Takadai Meadows at Niseko

Would the last farmer to leave Japan please turn out the lights…?

Revitalising Rural Japan Forum

Bringing the people to the food: Using agri-tourism and organic farming to save Japan’s countryside and food production

Sunday, 6 July 2008, 11 AM to 3:30 PM

Takadai Meadows, Konbu Village, Niseko, Hokkaido

EVENT SCHEDULE

The supply shock to global food production and skyrocketing food prices have created a sense of crisis in world agricultural production not seen since the 1970s. But even the issue is discussed at the highest level during the July 2008 G8 Summit in Hokkaido, Japan and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon warns that global food production must increase 50% by 2030 to ward off starvation, farmers in Japan are abandoning their homesteads and desperate rural towns are offering free land to settlers in the first time since the 19th century.

By 2035, less than a generation from now, Japan’s ruralities are projected to lose 11.78 million people. The emptying of the countryside through aging and migration to cities is causing ruin in rural towns and the loss of national heritage. For example, the town of Ogama in Ishikawa prefecture, situated in an “impossibly beautiful valley…a rare glimpse of a lost Japan” by The Economist (London), voted to sell the entire municipality to a Tokyo industrial waste company after shrinking to just eight residents. ³ It looks to be the first community in Japan to vote itself out of existence! Against this backdrop, who will man the farms and grow Japan’s food?

At this rate, future farmers will not be Japanese. Japan’s food self-sufficiency rate is now a mere 40%, the lowest in the developed world. Yet arable land in Japan is already going fallow from disuse. For the first time in Japan’s history after Hokkaido’s colonization a century ago, Hokkaido towns such as Yakumo and Shibetsu are offering free land if people build a house and settle there–a steep comedown from Japan’s ‘Bubble Economy’ heyday barely two decades ago, when the nation’s Imperial Palace Grounds alone were once rumored to be worth more than all of Canada. Without a major change, Japan could become a dichotomous land of overcrowded cities surrounded by ghost towns, an island nation dependent on an imported supply of food and vulnerable to famine.

In rich countries, farmers seeking to boost their incomes have welcomed the marriage of rural tourism and agriculture. Entire regions of France, New Zealand, Australia and the United States now thrive with harvests of tourists as well as crops. One unhoped-for effect of the prosperity generated by rural tourism has been to restore continuity to farming families. Grandchildren of farmers in Australia’s Margaret River wine region, for instance are returning to the countryside drawn by lifestyle and prosperity now enjoyed by their grandparents, reversing the loss of a generation to the cities in the 1960s and 1970s.

This has yet to occur in Japan, where tourism and tourist promotion focuses on hotspots and venues: touring Hokkaido’s wine country is unknown; the Kyushu tea estates would make great homestays.It is within this context that we would like to introduce Takadai Meadows. Led by local real estate and development company RidgeRunner Architectural Design & Development, a consortium of concerned Japanese and international residents are working together to promote Niseko and Hokkaido as an agri-tourism region. Takadai Meadows is the site of a former golf course development that is being converted into an organic farm which will supply an onsite agricultural tourism business. The venture promises to make a new type of rural farm that is both profitable and a preferred lifestyle.

The invitation-only publicity event features leading commentators on tourism and rural Japan, including Alex Kerr, Bruce Gutlove, and Homma Yasunori. Their profiles follow below. Together, we are advocating a new course for Japanese agriculture and tourism–bringing the people to the food: chi-san chi-shou, local production for local consumption. Having local, organic-grown food means fresher, more nutritious ingredients and more profitable
ingredients and revitalised local economies to ameliorate, if not stem, the exodus to Japan’s already overcrowded major urban areas.

We hope this event and project will promote agri-tourism as a way of restoring the fortunes of rural
Japan, promoting Niseko as a year-round rural tourism destination, and raising awareness of the benefits that sustainable agri-tourism development brings local farming communities.

Information about the speakers:

Alex KERR was born in 1952 in Maryland, USA. A graduate of Yale University (BA Japanese Studies summa cum laude), he first came to Japan in 1964, attended Keio as a Rotary Scholar, then Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He has served as a manager and consultant on traditional Japanese arts, and deals in Japanese, Chinese, and Thai Fine Arts through his company Chiiori Ltd. His IORI Corporation in Kyoto conducts cultural programs and restores old houses. Famous for his books Lost Japan and Dogs & Demons, Kerr has also written hundreds of articles in English and Japanese. When not advising the Japanese government on tourism and restoration of rural life in Japan, Kerr makes a life between Japan and Thailand. (Photo credit: Morikawa Noboru)

HOMMA Yasunori graduated from Hokkaido University with a Bachelors degree in Agriculture Economics in 1974 and went on to Yale University where he received an M.A. in Economics in 1979. His career includes more than 20 years work in banking technology and research at the Asian Development Bank, Industrial Bank of Japan, Citigroup Japan and Ascendant. Homma-san has spent many years working on projects overseas and is the author of a wide range of technology and business books. In 2005, he purchased farm-land in Niseko and started commuting to Hokkaido every month from his base in Yokohama to start an eponymous agri-business. Homma-san graduated with an MBA in agri-business in 2007.

Bruce GUTLOVE was born in 1961, in Huntington, NY, USA. He has studied plant physiology at Cornell University, food science-enology at the University of California at Davis and holds a B.Sc. Plant Physiology cum laude from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Mr Gutlove began a career in wine at an early age, working in importing, sales, wine education, and restaurant consulting. Entering the field of wine-making he worked on several continents with renowned estates including: Trefethen Vineyards, Robert Mondavi Winery, and Cakebread Cellars in Napa, California; Veuve Clicquot-Ponsardin in France; Cape Mentelle in Western Australia; and Cloudy Bay in New Zealand. For the past 19 years he has worked as Managing Director of Coco Farm and Winery of Ashikaga, Tochigi Prefecture, Japan where he lives with his wife and five-year-old daughter.

Emcee ARUDOU Debito is a naturalized Japanese citizen born in the United States in 1965. Author of Handbook for Newcomers, Migrants, and Immigrants to Japan, and Japanese Only–The Otaru Hot Springs Case and Racial Discrimination in Japan, he is a columnist for the Japan Times and has hundreds of articles online and in print (www.debito.org). He has lived in Sapporo for 20 years.