午夜剧场

This year marks the ninth year that I have been visiting Kamiyama Town in Tokushima Prefecture with students from my laboratory. Kamiyama is a hilly and mountainous area in the Shikoku Mountains with a population of less than 5,000, but it is often introduced as a leading example of regional revitalization due to various town-wide initiatives.

It all started when an old friend who had moved to Kamiyama invited me to use the town as a field for my research. I was captivated by the scenery I saw then—private houses scattered as if clinging to the steep mountain slopes unique to the Shikoku Mountains, and stone-walled terraced rice fields and vegetable plots that seemed to crawl up the mountainside. Since then, I have continued activities to investigate and record the origins and characteristics of Kamiyama's landscape.

Under the theme of "Landscapes of Daily Life," I have observed and recorded the ingenuity of daily life and livelihoods seen around private houses and gardens. I have also investigated the network of roads before they were motorized and the walking routes of residents from the perspective of "Landscapes of Roads." Every year, several students choose Kamiyama as their research theme. One student even took a leave of absence from the university to conduct research on agricultural landscapes while doing a one-year internship at an agricultural corporation in Kamiyama. A landscape is a complex overlap of a region's natural environment and the society and livelihoods of the people who live there, and it is something that continues to change. The exploration is endless.

Last year, as a basic survey for the landscape plan being formulated by Kamiyama Town, I began research to give shape to the "Kamiyama-like landscapes" that should be protected and aimed for, in a way that residents can share. Believing that regional identity does not necessarily exist objectively but rather within the people who perceive it, I decided to interview people living in the town. I was able to interview over a dozen residents of different social positions and generations for nearly two hours each. While the detailed analysis is still ongoing, I have begun to understand that common, everyday landscapes become the landscape of Kamiyama for an individual when linked to specific experiences in their lives. I also found that many people experience leaving the town to live elsewhere before returning to Kamiyama, at which point they objectify and rediscover the landscape.

It is not easy to bring students from Tokyo to Shikoku every year, but after nine years, there is no longer a reason to stop. Moving forward, the challenge is to turn the results accumulated so far into tools that more people can use.