Village Japan: Everyday Life in a Rural Japanese Community

by Malcolm Ritchie

In this elegiac account that is part travelogue, part memoir, British poet and writer Malcolm Ritchie recounts his and his wife's unforgettable three-year-sojourn in Sora, a remote farming and fishing village on the Japan Sea coast. Ritchie weaves together anecdotes, conversations, lyrical verses, and character studies to vividly and hauntingly evoke the rhythms of life in a traditional rural Japanese community. Underlying this portrait is the author's growing awareness that the aged inhabitants of Sora and the surrounding villages are the custodians of a fragile, barely surviving, way of life, one that is still informed by the cadences of the natural world, under the tutelage of its ancient gods. The book is a paean to a once noble culture all but effaced by Western industrial/technological materialism - the "cultural carcinogens" of the West - which Asian countries such as Japan have all too willingly embraced. Village Japan pays lyrical homage to a side of Japan rarely experienced or glimpsed by foreigners today.

Genres: Japan, Nonfiction

239 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1999

Reviews

[Smiley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first came across this 1999 compact paperback in a large Books Kinokuniya, 6th Floor at Takashimaya Times Square in Tokyo (https://www.kinokuniya.co.jp/c/store/...) in 2015, I was inexplicably amazed by its innumerable shelves of everything Japanese in English because it is the largest collections I have ever seen, highly recommended to all keen foreign Japanophiles since its English collections are far more greater than Books Kinokuniya, 7th Floor at Shinjuku in Tokyo; however, I decided not to buy it hoping to find one in one of its three Books Kinokuniya branches in Bangkok. I kept waiting but in vain. So it was my delight to see a copy in Books Sanseido in Nagoya during our visit early this month (2017). I have never read Malcolm Ritchie before so I reluctantly started reading it, thinking positively on it such as I liked its paper, its reader-friendly fonts, its maps, its topics and its glossary. While reading its first half, I asked myself to which genre it should belong and an idea popped up in my mind, it's a kind of his reminiscent memoir during his three-year stay with his Japanese wife Masako doing farming in Sora, a remote village on the Japan sea coast of Nanao Bay (opposite Noto Island) in Ishikawa Prefecture; the village is situated north of Kanazawa city. Since the name of the city has been mentioned (p. 135) in the topic of "Mr. Morishita's Treasure," I wonder how far it is from Kanazawa to Sora. Moreover, on June 10-11, our family visited Kanazawa famous for its tourist attractions for instance: Kenrokuen Garden, Hagashi Chaya District, morning market, etc., I would like to know the distance; according to Tundra Rob who answered my query via Yahoo Answers, from Kanazawa to Sora the direct distance is about 77 kilometers and 114 kilometers by the shortest road route.

I found reading this memoir a bit demanding since it's different from Ronald Dore's "Shinohata: A Portrait of a Japanese Village" (Allan Lane, 1978) I read three years ago. I mean this book has been narrated in topics with varied lengths. From its contents page, there are eight topics in Part One: Introduction, and forty-four ones in Part Two: Village Japan; the longest being "Mr. Morishita's Treasure" (16 pages) while the shortest that follows being "Weeping Timber" (8 lines).

Weeping Timber
A friend, whose job it had been to select different qualities of wood at a sawmill until he became blind in his forties, was sitting with us in our house one afternoon. I happened to comment on the amount of resin that had oozed out of the wood in our house since it had been built. He explained that the resin was the "wood's tears," and it should have been cleaned with saké after the house was built to make it "calm down." (p. 84)


To continue ...

[Felipe · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you want a nigh masturbatory account of an old white man's self-important "adventure" in rural Japan, of course emphasizing on the glorification of all things "traditional" and the demonization of all things "modern" and "western," this is most certainly the book for you.

I, on the other hand, struggled through a little more than half before tossing it aside (read: into my university library's return deposit) in disgust.

I shudder to think that this may be someone's first and only glimpse into rural Japanese life. Ugh.

[Kaushalya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting. This is not a sit down and read in one sitting kind of book. And I don’t think you *should* read it that way either. It has vignettes, little stories, different aspects of village life in japan. Think of it as reading anthropological notes. If you like that kind of thing - I do - this is a little gem of a book.