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Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines “side by side” as the state “of existing beside one another” and “of being in the same place, time, or circumstance." What does it mean for rural and urban communities to live side by side? Join University of Minnesota Extension staff as we explore the interdependent relationship of rural and urban spaces and why this necessary and complex relationship matters.
You have to realize how to allow a stranger to settle down in a different place. It requires a lot of preparation. It's not just bring people there and give them a house. A stove. If we're only looking at the ash, we can never enjoy the warmth.
Music (Jim Griswold):With revitalization, it's exactly like that. A lot of things will be lost eventually. So it really depends on what the fire can carry on. It's not only recover something back to the good old days, but also generate some new value everybody can enjoy for future.
Simona Zolett:It is doing a lot for making people think about, Okay, moving to rural communities is a possibility. You can have opportunities if you move to rural communities. You can create your own project. You can make a difference. You can live in a beautiful natural environment.
Simona Zolett:You can feel a sense of community. So this is helping in the mind of the Japanese society as a whole to make rural communities be perceived as more attractive place to live in. And even for people who might not have maybe financial means or they're not sure about what they're going to do, it's giving them an avenue to look around and think about, okay, what could I possibly do in this community?
Ellen Wolter:That's Professor Meng "Mo" Qu and Professor Simona Zollet of Hiroshima University in Hiroshima, Japan. In the second part of my conversation with Mo and Simona, I talk with them about Japan's Local Revitalization Cooperators Program, which was launched by the Japanese government in 2009 in response to depopulating rural communities. The program funds people to move to depopulating rural areas for typically three years to support revitalization work. That ranges from tourism to agriculture to entrepreneurship and forestry. They explain how communities set their own guidelines and use a community led selection process that aims to match skills with local needs with the ultimate goal of retaining participants as long term residents.
Ellen Wolter:Since 2009, the program has grown to roughly 1,200 participating communities with 20,000 graduates and about 70% who stay in communities. The program is not a perfect solution, of course, but one with many possibilities. Mo and Simona discuss its opportunities and the way it appeals to young people in Japan, many of whom have become disillusioned with urban life, as well as the program's pitfalls, like what happens when values are misaligned or a community is not welcoming, and what other countries experiencing urbanization can learn about developing a similar approach.
Music (Jim Griswold):When they've all had their quarrels imparted,
Ellen Wolter:This is Ellen Wolter from the University of Minnesota Extension, and welcome to the Side by Side podcast.
Simona Zolett:So Chikyokoshi means local revitalization or regeneration as a term. So it's one of the most common terms used to describe, again, this whole movement around revitalizing rural, but in general, local areas and local communities. And kyorio kutai means, it's hard to render it in English, so it means, literally it means cooperation squad. So it's basically this idea of this group of people that are going into the community and somehow meant to help and support these local revitalization activities. We translated it as local revitalization cooperator because it's a little bit simpler and maybe better in English, but it actually doesn't have an official English translation.
Simona Zolett:So other scholars have translated it in slightly different ways, but the essence is the same of people, again, helping local communities too with revitalization related activities. Very broadly defined.
Ellen Wolter:And it's been around since 2009. Is that correct? Yes. Was established. Yeah, tell me a little bit about that, about how it works.
Simona Zolett:Okay, so it's an initiative by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication, which is kind of one of the ministries that are somehow involved in this local and regional revitalization activities in Japan. So, and the idea was to support people who are interested in moving into rural areas, but they might not have the means to, like economic means or so on. And in exchange for health support in them moving into this smaller, dupulating community, they have to engage for, usually the term is three years, they have to engage in activities that again, are meant to support the community in some kind of way. If we look at all the range of possible cases, you have many different kinds of things that these people are doing from promoting tourism to working in the agricultural sector and trying to develop, developing agricultural infrastructure, but also for maybe, for developing maybe value added product or marketing them outside of the community. But then you have people working in welfare and trying to create services for local people, people, like elderly, like, or daycare services.
Simona Zolett:You have people working in, like in forestry as well. So, you have a huge range of different kind of activities these people are doing. And so the way the program is set up is that the central government provides a certain amount of funding and then each municipality, so it's carried out at the municipality level and each municipality which applies for this program can manage it quite independently so they can decide what kind of guidelines to set for accepting this kind of people. They can decide what job they want these people to do. So you have some municipalities that are very focused on specific things, like the municipality decides that they're strategic, what they want to work on is, for example, promoting tourism, then they will say in their guidelines, the people who come through this program have to work on promoting tourism.
Simona Zolett:So that's the guideline that's given. Other municipalities are much more free or more open, so they're more, have this approach of saying, okay, tell us what your capabilities, what your skills are, and we will see how this can apply to our community. So tell us how you're planning to use your skills, your ideas in our community. So there is a selection process. People apply, they have to submit their CV, they have to submit an action plan, so what they actually plan to do in these three years.
Simona Zolett:And then they get screened and selected. So usually what is interesting to me in this program is that it's not just the kind of the municipality as the local government employees that choose the people, but it's also people from the local community which are called to be part of the selection committee. So Japan has a quite strong culture in community organizations. So they have a lot of volunteer group within the community. You have the local, the volunteer firefighters, you have the community groups that take care of like cleaning the common roads and so on.
Simona Zolett:So usually you have local leaders and these are the people who get usually selected for being part of the committee that chooses the local revitalization cooperators, like who is coming into the communities. So there is this sort of vetting process, so to speak, in the sense that local authority figures, community authority figures or trusted people get to somehow look at these potential candidates and say, okay, this person seems like a good fit for our community needs and so on. So there is this process that somehow increases the trust in the people that come in through this process. Because in the end, it is complete strangers, but there is a sort of selection process through the community that makes them a little bit more trusted. Of course, you have mismatches sometimes and things may not work out.
Simona Zolett:But it is, in general, I would say quite effective.
Ellen Wolter:What I'm just curious how many municipalities are engaging in this program in Japan.
Simona Zolett:So right now, as in terms of the members, so the people actually actively involved in the program, as of now, you have almost 9,000 people. So the 9,000 is the active community local revitalization cooperator as of now. Of course, you have a lot of people, like about 20,000 people who have so called graduated from the program, but still remain somehow in the local area, running their own businesses or working for local governments and so on. As for the participating municipalities, you have around 1,200 municipalities that are part of this program and 20 prefectures. So it's basically a little bit less than half of all prefectures in Japan.
Simona Zolett:And this is actually a number that has been continuously rising since the beginning of the program. So the program itself started out in 2009, as I mentioned, with 89 members. So the people involved were 89 and I think maybe less than 10 municipalities. And so it has been growing quite steadily across the years as this program was recognized as being in many ways quite successful, especially in retaining these people in the local area, even after their three year term is finished. So, and that is one of the stated objectives of the program, getting people not just to come and help for a short time, like three years, but also after that, settle down in the municipality or around in the nearby area.
Simona Zolett:So again, it is a way to both support the communities, but also to attract populations. It has these two different aspects to it.
Ellen Wolter:Are there communities that might be hesitant to go to a rural area, maybe communities that are hesitant because they may not feel as welcomed or there might be values that don't align with theirs?
Meng "Mo" Qu:On two neighboring islands, we have two friends. One got a dream job. She got a basically abandoned house and ran away with that house and created her own business. But on another island, another lady just facing having a government job, and her basically pouring coffee for visitors every day. She feels this is not what I signed up for, and it's really boring.
Meng "Mo" Qu:And the only guy I get a chance to talk, not the woman. But I can see one is creating there become entrepreneur, another become office worker, even more boring than Tokyo. She's from Tokyo. So it's like a lottery. Some people got a really good luck, and some people got a really sad experience, then they eventually do something else after the contract.
Meng "Mo" Qu:Mhmm. Mhmm.
Simona Zolett:So, well, let me add something because I think this is a very nuanced picture. This is somehow a separate topic that we haven't researched in detail, so I cannot speak that much about it. But it is important to point it out. We do have an increasing foreign population to come in into Japan, rural Japan, to work especially in agriculture, but also healthcare. There are usually people from Southeast Asia and they stay or China, but mostly Southeast Asia and they stay on this very short, like maybe two or three years contract as so called trainees, which is basically a way for Japan to import cheap labor from poorer countries and let them stay for a short period in Japan to work in needed sector like agricultural labor, and then they basically have to leave the country.
Simona Zolett:And these are population that are there in rural areas, but are not very visible and they're quite separated from the local community.
Ellen Wolter:And
Simona Zolett:that is something increasingly of an issue in the sense that you have more and more of a need for this foreign labor, but Japan also right now is going through a period of sort of anti foreigner sentiment somehow. So going back to the Chikyokoshi Kirokutai program and this issue of maybe the rural communities being more conservative and how these people are being accepted or not accepted into the community. So I would say, first of all, again, it is true also in Japan that rural communities are very conservative, but I wouldn't say even politically that much because Japan as a whole, like in Japan, we don't have the kind political division that we see, for example, in The United States. So I would say the country as a whole kind of skews conservative, but it's quite mild sort of conservatism, so to speak. But the thing with the rural community is more like they're like closed society or they were closed society.
Simona Zolett:They were, you know, you had all these agricultural community that were very independent, very reliant on themselves for everything, and that was the historical situation. And now, of course, you have more of a, like from the postwar onwards, you had a lot of like urban to rural communication and interaction, but at their heart, communities remain quite closed somehow. And this used, it is still, but it used to be, especially in the past, an issue for people trying to come into the community because they were always treated as outsiders. And even things like buying a house, for example, it's not as simple as just going to the real estate company and just buy a vacant property. It's like you have to make yourself known to the community and then talk directly to the owner of the house.
Simona Zolett:And then they have to decide, okay, is this person kind of trusted? Do want to sell my house to this person who then is going to come into the community because then I have a social responsibility for the rest of the community to, if I bring in some person who is not going to fit in or some stranger, untrustworthy person. So these dynamic work are quite, still quite present in rural communities in Japan. Even buying farmland or land is very difficult in Japan if you don't know the people and are perceived as a trusted person. But I would say these dynamics have been changing and somehow breaking up in recent years because of these depopulation issues specifically.
Simona Zolett:Because as the community age and the community become depopulated, the local people also start feeling this sense of urgency, like if we don't do something, this community is going to die out. And this is driving, in a way, this stronger acceptance of outsiders because people are starting to realize if we don't accept people from outside, this community is going to die. So we have to be more open to strangers.
Ellen Wolter:So going back to your paper and characteristics of this program and some of the impacts, what did you find in terms of who participates and why they participate in this program?
Simona Zolett:So two interesting aspects of it. First of all, we have a lot of young people. People in their thirties are the main demographic, but then also a lot of people in their twenties and forties. So I would say younger people who are attracted by this program and also quite a lot of women, somehow surprisingly. So if you look at the overall picture of the program since the beginning to now and the people participating, it's still more male skewed.
Simona Zolett:So you have maybe 60% of men and 40% of women. But if you look right now at the younger demographic who are participating, you have increasing numbers. Actually, number of young women is higher than the number of young men participating.
Ellen Wolter:Did it surprise you that young people are participating?
Simona Zolett:Somehow, it doesn't surprise me in a way because, again, men as a society has been going through a lot of, well, economic precarity, first of all. So young people increasingly are having trouble with finding jobs. Also young people are increasingly, I think, disillusioned with the society itself, especially the working society, this idea that was quite ingrained in Japanese society that you have, you graduate from university, enter a good company and work there until you die. And you have to give all of yourself to your company and workplace. I think young people are looking for something different they can do and a place where they can somehow realize themselves and contribute to the place as well in certain ways.
Simona Zolett:So if you go to Tokyo, you are just a tiny person in a sea of people. But if you go to a rural community, you are one single person who can make some kind of difference. And this is what we hear a lot from the people who participate in this program. We want to feel like we can make a difference and in small rural communities, we can really feel like, okay, our presence matters and we can do something here that we couldn't be able to do in other places.
Meng "Mo" Qu:Young generation and relatively older generation, they both, we made both cases. And a majority is, of course, it's like Simona said, 30, 40, but we also see some fifty, sixty. They are the early group arrived to a community like twenty years ago. So this kind of people, they mostly play a network role. They're taking care of the young ones.
Meng "Mo" Qu:They also share very different social experiences connected where they come before. So people at different age actually having different kind of profile for their region. And I think art is also quite interesting.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. Either case and I don't think your study looked at this. But cases where people settle in a community and then they say, hey, you know, bring some friends along or bring some family along into that community. Is that something where you see networks kind of forming? You're both nodding.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah.
Simona Zolett:Yes. So, actually, what we do see are networks of newcomers. That's quite visible, I would say, phenomenon. So, again, as I mentioned before, it's still relatively difficult for outsiders to get into rural communities because of all those barriers I mentioned before. So, what happens is that once you start having people who somehow successfully manage to settle down and integrate to some extent into the community, and sometimes you have all these younger but very somehow entrepreneurially minded people or people with interesting ideas, they want to try out new things, they will maybe start an interesting project or have a cool cafe in the countryside and then people will start coming, visit them and they will say, okay, this looks like a nice place to live.
Simona Zolett:And they will start thinking, what about we move there? So the newcomer, the previous newcomers kind of work as a bridge that can attract these new people, but also help them then themselves if they decide they want to settle down in this community. They can help them to find resources, connect them to the local people who have some vacant houses that they might be willing to rent out or sell. So they function again as a bridge from the inside of the community to the outside and help bring in new people. So you have these smaller kind of clusters of newcomers that are forming because you have this initial group or even a single individual that somehow was doing something that got people attention to that place and made people think, okay, we would like to move there.
Simona Zolett:And then you have these clusters of people who are doing interesting things and that will attract more.
Meng "Mo" Qu:Yeah, like those people often play their role as a key person and, like, overwatching those newcomers. But we also find another issue. Like, a lot of this young generation making a cafe or this kind of craft beer is a very easy entry level, also connected with their hobby. But the current one issue is some community receive too many of people wanna make coffee, but nobody else wanna do other stuff. That's also quite challenging right now.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. There's only so many cafes and breweries you
Simona Zolett:can have in in one community. Yeah.
Meng "Mo" Qu:Island, we made four cafes, five cafes recently. Then the earlier senior kind of Chiku Goshi member says, oh, we don't need such lot of cafes here. We need something else.
Ellen Wolter:Mhmm. Are are the cafes, the entrepreneurial businesses, are they supported in any way by the government? Or are they all supported by the market and folks living in that community?
Simona Zolett:So Japanese government does have funding for entrepreneurs in rural areas. So one of the ideas is that these people will come in into the community, do whatever job they want with the community, but within those three years, they're also meant to start developing their own business ideas or at least as an idea, but the idea is that later they would actually start their own businesses in or around the community. So those three years also function as sort of preparation or period they can look around, see what's there in the community, what can I do in this community as my business? And after that, there is, specifically for the people in the program, after they finish their three years, there's some funding for them if they want to start their own business. So I would say it's probably less than $10,000 but there is something that is meant, again, to support these people in starting their own businesses.
Meng "Mo" Qu:There are the differences between which area you are, like the border area they receive. There is a new program, give them five years funding for people who want to start up new business. But we have to look at this critically. Some people just using this enjoy four or five years' life, then they close it and go back to Tokyo. So in that case, also, we also encountered.
Meng "Mo" Qu:So it really depends on the area.
Ellen Wolter:What percentage of people stay, do you know, in a community?
Simona Zolett:So the current figures, so the newest one are that 70% of people stay after. So, it's quite a significant amount of them. With the caveat that if you have people who might be settling down for, staying there for maybe three, four, five years, but then eventually they might decide to leave. This is actually something we have, a case that we found out recently. So we had a friend who came, actually his wife came into one of these rural communities through the Chikyokoshi Kyurukutai program, and they settled down afterwards and stayed in the community for almost ten years, I don't know, but for quite a long time.
Simona Zolett:But then eventually this year they left because they have a child and they wanted to give their kid a good education and there's only elementary school in the place where they live, but also the schools were not good enough in the area, so they decided eventually to move out so they could live in a place that could give their kids, their kid better opportunities. So, and that is something that I think we do, that is happening quite a lot. You do still have quite a lot of elementary schools in rural Japan, so that's not an issue. But then after the kids start growing up, education becomes the issue, and then a lot of this family move out.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. That's really, really hard. Yeah. Were they sad to leave?
Simona Zolett:Yeah. They were really sad because they did they were very strongly embedded in the community. They did a lot. They were both very active. They also opened a cafe again, but which also functioned as sort of community hub.
Simona Zolett:So, were quite well integrated into the community and they were quite important figures in the community as well, I would say.
Meng "Mo" Qu:As I
Simona Zolett:mentioned before, these people do make a difference.
Ellen Wolter:What are some of the impacts that you see on communities with this program?
Simona Zolett:It's doing a lot in terms of making rural communities attractive to people. So, idea that you have, you can have opportunities if you move to rural communities, you can create your own project, you can make a difference, you can live in a beautiful natural environment, you can feel a sense of community. So, this is helping, I would say, in the mind of the Japanese society as a whole, to make rural communities be perceived as more attractive place to live in, which again, in the case of most people, remain a sort of aspirational thing because then the majority of people will not actually move to rural communities. But I think it is doing a lot for making this idea, first of all, making people think about this in the first place. Okay, moving to rural community is a possibility.
Simona Zolett:And second of all, it is giving a way. Like, even for people who might not have means to do this move, maybe financial means, or they're not sure about what they're going to do after they move to rural communities, it's giving them an avenue. Okay, I want to apply for this project, and at least for three years, I know I will have a job, I will have housing, and in those three years, I have time to look around and think about, okay, what could I possibly do by myself in this community? So, I do think it's being valuable in different ways that are not necessarily reflected in the numbers themselves of people, but more in the mindset changes and also in these opportunities they're giving, especially to young people to experience living and working in rural communities.
Ellen Wolter:What were the industries before there was less population in rural areas?
Simona Zolett:So, most rural communities started as agricultural communities. Then you have other, you know, activities like mining and so on. But again, prevalently agriculture and forestry and of course, fishery in the coastal areas. So, the postwar period, you have a huge exodus already from the countryside to the cities that were the places providing jobs and especially better jobs for people. So, the population, first of all, started already in the 70s to be quite visible.
Simona Zolett:So, the government already in the 70s and 80s was trying to get people to go back to the countryside by encouraging industries to move into the countryside. So, a lot of factories, manufacturing especially, moved into the countryside to provide jobs for the local people. So, that was one thing. So, a lot of manufacturing moving into rural areas. Not necessarily big scale manufacturing, I would say small to mid size enterprises, like manufacturing enterprises, which of course has happened in many places, kind of completely collapsed when all these manufacturing jobs went to so called developing countries first and so on.
Simona Zolett:So, these kinds of manufacturing jobs have basically mostly disappeared from the Japanese countryside, except for like bigger industries, but those tend now to be concentrated more like in the suburbs of larger cities rather than in rural areas as such. And then infrastructure development became the other big way in which the government tried to support jobs in rural areas. So road development, development projects like dams, all these kind of government funded infrastructure development project that were also meant to, especially meant to support employment in rural areas because you do have these huge roads in the middle of nowhere, which basically were mostly to provide employment for people. But this is also not a thing anymore, I mean, not a viable way of supporting employment in rural areas. So that's why now the government has much of a stronger emphasis on entrepreneurship and getting people to create their own jobs somehow, because, again, there's not that many jobs.
Simona Zolett:And the jobs that are left, like agriculture and so on, are not that attractive to young people. So that's why we have this foreign labor coming in to do the job that Japanese people basically don't want to do.
Meng "Mo" Qu:I can give an example. Like, I encountered a guy running a before he was running a pachinko, a casino on a rural island, when he realized the population is getting older and older, he changed his business into a daycare home. So because of that, he imported a lot of daycare workers from Philippines and Vietnam. So you can see how the business also changed based on the need of the island. Think it's quite a smart approach.
Ellen Wolter:So for countries that are thinking about or would be interested in implementing a program like this, what are some of the considerations that they might want to think about before doing so? What are the benefits or challenges they might run into? What recommendations would you have for them based on your research that you've done on this program?
Meng "Mo" Qu:I think firstly, each place is very unique. It has a very unique structure and social structure as well. You have to realize how to allow a stranger to settle down in a different place. It requires a lot of kind of preparation. It's not just bring people there and give them a house.
Simona Zolett:So again, the community on board with this kind of thing, I think it's very important. I mean, if you look at the way that the program in Japan happened, you had a few pilot municipalities starting and it was a very small number at the beginning. And it was only after people started seeing results from this program and started seeing that things were actually happening and nothing dramatically wrong was happening that other municipalities started getting on board with it. So, I would say it's a matter of implementing this program gradually and getting the communities on board. So, where you have a community who is receptive to the idea of getting outsiders into the community and getting them to be engaged in project to support the local community, then you have a space where you can actually start trying to implement this kind of program and then see what the results are and then probably other municipalities, other communities will think about, okay, this might be a good idea for our community as well.
Simona Zolett:So again, this kind of gradual implementation.
Meng "Mo" Qu:I think one more thing could be every young people has a dream, right? They want to do something what locals believe is crazy in their community. So how to balance their personal pursuit, family pursuit with the community needs is also very important. For example, we have female hunters in the middle of nowhere. We have people running chicken farms, meanwhile operate a radio station.
Meng "Mo" Qu:These kind of people, right? If they are not apparent damage to the community culture but also make something regenerative, I think that's the best scenario.
Simona Zolett:There's also this idea of giving people both a sort of salary and free housing is quite helpful because it gives people a sense of stability at least for three years so they can, they feel they can actually engage in some community activity without feeling like they have this pressure of paying your rent and paying your bills and so on. So, it does help a lot in getting these people focused on their community work. And usually what happens is that they make a lot of connection in the community through this kind of work, and that helps a lot in then helping them to set up their own business after three years. So again, this pipeline from local revitalization cooperator to local entrepreneur is, I mean, can be improved, but it's actually something that is happening. We do see that happening a lot in Japan, and it is helping in supporting like local entrepreneurship by these newcomers.
Simona Zolett:I think it's transferable to other contexts as well. But again, there has to be some kind of funding available and housing available, which again, might not be a possibility for every community. Like I know some communities have issue with housing, there's no housing available even for local people, so why would we get, you know, support outsiders? So it has to be the right kind of community also in the sense of the condition, like a depopulating community that feels like we need and we want the help from What's
Ellen Wolter:some of research that you're working on next that you'd like to share with us?
Simona Zolett:One project we are both involved in right now, and it's an international level project, is called Tangible. And basically, it's about cultural change connected with migration and in migration dynamics in rural and remote islands. So it's funded by the British Academy, but it involves different countries. Like we have Japan, we have Canada and then UK and Scotland as the partner countries, project. Again, we are focusing on small, rural, remote islands in these countries and how they are dealing with these dynamics of the population on the one hand, but also new people coming in.
Simona Zolett:Some islands are more developed tourist industry with all the positives and negatives associated to it. So, we are looking at these kind of dynamics and how the culture is really of these islands, communities, island and communities is changing as a result, especially of new people coming.
Meng "Mo" Qu:Simona is a rural sociologist. She is more focused on agriculture and agriculture connected fields, but I'm more focused on the service industry, which build up Simona's industry. Without her study, we can't do anything for the tourism. Right?
Simona Zolett:I'm actually also doing kind of parallel research on how rural Japan is trying to develop so called organic villages, which is again connected with sustainable agriculture and this idea of again supporting a declining industry, which is agriculture in rural Japan, by getting new people involved, especially young people who are more interested in sustainable farming and want to be engaged in that, by trying to create the whole infrastructure around it, including the connection between rural areas and urban areas to develop, like support the agricultural industry in rural areas and then support the consumption side in urban areas. So you have this linkage between sustainable production and sustainable consumption, and this can support rural areas, culture, but also the population of rural areas by attracting new people.
Ellen Wolter:So when we first started talking, I think before we started recording, you talked about the festivals, the cultural festivals in rural communities. And so I'd love to hear more about those and what that looks like and how many people are attending from urban areas.
Meng "Mo" Qu:So the beginning, from 2010, a big corporation called Fukutake Foundation, alongside with they created a company called Beninist Arts and Naoshima and Culture Village. It's a three company, but it's actually shared by one boss. They they built several world level class iconic museums designed by the famous architect Tado Ando, one island called Naoshima, then they extended to Teishima and Inujima. Eventually, this thing became an international art festival hosted every three years by bringing 1,000,000 tourists to 12 remote island. Then, you know, twenty years ago, if you ask people now, Shima, nobody know about it.
Meng "Mo" Qu:Now it's become like a top 10 world travel destination, not only Japan.
Simona Zolett:On this island, now Shima, there is extremely iconic pumpkin sculpture. It's a yellow pumpkin with black dots, and it's extremely iconic. And it's by a famous contemporary artist called Yayoi Kusama. Like, if you search Naoshima pumpkin, it will immediately come out.
Meng "Mo" Qu:In 2021, they introduced by New York Times, ranked top seven in the world to global travel destination, and two of their museums are ranked top 15 in the world. So it's quite an amazing power done by art. But at the same time, you know, contemporary art is very strange. With a lot of rural residents, they have no idea why there is a pumpkin in front of my door, why people come here to take a photo with those pumpkins. So what to do this with my life?
Meng "Mo" Qu:Then some locals are interested. At the beginning, they're curious. Later, they're joining the open business, so they're benefited from it. But some locals, some artists, they believe it's very ugly, just in front of their door, they can't remove it. So there are mixed voices, but in general, this art festival brings a lot of income and jobs back to the rural community in these 12 islands.
Meng "Mo" Qu:But my question is, it's only 12 islands. We have 400 islands. So what about the rest island? They are quite jealous with this kind of approach. That's why the whole area become very creative.
Meng "Mo" Qu:Everybody want to run small scale art festival, gallery, something popping up. So more focused on these changes until now. It's quite interesting.
Simona Zolett:But it's like you have these very big scale cases like the Naoshima And Setouchi Trinale Islands that he's just talking about, where they basically really turned islands that really were absolutely not on the map of any tourist or any visitor into like global scale tourist destinations. So, it's really incredible to see, especially during it's, so you have these museums, but you also have Triennale art festival. So, every three years there's a lot of art installation everywhere around, and they're also trying to integrate it with the community by using abandoned building for art installations and so on. So there is an effort at least to integrate with the community. But I think what this started is a broader movement for rural art fest, rural contemporary art festivals in And you see some of them are much at a like more bottom up local scale, so smaller scale because of this, because this big event made it popular, so now a lot of smaller communities are also trying this model as a way to attract some people to visit.
Meng "Mo" Qu:There are more than a 100 a kind of Trinale Benali in rural Japan. I see a very popular trend. People every community want to make art gallery event. Like, everywhere we travel, we see some strange art in in the abandoned house. Quite charming, so to say.
Meng "Mo" Qu:But on the other hand, what what's next? That's really questioning me. What's next? So far, we apply contemporary art. So what what about five years later?
Ellen Wolter:Well, I will finally let you go.
Music (Jim Griswold):How to do?
Simona Zolett:Yeah. What was
Music (Jim Griswold):that? If you have a chance
Simona Zolett:to visit
Meng "Mo" Qu:us. We're happy to host you. I
Ellen Wolter:think after talking with you, I'm gonna have to start planning that. So watch out, and I'm gonna come visit you.
Meng "Mo" Qu:Sweet.
Ellen Wolter:Alright. Great to talk to you both.
Meng "Mo" Qu:Thank you. Have a great evening.
Ellen Wolter:Thanks. Bye bye. Bye. Thank you for listening to Side by Side. We welcome your emails at sidebyside@umn.edu.
Ellen Wolter:Side by Side is a production of the University of Minnesota Extension and is written and hosted by me, Ellen Wolter. Special thanks to Jan Jekula, who designed our wonderful logo, and Jim Griswold, who sings and plays guitar in our opening and closing credits.
Music (Jim Griswold):Really doesn't matter at all.
Ellen Wolter:You can find episodes of Side by Side wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Ellen Wolter, and this is side by side.
Music (Jim Griswold):Singing a song side by side.