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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.
The context of revitalization, it gives more of the sense of a place that somehow has already developed. I would say rural Japan is a developed context. They didn't have anything that was lacking. They had all the needed infrastructure. They had the jobs.
Simona Zollett:They had social services, the schools, the hospitals, and so on. But then because of this demographic decline, you're starting to lose these things. You lose the infrastructure, you lose the schools, you lose the hospitals, but you also lose the people. So you basically lose what is making a community a community itself. So you lose both infrastructure and the people that are in the community.
Simona Zollett:So basically, you're losing the vitality of the community. And the idea of revitalization is bringing this vitality back to it.
Ellen Wolter:That's professor Simona Zollett of Hiroshima University in Hiroshima, Japan. I spoke with Simona and her colleague, professor Mo Meng, about their community revitalization work in rural areas in Japan. In the first part of my conversation with Simona and Mo, they share about their work and give us insight into how Japan is navigating what Moe calls super, super aging in Japanese rural communities. Like many countries, Japan has experienced urbanization alongside a rapidly aging society, has hit rural Japanese communities particularly hard. The definition of a superaging society actually originated in Japan and is a community where more than 21% of the population is older than 65.
Ellen Wolter:And yet Simona and Moe are working in rural communities where more than 60% of the community are older adults. As a comparison in Minnesota, the oldest communities hover around 25 to 35% of older adults, which is similar to other states with large aging populations. The Census Bureau estimates that by 2030, one in five Americans will be 65 or older. And by 2034, older adults will outnumber children nationally. And these numbers will be even higher in many rural communities.
Ellen Wolter:And so this means that communities will need to answer new questions about how a community thrives when a significant portion, for some, a majority of its population is 65. There is much for us to learn from Japan and its aging society. Moe and Simona share how Japanese communities that are majority senior are working to revitalize and the role that urban areas play in supporting those rural communities. Moe and Simona describe how Japanese rural and urban places are really relational, and just like in The US, how one impacts the other's prosperity and revitalization. This is Ellen Wolter from the University of Minnesota Extension, and welcome to the Side by Side podcast.
Meng "Mo"Qu:When they've all had their quarrels and parted, we'll be the same as we started just to travel along singing a song Side by Side.
Ellen Wolter:Simona and Moe, welcome to Side by Side. Thanks so much for joining us all the way from Japan.
Simona Zollett:Thanks for having us.
Ellen Wolter:I'm curious, are either of you from a rural area?
Simona Zollett:So from Italy, and in particular, I'm from a very small town in the Northeast Of Italy. So it's actually close to the famous mountain area called Dolomites. And actually, of the reasons why I started doing research around rural areas was because I myself was from a rural area, which was facing this kind of issue with the population, young people living, job loss, and people being unemployed because all the local industries are disappearing and so on, because I wanted to understand what kind of dynamics were happening, but also what kind of solution that could be to this issue that rural areas were facing in my country first. And then I realized after moving to Japan that we were facing similar issues in Japan as well.
Ellen Wolter:What about you, Mo? Did you grow up in a rural area?
Meng "Mo"Qu:I wouldn't say so. I grew up from a very small city in China, small in term of 9,000,000 people. We call it small city. Then later, I go to Shanghai. They have a 25,000,000 population.
Meng "Mo"Qu:So it's quite like a mega city scale. But later, I have experience in rural China to do some volunteer work. I can compare the dramatic between the rural and urban. That really make me think a lot between these two places. That's where young people leave their hometown, go to another big city to pursue their dreams.
Meng "Mo"Qu:We cannot have a very balanced approach, right? There is always one side going to another. So rural urban, from my perspective, is quite relational.
Ellen Wolter:I agree very much, Mo. And I'm hoping that these conversations on this podcast help folks, particularly in The United States, see how relational rural and urban actually is. So and I'm really interested in the work that you've been doing on the revitalization program in Japan. And before we dig into that, I'm wondering if the both of you could share a little bit about Japan's demographics and how it's been changing over the last thirty, forty years and what what that's looked like.
Simona Zollett:Japan, first of all, is one of the most rapidly aging and shrinking societies in the world, actually. So I think only South Korea is close to Japan in terms of what's happening with the population. So population has been declining for fourteen consecutive years, so you have a steady population decline. Japan also regulates international immigration into the country very strictly. So somehow the migration flow have not balanced the kind of natural population loss that Japan is experiencing.
Simona Zollett:People aged 65 and above are now almost 30% of the whole population. So you have this kind of inverted pyramid in the demographic structure where you have increasingly more older people than younger people. And this is not just about declining population, but it's also a story of demographic imbalance between places. So most of the even larger town within Japan are declining in terms of population, but then you have Tokyo, which is like basically that's where everybody goes. It feels like all the young graduates from our more regional university then will end up in Tokyo eventually.
Simona Zollett:So you have this big black hole where old people go, and then usually then they will stay there. So you have this huge, like one third of the country lives in the greater Tokyo area. So it's really unbalanced demographically. And only maybe three or four other larger cities like Nagoya, Fukuoka, Osaka are seeing a sort of demographic increase. The other ones are all declining.
Simona Zollett:So it's a rural story, but it's also a story of the country more generally. Like even the larger cities and towns are kind of declining. So that's the picture as of now.
Ellen Wolter:I'm curious, and maybe you don't know this and that's okay, but is this kind of a story that's happening in many industrialized countries?
Simona Zollett:It depends like the way the country is somehow geographically structured in a way. So I'm thinking about Europe in particular. Europe tends, several European countries at least, tend to have a much more diffused structure when you don't have a lot of big cities. Like Italy, for example, has a lot of Rome and Milan are the two major cities, and the population is maybe two or 3,000,000, so it's not very big. And you have a lot of owner towns that are quite close to each other.
Simona Zollett:So the population is diffused more evenly in the territory among smaller settlements. So you don't have this huge concentration in specific single mega cities. But maybe Asia is different. Maybe Asia has pattern that's much more similar to Japan, like China, for example.
Meng "Mo"Qu:Yeah, China has three major cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. They basically absorb different north, middle, central, and south population into one area. So I think, recently, Chinese government also very emphasized on Asian society. So they're basically learning a lot from Japan. So in terms of population comparison, China now equals Japan in 1990.
Meng "Mo"Qu:So they already use the word Asian society. But if you look at Japan's demographic in urban area, the definition for super Asian society is 21%, but a lot of the community we are studying is more than 60%. How do you define that? Super, super, super, super aging, I would say.
Ellen Wolter:Mhmm. Well, some so some of
Simona Zollett:the excuse me. Some of
Ellen Wolter:the rural communities you're working with are more than 60% over the age of 65. Is that right? Wow. That's really incredible.
Meng "Mo"Qu:Mhmm.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. That that's really a helpful comparison. That is less common in The United States for sure. And is the draw into Tokyo, the megacity, is it primarily work? Is that what is bringing people into Tokyo?
Simona Zollett:Well, it's definitely work. That's the probably biggest or most important reason why people would go because there's so many jobs available in Tokyo. All the industries are there. All the businesses are there. But also there's this aura of Tokyo, you know, the mega city, everything is happening there.
Simona Zollett:You can have anything you want. There's a lot of entertainment, culture. Like anything you could possibly want is happening in Tokyo. So it's understandably a big draw for young people maybe coming from more rural or regional areas who are like kind of fascinated by the aura that Tokyo has as a place. That kind of lets people also forget a lot of the inconveniences of living in Tokyo.
Simona Zollett:Like, you have tiny apartments, like the tiniest apartment you can possibly imagine, really high rents, long commutes, but people are willing to put up with these kind of things, at least especially younger people. So that's what has been happening.
Ellen Wolter:Are the opportunities, the job opportunities declining in rural areas as well? Is that also part of the imbalance, if you will?
Meng "Mo"Qu:I would say this from infrastructure perspective. For elderly people, they care more about hospital. And for young generation with family, with kids, they care about education. A lot of schools start to decline. After school is gone, we will lose the 30 to first 40 generation first, they will move out.
Meng "Mo"Qu:And the older people, they will eventually live in the city, in an apartment near a hospital, in case they cannot become healthy, so they have to go back to this, move away to city. That's also all migration at the later stage. So I don't know how the situation in The United States, in Japan. Some of the cases, they don't have enough clinic, so regularly they send doctor every once a week to each community, but it's apparently not enough. All locals have to take the bus two or three hours, in total, like four hours in return to just go to hospital.
Ellen Wolter:Yeah. That's becoming much more of an issue in rural communities in The United States is health care. Yeah. One of the things you wrote in your article about the revitalization program is with the rapid demographic decline, many communities are facing the possibility of vanishing in the coming decades. And I wondered when you write vanishing, that's a big leap.
Ellen Wolter:Right? A community that vanishes. Can you describe a little bit about what this looks like for a community, and and has that already happened in some places in Japan? And now that you're describing to me that in some communities, 60% of people are older than 65, I see what you maybe mean by this. But could you maybe just elaborate a little bit more on on vanishing and what that looks like?
Simona Zollett:So actually we use this word because it was used in So in 2014, there was a very influential report written by a think tank. It's called the Masuda Report after the person who wrote it. And basically he did this research like about the demographic trends into the future in rural communities around Japan. And what he found, or his working group found about this process is that now, unfortunately, I don't remember the exact statistics, but that about maybe 60% of rural communities in Japan, looking or he at the municipality level, were likely to vanish by 2,040 or 50, so
Meng "Mo"Qu:much. 125. Forty, forty.
Simona Zollett:Forty, forty. And that had a really big kind of impact on Japanese society. It was picked up by politicians, the media. So again, actually became the reason why the then Abe administration started their so called Chiho Sosei policy, which is their regional revitalization policy officially. So again, because this report came out and it said, okay, if you're not going to do something, most of the settlements in Japan will disappear in thirty to forty years because simply the people will age and die out, and then there will be nobody left in the community.
Simona Zollett:So it's a literal sort of vanishing in the terms that the population itself is going to be gone in a few decades because of aging. So that's why we use that term. It's a well known and established concept in Japanese rural studies. And in a way that report has been criticized as well, like the way they did their statistic calculation, but also other, the way they were thinking about what it means for a settlement to become depopulated. And for example, they were focusing on the presence of young women.
Simona Zollett:And that drew a lot of criticism because they were saying, okay, you're seeing women only in their value for having children and maintaining the local population, which ignores the fact that a lot of young women are going out of rural areas because they're facing a lot of misogyny or kind of gender imbalance. They don't have a lot of opportunities. So that's one of the reasons why young women are actually living in rural areas. And yeah, that was the reason why we used that specific word. It is what is happening.
Simona Zollett:Like if you drive around rural Japan, you will come across a lot of smaller settlements that are basically nearly abandoned. Maybe there's one or two people left living, and once those people leave, the whole settlements will be gone. You see a lot of abandoned collapsing houses. The abandoned houses in Japan is a huge issue in itself. So like, it's very visible even as you go around rural Japan.
Ellen Wolter:So it a it is a literal reality that there are communities that are are vanishing in a way or being are being abandoned because there are no people.
Meng "Mo"Qu:Maybe I can give a quick example. One of our training is go to a community called Niguo in Simonae Perfecture. It's a pure depopulation community. Our assignment is try to redesign a community hub for a small community, six small community, they are shrinking enough, they don't have enough infrastructure, they have to combine six small village into one new village. So therefore, how to design a new community hub can basically serve with infrastructure, including transportation function, to sustain the remaining population needs.
Meng "Mo"Qu:How do we smartly use those people to continue running this time? That's already back to ten years ago. Then later, I have another during our fieldwork, we have another encounter. Like a lot of town, a lot of village, you can see like a lot of houses after five years, they're back to nature. They start declining.
Meng "Mo"Qu:So for some lucky community, they receive government support. If they are beautiful enough, they become heritage, but the government only support this funding to run away the looking of the town. Therefore, the inside of the house is still quite semi like abandoned. So we see a lot of these kind of cases, very interesting, very beautiful looking, but nobody, more than half the house are empty, nobody living inside. So it's a beauty and set, that kind of atmosphere.
Ellen Wolter:Is there much is there much tourism in Japanese rural areas? I'm thinking about, you know, the folks, for example, in our metropolitan area in Minneapolis, Saint Paul, which is in no way as big as Tokyo, Tokyo. But, you know, there are folks that want to get out of the city to to be in a peaceful, quiet place. Is there anything like that in Japan? Sort of rural tourism, if you will?
Meng "Mo"Qu:Yeah. Dramatically number increased for inbound tourism in Japan. But the current issue, those people are only focused on the major urban area. There is a potential for them to visit rural countryside, but there's a lot of barriers, language barriers, transportation, inconvenience, so therefore in the rural area, they want tourism. Every town want tourism.
Meng "Mo"Qu:Almost all the towns think about tourism as the last kind of backup industry after their first and second industry collapse. Everybody want to do hospitality, but a lot of this area never have any experience. They have no food in the evening, no restaurant, and not a lot of accommodation. So therefore, how to do tourism in this kind of It's not that easy. And okay, another state is in some rural area, the youngest guesthouse owner is 86 years old.
Meng "Mo"Qu:How do we So do with
Simona Zollett:Japan itself tried to encourage tourists in rural areas for, has been trying to encourage tourism in rural areas for a long time. So even domestic, I'm talking about domestic tourism specifically. So there was a movement starting from the eighties where they had this big campaign to get urban people to go more to like smaller destination in the countryside. In Japan, until recently, there was not such a strong pull towards nature, this idea of wanting to escape the city. Also Japanese people, I mean, it's a little bit of a stereotype, but it's actually quite true that Japanese people don't really take long vacations.
Simona Zollett:So there's not a lot of travel. They don't really travel that much. So when they travel, and it used to be in the past that people, when they travel, they travel in big groups, maybe go overseas with their company and then come back. So again, the Japanese government had been trying to encourage tourism into rural areas. They developed a lot of infrastructure.
Simona Zollett:That was the bubble period in the '80s and '90s, and then the bubble kind of burst and a lot of these projects were abandoned. Like now, if you go around the Japanese countryside, you see these huge hotels or golf courses in the middle of nowhere that are now completely abandoned. So there was also a failed rural tourism development that we see a lot. Like the remains of it are still very visible. And abandoned theme park.
Simona Zollett:Yeah, abandoned theme where park in the middle it's really like hard to build sometimes. From the 2000 onwards, there has been a stronger feeling, okay, we want to rediscover the countryside. We want to enjoy nature in rural areas. But I think that's more, you know, there are a few hotspots that are very famous for nature tourism. Around Tokyo, there are many of them, like Nikko, Kamakura, they're quite famous and quite touristy.
Simona Zollett:The rest of the country doesn't really get that many tourists. And the last push of the government has been to try to get, so as Moe was saying before, the inbound tourism, so foreigners coming to Japan has been increasing dramatically, but they only go to the major cities. They do the usual Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, whatever. And they don't go to rural areas because of time, of course, but also accessibility is a big issue.
Ellen Wolter:One of the things you noted in your article, Simona and Mo, is that more commonly in East Asian countries, you said that there's a focus on rural revitalization, which is different from rural development, in that it implies the need to address rural depopulation and decline. And so I'm wondering if you can just share with me a little bit about that distinction and how you see that distinction between the two of those.
Meng "Mo"Qu:I think it really depend on each region, also each scholar, how they frame it. Right? Develop means adding new things, adding layers. Revitalization, in my opinion, is more about brain Something new while keep something tradition. But how do we maintain this balance is extremely important.
Meng "Mo"Qu:It's like a lot of traditional Japanese architect, by years, they basically changed 100%, even 200% the material. They just still looks like the original one. The way say that's the original or continuation of the culture. So it really depends on what the most important value can carry down by people. So a lot of the practice is also done in this kind of way.
Meng "Mo"Qu:Revitalization in Japan, rural Japan, could mean bring young people back and do something for the community, and also for themselves as well. It could also means create new jobs, bring economy kind of revitalization, or bring something extra. So yeah, I think it's really different compared with, for example, in China, it's more about making something new. Making something new then, and what happened. But I don't know, Chinese rural is totally different concept because they more treat rural as agriculture sector and unit.
Meng "Mo"Qu:But Japan still carry a lot of original culture how to continue this practice. For example, like a festival and events. A lot of festivals cannot continue. In our case, they rely on a lot of volunteers from nearby. So two thirds of the festival participants are borrowed population.
Meng "Mo"Qu:In that case, what is revitalization? Just continue this practice, this event, and festival is more important than anything else, even they are not local.
Simona Zollett:If I may add, I think, I mean, development in general or rural development is, I would say, the older term, kind of, it's a matter of opinion and viewpoint, I think, but it also carries some negative connotations. If you talk about same as you talk about developed and developing countries, this kind of sense that development, if you need development, it means that there's something you're lacking. So the community or the place is lacking something, and you have to create and develop the place somehow.
Meng "Mo"Qu:Which,
Simona Zollett:I mean, it does make sense if you think about the context in which rural development was created as a concept and as a policy practice and so on. It was, again, creating infrastructure in rural areas that were needed, building schools, building hospitals, building infrastructure, creating jobs, and so on. And these things are still needed in many places. But again, the context of revitalization is more, it gives more of the sense of a place that somehow has already developed. I would say rural Japan within the country is a developed context.
Simona Zollett:They didn't have anything that was lacking. They had all the needed infrastructure. They had the jobs. They had the social services, the schools, the hospitals, and so on. But then because of this demographic decline, you're starting to lose these things.
Simona Zollett:You lose the infrastructure, you lose the schools, you lose the hospitals, but you also lose the people. So you basically lose what is making a community a community itself. So you lose both infrastructure and the people that are in the community. So basically you're losing the vitality of the community. And the idea of revitalization is bringing this vitality back to it.
Simona Zollett:And that can happen in many different ways, of course, but that is the, I think that's the essence of the difference between the two costs.
Meng "Mo"Qu:So in my class, I often tell students, it's like a stove. If we're only looking at the ash, we can never enjoy the warmth. So with rebanalization, exactly like that. A lot of things will be lost eventually, so it really depends on what the fire can carry on. Each region will have a very different thing remaining to the rest of the area.
Meng "Mo"Qu:So I think that's very different compared with development. And I actually more prefer The UK contact, the user regeneration. They're generating something extra. That's also connect to popular term in tourism, regenerative tourism. We bring something plus back to the community.
Meng "Mo"Qu:It's not only recover something back to the good old days, but also generate some new value everybody can enjoy for future.
Ellen Wolter:Hi, folks. We had such a fantastic and long conversation that we couldn't fit it all in this week. Stay tuned next week for the second half of the conversation with Simona and Moe. They talk about Japan's local revitalization cooperator program, which funds people to move to depopulating rural communities for up to three years to support revitalization efforts. We'll see you next week.
Ellen Wolter:Thank you for listening to Side by Side. We welcome your emails at sidebyside@umn.edu. 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. You can find episodes of side by side wherever you get your podcasts.
Ellen Wolter:I'm Ellen Wolter, and this is side by side.