Inaka: Portraits of Life in Rural Japan

Inaka is an unusual book. It comprises eighteen essays by seventeen authors, in three hundred and five pages, with a few black and white illustrations. What unites these seventeen very different people is their love of Japan and Japanese culture. They have all lived in rural Japan for years, many have written extensively on Zen, Temples, Geisha and the World Heritage sites. What I love about this book is the varied viewpoints: the young teacher arriving hardly able to speak the language in a part of Japan so remote that even now few locals have seen an American girl before; to the old-timers who have lived in Japan for decades and are still finding fresh inspiration among the ancient temples; to those who can’t stand the draughty houses with no central heating, to those who love the snow and find the winters in the remote North exhilarating; to those who delight in the idiosyncratic public address system that wakes them in the morning and later announces the disappearance of an old person or even a dog; to one intrepid traveller who follows in Bashō’s footsteps on the narrow road to the deep North. And there is much, much more to enjoy in this wonderful book.

Stuck in the depths of COVID lockdown, this was the perfect escape into another beautiful, occasionally poignant and often entertaining world. Seeing so many perspectives on Japan from the different writers gave it a breadth of description that the usual travelogues often lack. Highly recommended.

Inaka is a collection of autobiographical writings detailing the experiences of Gaijin (‘Westerners’) living in rural Japan.Disclosure – my brother wrote one of the pieces. So I dutifully read it and told him how great it was. Then I started reading a couple of others and got sucked in. There is a real variety here – some about life as an English teacher in Japan, some about learning a traditional craft (pottery, dyeing, tea-making), some about marrying into and being part of a Japanese family, even one person training to become a Buddhist monk!What you won’t read about is living in Tokyo – the book studiously avoids big cities. Instead you will learn about the idiosyncrasies of life and people in small town Japan. The infuriating local council edicts, the bewildering superstitions and customs, the decline and sometimes resurrection of rural communities.There are eighteen chapters altogether, well-written by published authors and experienced bloggers.Having stayed with my brother’s family a few times I can vouch that reading this collection will give you a much deeper understanding of everyday life in Japan than you will get from watching a Kurosawa movie, reading a Manga, or holidaying in Tokyo and Kyoto (although I would thoroughly recommend all of these things). I often found myself laughing out loud or sagely nodding in recognition of situations and interactions the authors get themselves into.To conclude; I would thoroughly recommend this to anyone who wants an ‘unfiltered’ taste of Japan and wants to learn more about the country and people.

Discover a very different side to Japan - threatened by modernisation, but still very much in evidence in these accounts of rural life, written by non-Japanese residents. Written with affection and understanding. Revealing, instructive, and entertaining.