Following on from yesterday's post on Rural Japan I thought I might make a few comments about the good and the bad sides of life in Japan. To start with the Cute, since it follows on from yesterdays' pork discussion, I present this example of the sort of signs that festoon places where road construction pork is being spent (click on the photo to see it larger).
Japanese signs frequently have cute animals on them telling you not to do something or warning you about something. In some cases (I recall a picture of a fish with its fins above its eyes being hit by a drinkcan illustrating a sign requesting people to not throw their litter in the river) the cute animal makes sense, in other cases - such as the example on the left - the cute animals seems completely out of context. In fact this segues nicely into a couple of the bad points about rural Japan. The first is the amount of totally pointless signs that seem to have proliferated everywhere. They are only eclipsed by the amount of other totally unsightly and generally useless stuff such as railings, flshing lights and other things that are intended to improve road safety at the price of ruining the scenery.
However, while the new roads are, as I say, gold plated pork with all mod cons, the older roads require care and attention to drive on. Not only are they narrow, twisty and full of blind corners, they frequently have ditches at the side without any guard rails so there is always the worry that in your attempt to pass a pedestrian you accientally run off the road. What makes the whole thing more fun is that the new roads frequently turn into the old style roads with practically no warning... It is true that compared to say roads in France even the old ones are well maintained with none of those "Trous en formation" or other hints that the road surface is rutted and falling to bits and that you don't get total morons driving down them at high speed. I assume the latter is because Darwin has had his way with such drivers, although it could be because the sorts of Japanese that want to do that don't live in the countryside.
The good parts of rural Japan are the community spirit and adherence to old traditions. For example last Sunday, the day after we arrived here, the locals were having a community walk. This involved over 100 people of all ages from about 2 months (he/she was carried) to distinctly elderly (over 65 is the best I can come up with as an estimate) and all sorts of people being volunteered to lead the walking groups and prepare the feast that awaited us on our return. As a minor celebrity, as probably the only gaijin for miles around, let alone the only one with any connection to the area, I was surrounded by people during the walk and fed one delicacy after another afterwards and I picked up a lot from the questions. It was fascinating to have people wonder why I like coming here (other than it being my perents-in-laws' home), they seemed amazed when I explained that it was because it is tranquil and beautiful. What stood out was how everyone genuinely appreciated the efforts of the organizers and how this sort of excuse for a social meeting gets repeated one way or another every few weeks. The next one, which I'll miss much to my disappointment, is the Matsuri (festival) and the Kagura performance that will go with it (my wife has photos of last year's one). As a result everyone knows everyone else and to some extent cares about what happens to them, you could call it gossip but I don't think it has the sort of malicious overtones that gossip has in English. On a sidenote: people often moan about rural depopulation and note Japan's depressing birthrate, but this part of Japan seems to be thriving with numerous children of all ages - the wife had a certain amount of trouble matching children to parents and grandparents.
Then there are the traditions. Now I admit that these are somewhat funded by Japan's equivalent of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy, and that this little piece of Shimane-ken is a poster child for land that is generally unsuitable for growing rice efficently, given that rice needs flat ground and the land around here is pretty vertical unless laboriously terraced (see photo on RHS). Yet on the other hand despite the difficulties, not having fields would make the countryside look far worse. Japan has such a wet climate and its soil is so fertile that if you abandon a field or greenhouse it only takes a couple of years for it to be covered in vines and be only recognisable as formerly cultivated land by the fact that it doesn't have any trees on it. After 10 years or so, especially if the bamboo has spread, then even that judgement is hard to make. The locals do maintain many rural traditions, from harvesting some fields by hand to the aforementioned matsuri and I think that many urban Japanese, even if they themselves would not visit or see these traditions, do value their retention and see them as a worthwhile use of their (relatively low) taxes.