Stories of people heading to the city

In Showa 30-40, many young people moved from the countryside to the cities. During the period of high economic growth, the countryside underwent rapid change and decline. What did young people feel at that time when they left the countryside and headed for the city? What kind of social trends existed and what kind of atmosphere existed at the times? My father was one of those young people who came to Tokyo from Ishinomaki when he was 18 years old…

The son was a city kid who grew up in Tokyo, but due to his wife’s job, he had to move to another countryside called Ayabe City, Kyoto Prefecture. In 2021, due to the Corona disaster, I was mainly working from home, so it was easy for me to work wherever I lived, but even after moving to Ayabe, I was still facing only computers. But the view from the window of the room changed. From the room, you can see the wide sky, mountains, rice fields and fields. In recent years, many people have moved to the area because they yearn for a rural life, but the population decline that began during the period of high economic growth is still progressing rapidly. Why did people leave the countryside? Even if we recruit immigrants under the keyword of regional revitalization without knowing much about what happened at that time, nothing will change in the end. I didn’t yearn for a country life, I just came to Ayabe with my wife, but why are there fewer people? I wanted to know more about its history. It has to do with the life of my father, who died when I was a university student.

In this work, we interview people who moved from Ayabe City and its surroundings to the city in the 30s and 40s of the Showa era, and who still have their homes in the city and use it as their main base of life. By collecting their personal stories and taking a bird’s-eye view, he hopes to depict the “modern and contemporary history of the Japan countryside” from an individual perspective, which we do not know much about today.