Kuni A Japanese Vision and Practice for Urban-Rural Reconnections

Japan Book Review: Kuni: A Japanese Vision and Practice for Urban-Rural Reconnections

Kuni: A Japanese Vision and Practice for Urban-Rural Reconnections

by Tsuyoshi Sekihara and Richard McCarthy

ISBN: 978-1-62317-731-7
North Atlantic Books, 2022
148pp; paperback

Japan's rural areas are hemorrhaging people, and those remaining are quickly aging. Many communities are being abandoned altogether. Japan's cities are too big, with increasing numbers of people living lonely, unfulfilling lives.

What to do, what to do…

Authors Tsuyoshi Sekihara and Richard McCarthy lay out their ideas for helping solve these problems, with a special emphasis on "kuni," a Japanese word which usually means "country" but in this case means "community that is small but independent."

Kuni: A Japanese Vision and Practice for Urban-Rural Reconnections

Some readers may jump the gun and guess right off the bat - with some justification - that the authors swing heavily left politically. They may wonder how long it will take before words like "systemic racism" and "climate chaos" appear. The answer is…three pages.

Still, these readers should not give up. Most of the ideas presented don't really have much of a political bent. In fact, the authors seem to, in many cases, advocate for small governmental oversight. They have some harsh words for rural politicians "whose imagination and relevance faded years ago, but whose positions remain."

There are certainly statistics to back up the claim of dying rural areas, although anybody living in Japan probably knows of the decaying of Japan's rural areas. Sekihara asserts that 300 villages disappear in Japan every year, although an attribution for this is not presented.

Boiled down, the main gist of the book is that rural Japan (and to a lesser extent, rural America) are dying and the best way to fix this is to "right size" towns to anywhere between 500 and 2,000 people and to get people in urban and rural places to reconnect personally and economically.

"The conditions needed for kuni to emerge are democracy, science and technology, transportation infrastructure, the communications revolution, a declining birthrate and aging population, a stagnation below the surface, the death of culture, and citizens dichotomized by ideology."

One of the more interesting proposals is to offer a kind of disaster insurance to people in urban areas who visit and buy products (most often rice) in rural areas. In the case of disasters - for example earthquakes and tsunamis - these urbanites will get temporary lodging and food in rural areas while their areas are rebuilt.

There are a few minor annoyances with the book. One is that that the chapters veer back and forth between the two authors, and their writing styles are not in sync. A second is that the book tends to wander into the weeds at times. Readers may ask, "what was the relevance of the last 10 pages?"

While not all readers will agree with the solutions and conclusions of the authors, at the very least there are some interesting, thought-provoking ideas presented.

Review by Marshall Hughes.

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