Blizzardboy | A Kiwi in Japan

Foreigners come to Japan for as many reasons as there are brands of sake, they come looking for their own image of Japan, be it that of samurai ninjas, pokemon-ed kitty chans, or sony-ed nec’s, or tea gardened geishas.

Village Japan by Malcolm Ritchie is the anecdotal record of a British gentleman, very much into Buddhism and married to a Japanese woman and his experiences living in the rural Japanese village of Sora. Sora is located on the Japan Sea side of Japan, in Ishikawa Prefecture on the Noto Peninsula. This area was in the news earlier this year when, on March 25th 2007 a magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck the region destroying a large number of the traditional houses and buildings the region is famous for, as well as killing one person and injuring 160.

The traditional Japanese way of life and its decline is a central theme of this book. Ritchie rues the destruction of the way of life that he found on the Noto Peninsula, an agrarian way of living essentially unchanged since the introduction of rice cultivation to the Japanese archipelago.

Don’t get me wrong – being close to nature and living in cyclical harmony with nature is certainly a very valid way of life, and important too if we are to continue living on this planet in the manner we are accustomed to, however, Ritchie I think fails to point out just how hard this lifestyle really is, and therefore, why it is so unattractive to normal Japanese people in this day and age.

The anecdotes are amusing, particularly those dealing with his neighbour, the venerable Old Man Gonsaku, and the way that this book details a slice of life almost entirely unrecognizable from that lived by the majority of present day Japanese people make this book a well worthwhile adventure into the heart of Japan’s rice field past.

There is a review of Village Japan at Links.net.

# Title: Village Japan: Everyday Life in a Rural Japanese Community
# Author: Malcolm Ritchie
# Paperback: 239 pages
# Publisher: Tuttle Publishing (June 1999)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0804821216
# ISBN-13: 978-0804821216

You can pick up a copy from amazon.com by clicking here: Village Japan.