the government announced an initiative to make Japan a “Lifestyle Superpower.” One of its goals was to reduce Tokyo commuter crowding enough to make it possible to open and read a newspaper on the subway, but rush-hour riders are still waiting.

Still, for many of the U-Turners, it is not only the physical but also the spiritual barrenness of the big city that is prompting a search for alternatives to life in Japan Inc. They cite the erosion of traditional Japanese values, a growing estrangement among family members or the materialism of Tokyo, which some see as merely another outpost of a vapid global culture based on television and shopping.

“Japan has caught up with the West, and now it is trying to overtake America, and that was OK, but now we have lost our goal,” said a 28-year-old office worker. An economics graduate of a prestigious Japanese university, he is looking for a way to quit his job as a Tokyo accountant, move to the countryside and live off the land, perhaps in forestry.

“Japan’s value system today is entirely connected with money,” he said. “It seems that this is a society where everything can be bought--as long as you have the money. But we have lost track of what’s essential.”

Last year, the young man spent his vacation studying land management at an agricultural school. For the time being, he is keeping his views and plans secret from his co-workers. Although he says he enjoys his job, he says urban life is too “unnatural.”

Many would-be transplants feel that the metropolis is not a good place to raise children, said Katsuo Otsuka, a professor of international economics at Waseda University who has moved here to Takahata and now brings students to the town for exchange programs aimed at promoting alternative development.

“The air and water are bad, and human relationships are becoming more difficult,” he said. “People are much more egotistical. It’s because the birthrate is so low. Only children are used to having the world to themselves. There is less concern for others, and, at the same time, competition is becoming fiercer.”

Otsuka argued that Japan must change its lifestyle as it enters a new era of slower economic growth, higher unemployment and a mature economy. He said a government proposal to move the administrative functions of the capital out of Tokyo does not go far enough--he advocates a radical decentralization to reduce the city’s population by half.

“Our old lifestyle was based on mass production, mass consumption and mass disposal,” he said. “It’s ‘consumer civilization’: Buy and use as much as possible, and then throw it all away. This is becoming unsustainable.”

For Adachi, the attraction of a healthier and more natural lifestyle drew her to Takahata five years ago. She is now the proud owner of a puppy, a pickup truck and a 120-year-old farmhouse she is gradually restoring.

She grows her own rice and vegetables without pesticides or chemical fertilizers and works in the elder-care department of the town welfare office to earn money. Eventually, she hopes to become a full-time organic farmer.

While she sometimes misses the bright lights of Tokyo, she said, “You can’t live purely by amusing yourself. I did not want to be deceived by superficial amusements. I wanted to have a real life.”

In the city, she said, “There is so much external stimulation that you have to build walls around you to protect yourself, and your relationships with other people become distant. On the subway, you see ads everywhere and music blares at you and there are so many people that you have to shut it all out. And people don’t express their true feelings. You have to pretend to be someone else.”

It is a measure of how much Japan is changing that Adachi says her farmer neighbors were not fazed by the sight of an attractive single woman from Tokyo putting down roots alone--although many did offer to introduce her to a suitable husband. “Now that I’m over 30, though, I’m not asked so often,” she said with a laugh.

In many respects, the sentiments of the Japanese back-to-the-landers are indistinguishable from the views of American yuppies who have opted for simpler lifestyles outside the big city.

But many of the Japanese express a sense of vulnerability because their nation produces only 62% of its own food.

“It used to be that people grew their own food and ate what was appropriate for their climate,” Adachi said. “Now, we import food from all over the world and eat much too much.”

The young Tokyo accountant, too, looked up from the lunch table at a crowded downtown restaurant and gestured in dismay at the bountiful array of delicacies.

“When we eat, we have no idea where our food comes from,” he said. “We are like animals who eat whatever fodder is put in front of us. I think it’s very good for us to think about how and where and by whom our food is grown.”