Going back to the beginning of this 2023 project

11-2018 cultural landscape south of Echizen-city, Fukui-ken

My first impressions of Japan date to the jet's final approach into Narita on June 26, 1984. That's when the new cohort of native speakers of (USA) English in the "Monbusho English Fellow" program were being assembled for orientation to the life and work during the next 12 months. Based on a positive experience in rural Fukui-ken, I returned a few years later to improve my Japanese language skills, renew friendships, and earn enough money to cover monthly costs. Around that time I began the 7 years of graduate school, fieldwork, and dissertation writing that resulted in professional credential for teaching and research in higher education. But it was public engagement and outreach that came to mean most to my ongoing career in Japanese language and society, international education, museum studies, and visual anthropology. From 1999-2001 a fellowship at the National Museum of Ethnology allowed publication of the work found in the dissertation, as well as new work on local government and citizen groups in Fukui-ken.

Ever since learning to photograph and develop pictures as a teenager, the appeal and uses of visual communication has interested me. So a camera has usually been nearby during several stays in Japan to work, study, research, or vacation. Most recently, from 2016-2017 while employed at a friend's consulting company in Fukui-ken, I used weekends, holidays and free time some evenings or early in the morning before work to bike or walk around the surrounding valley, fanning out to explore many of the hamlets now incorporated into the city of Echizen (in its present form since 1995, before that known as Takefu). Around this time a popular TV host, Tamori, was broadcasting his long-running show, Bura Tamori, in which he visits out of the way corners of cities here and there around the islands of Japan, learning interesting details from local people at the same time that viewers do. The title of the show references the leisurely form of walking in the Japanese term, bura-bura aruku. This expression nicely sums up much of my methodology: select a destination, then allow time to wander - not restricted by itinerary or daily schedule. But instead of TV crew and research team, as well as prearranged local experts to talk to, my mode will be guided by a few principles.

During the lull in rhythm and pace of life during Covid year-1 and year-2, I daydreamed about places to trial the same semi-purposeful wandering, observant for traces of earlier times, particularly prior to the 15-years of Pacific War that Japan was engaged in. Since I know so little of the regional variety, I began with the Japanese dialect map on Wikipedia to narrow my search for cities of between 35,000 and 350,000. Excluded were the 66 cities fire-bombed during 1945 by the B-29 fleets of the USA. The logic of dialect standing for regional variety is that people who speak a similar way probably communicate most frequently, thus forming a shared pool of experience not just of words but of people, places, and things, too. Excluding the prefectures away from my chosen dialect zones, I turned to the table of cities on Wikipedia to sort by prefecture and then copy-pasting those into a spreadsheet. I could next resort by population size and remove ones with populations too big or too small, leaving just those cities in the dialect zones of the right size: "right" means practical to bicycle around. As another layer of selection, priority went to places that once were part of the Edo-period trunk routes leading to the Shogun's capital. While often the modern name differs to the one used from 1603-1867, the layout of streets and some of the original hamlets now merged into the modern city jurisdiction still bear some trace of long-ago days.

Trusting in mostly fair weather, ease of borrowing or renting a bicycle, and the availability of affordable accommodations, I will travel with just rucksack and a shoulder bag, as well as camera (Canon g9x-ii with 3x optical zoom and 1-inch sensor; advanced point-and-shoot camera). While video is not the main form of documenting the bura-bura walking and riding, the stereo-mic of the camera does allow reasonably good moving pictures, too. Printouts from online maps show the pattern of streets. Ones that are rationalized in grids indicate relatively recent development. So the places to prospect for old traces will be the parts of the map that exhibit wiggly clumps of lanes. Through this combination of visiting promising clusters of buildings on the map and visual interest spotted while wandering, the idea is to discover interesting subjects; interesting as defined as triggering commentary, serving as a visual prompt for brief writing of a paragraph or two to identify the subject or to speculate about its use and significance during its heyday and in the generations since then.

In order to make available as much of my attention as possible to looking and noticing historical traces on the cultural landscape, it will be important to get (visually, geographically, historically) familiar with the location as much as possible ahead of time so that moving from landmark to landmark, from place name to place name will be relatively effortless and automatic. Predeparture scrutinizing the mapped clusters of wiggly streets and comparing it to the satellite views of major landmarks, or possibly using "street view" (first-person photo view along main avenues) is one way to get to know the places ahead of time. Once on site and having made an initial tour around, it will be valuable to talk to a reference librarian or local history resource person at a museum or community organization to learn about historical structures from the time of early industrialization and following, 1875 to 1925, plus or minus.

Another way to make the location and its historical window of focal interest feel more personal is to scale the time and major technological features to my own genealogy. The generation of my grandparents growing up at their home was about 1900-1920. Going back one more generation to the mother and father of my grandparents is around the time frame being considered in this project. When scanning the fields and streets, projecting the childhood years and time of marrying for my great-grandparents somehow makes the landscape feel more familiar, even though my family line is not Japanese; not distant or alien. 

As for major features of the modernization in these years, the advent of rail networks laid and steam-power characterizes the first great leap forward. Those continued, but in many cases then were eclipsed by the rise of petrochemical services and products (personal transportation, light, heat) and the spread of electrical lines to run lights and motors big and small. Growing literacy, readership, and the advent of broadcast radio news and education and entertainment fitted into the next phase of industrial infrastructure and economy prosperity, mass everything: education, transportation, production, distribution, promotion, and consumption. 

In summary, I look forward to wandering and wondering at the cultural landscape of 100+ years ago that lingers here and there for those with eyes to recognize it. The project is an exercise in seeing and reflecting on context and conditions leading up to the creation and eventual abandonment or demise of the older enterprise and livelihood of its time. As the inverse of the words of speculative fiction writer, William Gibson, "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed," now I can say that the past is still here but is not evenly distributed. This is a kind of above-ground archaeology. The bura-bura 2023 project offers a way to engage in the cultural landscape across several regional centers around Japan. A similar approach may work in other societies, too. The results of the April and May 2023 forays should form a good counterpart to my two volumes from 2016-2017 in Fukui-ken, Life and Times Today in Rural Japan.