yoryokutai steep cliffs on hand-made bamboo ladders. I spent weeks camping out in a tent along the razor-wired Greece-Macedonia border reporting on the situation when nearly 10,000 refugees were unable to pass beyond Greece and were bottlenecked in a tent village that devolved into a humanitarian disaster area. I traveled widely and eventually found fulltime reporting jobs in New York, first with The Tokyo Shimbun and later with Japan’s public broadcaster, NHK. In the years after I left JET, I was building my career and having meaningful experiences, but I frequently thought about my friends in and around Kawakami and dreamed about the idea of returning one day. This desire was augmented by the experience of feeling ground down by life in the city. As my brain fried on my daily standing commutes on New York’s decaying subway system, I wondered if my career really necessitated living in the city. In this global age of remote work where you can access the world anywhere you have an internet connection, I wondered if it would be
A JET Alumn’s Unexpected Return to Village Life
possible to continue my career in a place like Kawakami for a while. I left my job in New York and bought a one-way ticket to Japan with the goal of starting a new chapter of my career back in the Land of the Rising Sun. Shortly after making that decision, I was reading through my news feed and found a report that hit me like a punch in the gut. According to a recent study by the government of Japan, of all of Japan’s thousands of municipalities, Kawakami had been projected to be the #1 village for the highest rate of downsizing between 2019 and 2045. It wasn’t a shock to me that the village was projected to decline, but something about its becoming #1 on the list felt surreal and particularly crushing—like learning that a loved one had been diagnosed with a terminal disease. I grew a sense of determination to select Kawakami as the next place I would call home. I believed that I could make it anywhere, and I felt that if this was so, why not work in a place that could use my help. I wanted to show by example
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