From social issue to art site and beyond – reassessing rural akiya kominka

ABSTRACT

Akiya or vacant houses are often perceived as threats to their neighborhood, as socio-political problems for local communities, and as objects of difficult decisions for their owners. However, recently there has been a reappraisal of their forgotten qualities and a revival in interest in such houses, especially when considered as sites of a special character suited to different types of cultural events. This article explores the implications of the use of akiya in rural communities in Japan, tracing the trajectory of change from irritating nuisance to local (touristic) attraction and art site. Furthermore, it analyzes how this shift has the potential to lead to their reassessment as valuable resources not only for the revitalization of local communities but also for private choices in everyday life. The article analyzes three specific art installations created within the framework of recurring art festivals and staged within the walls of old vacant dwellings, and the artists’ thoughts behind them, which hint at incentives for akiya use inspired by the sites. The artworks offer opportunities for interactions between residents, artists, and visitors, influencing insider and outsider perceptions of the local community, and they function as innovative playgrounds for local citizens’ and newcomers’ individual choices. Examples from the field show that the artist’s role as yosomono (outsider) ultimately has the potential to pave the way towards a more diverse and creative view of these community assets, changing the perception of the vacant house from being a bothersome and useless legacy into a resource.

KEYWORDS:

• Art festival
• akiya kominka
• artist’s involvement
• yosomono
• usage of legacies
• preservation

When I first entered Kioku no ie (House of Memory), an installation by artist Shiota Chiharu at the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale in 2018, I went around with mixed feelings. Greyish-black cobwebs made of wool yarn covered everything that had once probably been the four walls and the belongings of a home full of life. I had goose bumps despite the heat reigning outside. When I left the house, I asked the two elderly volunteers from the neighborhood, who that day where on duty stamping art festival passports, whether they did not find it spooky to spend the whole day in a house like that. They chuckled my concerns away; “not at all.”

For photographs of Shiota’s House of Memory, see: https://www.chiharu-shiota.com/house-memory-jp

Although this was not the first art installation in a formerly vacant Japanese-style house (akiya kominka) I visited, it was one that left a strong impression. It became the starting point to ponder over questions related to the power and effects of turning vacant houses into spaces for art, i.e. converting the once private, intimate, and domestic space of a home into a public space. What are the messages this can convey not only to the surrounding neighborhood but also to visitors? Given my research interest in the long-term effects of recurring events like biennial and triennial art festivals on the life quality of the people residing in the area, these different uses of vacant and abandoned spaces preoccupied my thoughts.

Kitagawa Fram, the initiator and artistic director of several renowned rural art festivals, has authored various books describing the thoughts and intentions behind his initiative. He considers reconverting and reviving an akiya kominka into an art space in a remote village as usually having a positive effect on the people in its surroundings and beyond (Kitagawa 2015, 35–62; 89–140). After more than 20 years of recurring art festivals in different towns and hamlets, some of these effects have become appreciable. Drawing from this perspective on recontextualizing and reviving akiya kominka, this article first reflects on the social and personal meanings of kominka and the related challenges of addressing the growing number of akiya. Next, by considering three examples of kominka art sites against the backdrop of societal issues regarding housing politics and traditional inheritance systems in Japan, I examine their possible influence in engaging local inhabitants as well as visitors. Such kominka spaces help revise their views of the buildings and allow for the attribution of new value to old houses, enabling the rescue of socio-culturally and regionally significant buildings from decay and demolition.

The insights presented in this article stem from fieldwork carried out during three periods: 1) seven weeks in the Tōkamachi area in Niigata Prefecture before and during the 2018 Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale (ETAT), 2) a follow-up stay of one week in 2022, and 3) three weeks at the 2019 Setouchi Triennale. In addition, I spent shorter periods in the Oku-Noto Triennale area in Ishikawa Prefecture between festivals. I conducted participant–observation during the numerous activities taking place as volunteers and other long- and short-term residents prepared for the festivals, as well as in non-festival related events taking place in shops and communal event places aimed at the locals. Such engagement also allowed me to participate in numerous conversations with residents and outsiders in informal settings. These were supplemented with interviews with community politicians and employees from the municipal administrations involved with the festivals.

The increasing number of vacant houses, or akiya, throughout Japan has been a media issue for the last decade and has recently gained momentum as the number of such houses was predicted to reach the 10-million mark in 2023. Research from the Nomura Research Institute foresees that even though one in three houses is likely to be vacant in 2033, the number of newly constructed houses will continue to far outnumber demolished ones (Nomura 2019). Japan has failed to adapt its housing policies to societal developments and its own changing needs; the result is that Japan is now a “dwelling excess society” (jūtaku kajō shakai) as Nozawa Chie terms the situation. Little is being done to address this situation despite the signs of this excess having been obvious for a long time (Nozawa 2017).

Among vacant houses, many are Japanese-style detached or semi-detached houses or (ko)minka, especially in the rural areas. They were built to last for several generations, with a wooden framework of high-quality material and supreme craftmanship. While the term kominka usually addresses houses that are more than a hundred years old, minka is used when the house is not as old but still displays an archetypical Japanese architectural appearance. Architect Yoshida Keiji notes that a minka normally includes both a family’s business workspace and its dwelling in one building. Only after World War II, when the separation of living and working spaces became the norm, relegating dwellings to spaces for living purposes only, did the use of the houses change. To differentiate them from minka, the latter are also termed chūkominka or middle-aged old houses (Manabe 2008, 236). In everyday life, however, these terms are used interchangeably. Here I use the term kominka to mean old Japanese-style houses, including those built in the early Shōwa period (1926–1989) and up until the 1970s.

Vacant houses as societal issue

Among vacant houses registered with state authorities, about 44% are detached or semi-detached whereas 56% are rental apartments and condominiums (ZKKBK 2020). The largest portion of the latter is found in the big urban areas and Okinawa; the former are the norm in rural towns and remote villages. For the local communities and the immediate neighborhoods containing these houses, akiya are seen to be a nuisance because of both realistic and hypothetical fears related to them. Media articles call them haunted houses, obake yashiki, and feed concerns regarding dirtiness, unwanted visitors – of both the human and animal kind, and fire hazards. Besides, akiya present economic challenges – vacant dwellings reduce the real estate value of an area and, consequently, surrounding buildings. As Nozawa Chie points out, “The increase in vacant houses does not only have a major impact on the day-to-day living environment, but also on dwindling populations in regional areas, falling land prices, and decreasing tax revenues” (Nozawa 2022).

Recently, land prices have started showing a slight increase after decades of decline. This is also true for regional areas with good public transport connections to larger urban centers, such as Nagano Prefecture. However, despite plenty of vacant housing and well-developed online platforms, called akiya banku, that advertise available buildings for rent or sale, local governments’ efforts support the construction of new housing and apartment complexes because these are a secure investment to attract newcomers. Tōkamachi City, for instance, links the regional webpage of the akiya banku to its official homepage offering financial and practical support to people who are thinking of relocating (https://www.city.tokamachi.lg.jp). Under the motto “I’m home”, the city administration helps establish contacts between akiya owners and potential renters or buyers and helps relocators find suitable local companies and workmen for renovation projects or to support do-it-yourself home repairs. Furthermore, financial support is offered to cover some of the expenses or the monthly rent for a certain period. Despite these initiatives, investing in new housing or in the complete modernization of used but more recently built houses is thought to be more effective in attracting young urbanites who wish to relocate without having to make a long-term commitment to a specific rural area.

The well-known fact of a rapidly shrinking society is only one side of the coin that marks the increase of unused or abandoned dwellings. The reasons why these buildings are not allocated for other uses or torn down are manifold. The Japanese real estate tax system has been an important factor. It is considerably more expensive to leave a potential building lot empty than to leave an unused building on it. The system is currently under revision, which will lead to higher expenses for houses left unoccupied compared to the current system. Furthermore, since the 1950s, Japanese housing policies have consistently supported new housing construction. This trend increased after the economic bubble burst in the 1990s, when the development criteria for controlled urbanization of farmland areas were relaxed. Such relaxation led to over-construction of new towns both in urban outskirts and in catchment rural areas for adjacent cities (Nozawa 2022). According to a survey by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication, this resulted in the total number of houses exceeding the total number of households by 16% in 2018: “[…] The state has made it easy to construct housing, and municipalities have continued the excessive relaxation of controls on developments as they attempt to increase the population. […] House buyers have bought without carefully considering life in the distant future when they are old and no longer able to drive, or the risk of the house standing vacant after inheritance” (Nozawa 2022).

On the culturally embedded side, Japanese tend to prefer not to rent or buy used dwellings. This means that about half the vacant houses and apartments are those intended for rent but that encounter difficulties in attracting tenants. The reasons why the other half of vacant houses are left empty are, according to the results of a regularly conducted survey by the ministerial Housing Bureau among akiya owners, of a private nature. A vast majority uses them for storage, but long-term hospitalization or work-related transfers, intentions to rebuild that have not yet materialized, waiting for better times/necessity to rent or sell, or use as secondary residences are other prominent reasons (Housing Bureau 2020, 164).

Obstacles encountered by municipal governments and NPOs trying to initiate actions to revive a community using vacant houses in different ways are less quantifiable but equally important. They encounter a broad variety of socially embedded obstacles when aiming to bring vacant houses to renewed use, often depending on the owners’ life stage. Owners hesitate because they do not want to be bothered with tenant issues, due to unfinalized inheritance processes, and most importantly decisions regarding the family altar and grave (Katō 2017, 139f.).

Vacant houses and the meaning of home

Leaning on human geographers Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling, I conceptualize a home as a place and as a spatial imaginary that may evoke a sense of belonging as well as alienation, but which is central to the construction of people’s identities nevertheless (Blunt and Dowling 2006, i). Home thus entails a sense of attachment, a space to which socio-spatial relations and emotions are bound. The home includes the physical building, its surroundings, as well as the neighborhood (Blunt and Dowling 2006, 2–3). Thus, a home is defined by its use; when it becomes an akiya it turns into a burden, because there is always the feeling that one is not acting with respect towards the ancestors’ wishes who would want the heirs to comply with the ancestral rites. Exemplifying this, the anthropologist Christoph Brumann in his study on old townhouses, or machiya, in Kyoto, reports on owners whose sense of loyalty towards the house as a space of familial memory was so strong that they would rather demolish the building than sell it to strangers or allow it to be changed from private to public space (Brumann 2001, 183).

Disposal is also a complex and ambivalent act when it involves material objects intertwined with one’s life and social relationships. In his analysis of the disposal of unused or no longer necessary objects, sociologist Kevin Hetherington suggested that it is the sentimental value people attribute to things that they have had a long-term relationship with that keeps people from getting rid of them. “[…] Disposal is about placing absences and this has consequences for how we think about social relations” (Hetherington 2004, 159). In her research on gifts in Japan, Inge Daniels found that people’s reluctance to dispose of things is determined by a feeling of duty rather than emotional attachment: “The duty people felt towards objects is grounded in an awareness of the interrelatedness of human and non-human entities. In other words, things offer their service to people who, in return, should be thankful and treat objects respectfully” (Daniels 2009, 396).

Similarly, the house in Japan is not just a physical dwelling for those currently living in it but also a place to worship the ancestors and a place for the ancestors’ spirits to return. Vacant kominka often remain home to both a Buddhist altar (butsudan) and a Shinto house shrine (kamidana), meaning that the ancestors and the Shinto deities are still residing in or visiting the place. Morally, the owners have the duty to take care of the house, but in practice, that is not always possible, an issue of concern for all my interlocutors.

Although differing in degree depending on these variables, the owners of an akiya kominka must deal with both: the sentimental value as well as the duty and responsibility towards the handed down item and its contents. An inherited house is a gift from the ancestors, but it comes with responsibilities. If children and grandchildren have no immediate use for the house, they still have the moral obligation to keep it until they find a proper way to satisfy expectations regarding their obligations. In the aging society of Japan, this can become a long process. There are, however, signs of changes in the years to come. As my interlocutors also made clear, younger generations come up with more diverse and pragmatic interpretations of tradition, lineage, and ancestral wishes. In the meanwhile, home remains the space to revere ancestors; the family grave is also often placed in its proximity. To properly close the house and/or the family grave, and in order to avoid the house becoming vacant, a large range of legal actions as well as ritual ceremonies would have to be undertaken. Furthermore, when deciding how to dispose of a vacant dwelling, social relations with the ancestors, the living family members, and the neighborhood community must be respected no matter whether the driving force is duty or emotional attachment (Takamura 2015, 7).

The line between vacant and abandoned is also a nuanced issue for municipalities. A house can be abandoned due to the inability of the owner to take care of it for health or economic reasons. But, as some of my interlocutors, who neither opted for using the akiya nor tearing it down, voiced, a house can be left vacant for meaningful purposes as well: leaving the house to decay “naturally” is also thought to be an appropriate alternative way for demonstrating reverence to the ancestors when other solutions are not considered acceptable. Thus, even assuming regional differences, the overall politico-economic interests of the municipalities are less of a barrier to the use of vacant housing than the individual social and emotional concerns.

The rural kominka as art space – three case studies

Probably the most famous and most studied example of the revival of a village that seemed to be doomed to oblivion is Honmura on Naoshima island in the Seto Inland Sea, which has a history going back to the Edo Period (1603–1867). The Ie Purojekuto (House Project) was initiated at one of the first regional art festivals taking place in Japan in the Seto Inland Sea on Naoshima (Miyamoto 2018). With the active support and involvement of villagers, vacant dwellings that were part of the townscape of the region as well as other buildings central to the village’s everyday life, such as shrines and temples, were converted into permanent art pieces and exhibition sites. The success of the project laid the groundwork for further reuse of old buildings as cafes, restaurants, tourist accommodation, and community centers (Miyamoto 2018, 135–138). Alongside the island’s top-class international museums and implementation of the Setouchi Triennale Art Festival, Honmura resurged as a magnet for visitors from inside and outside Japan. Since then, art festivals in the Japanese countryside make a point of using vacant kominka and closed-down or seldom-used municipal facilities for permanent or temporary art installations. This is in line with founder and artistic director Kitagawa’s motto: to make use of existing objects and values, and to convert something perceived as a nuisance into a resource. For the community’s residents in particular, the revival, maintenance, and new use of vacant buildings on the verge of forfeiture symbolizes newly added value (Kitagawa 2015, 45–62).

I will now turn to three examples of art works installed in kominka that I have experienced during my fieldwork. The first example is Kioku no ie by Shiota Chiharu, which I introduced in the beginning. This work symbolizes one of the landmark projects of the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, the Vacant Houses Project (Kitagawa 2014, 82–107). This project aims to fill no-longer-inhabited houses in all hamlets of the Echigo-Tsumari area with new life as artworks. However, rather than just putting to use some local building material that no one seemed to need anymore, the artworks are meant to become instruments for beholders to reconsider the lives that once had been led in those dwellings and to make visitors think more broadly about the meaning of life and living (Uchida 2020)

The house Shiota chose for her work Kioku no ie had been a family-run silkworm farm. The black woolen yarn that I had interpreted as cobwebs was stretched from point to point in many directions all over the space. The installation had been made for the 2009 version of the Triennale, so when I saw it nine years later, it had gathered its share of dust that made it look silvery in the scant sunlight falling through the hazy windows. Knowing about the house’s background, standing in a rural area visibly marked by depopulation with practically no living soul on the streets, I found that my instinctive interpretation was that of a realistic project depicting the world of a home left vacant ages ago with utensils and belongings left behind, slowly withering away. However, as the volunteers from the neighborhood taught me, the opposite was the case. The art installation had not only re-enlivened the neighborhood thanks to festival-related events, but it has also given them frequent reasons to leave their houses, such as neighborhood meetings in preparation for the festival. These meetings would lead to other conversations and gatherings, including talks about memories, neighborhood stories, and local history.

Shiota creates similar installations with cobweb-like entanglements of yarn at almost all the large art festivals in Japan. The intention behind them is always an attempt to revive memories of the local area. In an interview, Shiota explains that while exploring human existence, at the end of which death is inevitably waiting, life is an uncertain journey that is kept together through the web of time. She uses yarn to express this sentiment in three-dimensional space. By connecting material elements, presumably symbolizing memories, with wool threads, she weaves lifelines: “Most of my work is about the memory in absent things […] or the existence in absence. […] Black wool symbolizes the universe, the deep, deep space or something like the night sky, not to paint it monochrome black. Within this black, there is a deeper world like the cosmos’ big bang, the beginning of the universe” (Lærkesen 2022). Despite her busy schedule as an artist with several ongoing projects around the world, Shiota spends as much time as possible and needed in the places where she is to exhibit an installation. For the Kioku no ie installation, the artist asked people in the neighborhood to participate by providing “objects of everyday life they had stored away because they did not use them anymore but throwing them away would be a shame” (Uchida 2020). By placing these objects (furniture, books, kimono, geta-sandals, etc.) in the house and connecting them to the cosmos with black yarn, she helped reconnect the formerly lifeless building with its neighborhood and re-establish a sense of ownership and responsibility for it within the community. Although my local interlocutors from the Echigo-Tsumari Art Festival supporting volunteer group, named Kohebitai, repeatedly told me that they did not really understand why these installations were designated as artworks, the inherent meaning as well as having been involved did appeal to them.

Shiota herself, reflecting on her aims in this type of artwork, has said: “I consider my artwork a kind of momentary philosophy (shunkan tetsugaku). [I want to make it so] that the moment people enter my artwork, they instantly think about what it means to live […] what it means to die. This is the kind of artwork I intend to create” (Lærkesen 2022).

Another artist, Nakashima Kayako, converts vacant houses for Echigo-Tsumari, Setouchi and Oku-Noto Triennales into illuminated buildings. To do so, she perforates the roof and walls of houses with holes, into which she inserts acrylic tubes to channel light. One of them is the Akarui Ie (Bright House) in Suzu. Inside the house, in addition to the lit-up holes, a mass of used lightbulbs has been hung from the ceiling, resembling a chandelier. During daytime, the holes allow the light outside to enter otherwise dark rooms. At night, the lights turned on inside beam outward into an otherwise almost deserted village.

For pictures of Nakashima’s work, see: https://oku-noto.jp/ja/artist_nakashima.html

The location of Akarui ie is Suzu, at the tip of Noto Peninsula and the center of the Oku-Noto Triennale. With only 14,000 inhabitants, it is the smallest municipality on Honshu. Commenting on this isolated area, Nakashima notes:

[Expressions such as] ’A house with light’ (hikari no aru ie), ‘a bright house’ (akarui ie), ‘bright future’ (akarui mirai) are often used. The combination of light and house is often used as synonymous with life’s abundance and joy. Suzu is a district in quest for a ‘bright future’, it fumbled around with both geographical issues in relation to the potential construction of a nuclear power plant, and with its history. Now, wind turbines spin on its mountains, salt can be earned from the sea, festivals are taking place in town (sato). (Nakashima 2021)

She continues by pondering the fact that this kind of harsh area should inspire thoughts about the meaning of “abundant/abundance”. “By simultaneously narrating light (hikari) as a symbol of hope (kibō no tokuchō) and making use of it as a symbol of hope, I want to create a quiet place, where one can think about the value of life” (Nakashima 2021). The oversized chandelier made of broken light bulbs gathered from local residents symbolizes the artist’s disagreement with the perception that the invention of the electric light equaled a bright future. The artistic statement therefore also honors local citizens’ engaged resistance against the building of a nuclear power plant on the tip of the peninsula, a tug-of-war with energy corporations and prefectural politics that started in 1975 and lasted for almost three decades before it was finally relinquished.

The third example is Murata Nozomi. In her work entitled Manaura no keshiki (Remains in the Mind’s Eye), Murata filled a 300-year-old vacant kominka on Takamijima in Setouchi with fine threads of stainless aluminum filament. Like Shiota, Murata also draws in spaces, and through her installation, she expresses her perception of memory, time, and existence that the old building exudes. I met her briefly when I visited the site during the festival in 2019. Like the two other artists, she was driven by the wish to somehow “illustrate” the non-visible thoughts and feelings one carries inside. The aluminum filament welling out of the room is a way of making thoughts and emotions visible.

There are no permanent residents living on the island anymore. People involved with the festival only come there during the daytime and during the preparation before the festival, the implementation, and again to clear the site at the end of the festival. Because Murata was still a student at the Kyoto University of the Arts when she prepared her installation on Takamijima, she had the time to stay throughout the project and cooperated intensively with craftsmen to prepare the house for the installation. She also worked with the volunteers, who oversaw the bending of the thousands of meters of thin wire into the shapes she needed. Her young age and thus perceived vulnerability (whether real or not) presumably also led to the almost familiar relation she had managed to establish with the volunteer supporters for the Setouchi Art Festival named Koebitai.

For examples of Murata’s Setouchi artwork, see: https://setouchi-artfest.jp/artworks-artists/artists/328.html

In an interview, Murata describes her lack of creative motivation during the pandemic restrictions (Murata 2020). It had been a very hard time for the artist, and for a long time, she was unable to produce artistic work. This made her realize how important contact and interaction with other people were to her work. When talking or listening to somebody, she realized, even a casually or unintentionally dropped word works as a source of inspiration and leads to a new and feasible project.

Rural art festivals have expanded over the past two decades. As the festivals have developed, the ways artists use, artistically interpret, and display the past lives and work they meet in the vacant buildings and the hamlets that host their art works, combined with the exchanges with resident volunteers and their direct or indirect contributions to the installations, have influenced people’s ways of perceiving vacant kominka.

Shiota’s way of commemorating and remembering the life and work lived in the house, Nakashima’s request for contributions from the residents to become part of her installation and her celebration of their fight against the nuclear powerplant, or Murata’s involvement of volunteer helpers to bend the filament down memory lane, have proven effective. This way of showing respect to common local history and setting a stage for residents’ get-togethers to revive family stories, leads to talks about personal experiences in and around one’s house and home, and a reassessment of the lives lived in them, as well as the wishes and prospects of the late inhabitants. Furthermore, installations of this type are more likely to evoke such reactions than projects for which the vacant house merely serves as an exhibition room. In the latter cases, the type of participation and involvement from volunteers induces less emotional commitment. When the volunteers’ role is that of outside helpers rather than playing an integrated part that is visible in the final artwork, the emotional sentiment towards it also remains weaker.

Kominka artists as yosomono (outsiders) – inspirational sources for reconsidering housing options

According to Kamada Yumiko, the term yosomono means anybody from elsewhere, regardless of gender, age, or nationality, who enters and possibly establishes her- or himself in a community. Kamada, the founder and chairperson of ONE-Glocal, a company committed to strengthening regional and local small-scale production by supporting producers to reach out to a larger market, believes that yosomono will become the key promoters of a renewal of local production possibilities in regional communities and therefore will play a key role in Japan’s development not only locally, but on a nationwide scale (Kamada 2021). Kamada’s basic argument is that rural regions can draw from existing small-scale skilled craft resources, famous for carefully crafted products but lacking the necessary know-how to connect to and deal with a wider market essential to do business in contemporary society. It is here that yosomono come into play, with their potential to act as a bridge between the producers and consumers of crafts, beyond regional boundaries. To lead these local communities blessed with rich cultural capital – handed-down manufacturing skills and expertise – into a viable future, yosomono need, she argues, to become part of long-term and sustainable collaborations (Kamada 2021, 5–7).

The artists using kominka and other vacant buildings as space for art installations play a similar part as yosomono. They too come from the outside and establish themselves, even if only for a shorter period, in the local community. Their artworks function as a bridge between the kominka and the residents, the art site, and the visiting audience. For the involved residents, the three cases I have discussed uncover the hitherto neglected potential of the vacant kominka, inducing new ways of appreciation and challenging ingrained views on how to use them. Such a process is furthermore strengthened by a group of residents that I will term “functional yosomono”. That is to say, these are locals who have lived elsewhere in the course of studying, working, or searching for new horizons and have now returned to their original home regions, for a variety of reasons, to stay, and are therefore also called “U-turners” (Klien 2020; Knight 1994; Reiher 2020; Takeda 2020). Their experiences outside of the norm make them open to other perspectives; such experiences have also challenged inherited and embedded ways of thinking and acting. In an earlier Japan they would probably have had a questionable standing upon their return because of their different views and questioning of taken-for-granted customs. However, the need for rural communities to open up to outsiders assures functional yosomono some credit upon their much needed and welcomed return. In turn, they represent a potential for community engagement and the bridging of existing gaps of understanding and support vis-à-vis new initiatives, including the treatment of vacant kominka.

Resonance beyond the art festival period

Although difficult to quantify, the involvement with art projects on different levels has proved to be a source of numerous individual initiatives and paved the way for their acceptance in families, neighborhoods, and extended communities. Even if they have not yet materialized, the disclosure and discussion of ideas have formed a creative, generative milieu for thought. Witnessing the processes behind the emergence of an art installation out of a dilapidated vacant house has also contributed to this renewed awareness, not just as a result of the artists’ use of the akiya in novel ways but also because of the artists’ respect for the history and stories these vacant houses contain. A 32-year-old man recounted that, after some years as a musician in Niigata City and a working holiday year in Australia, he decided to return to his hometown to follow in his father’s steps as a rice farmer. By doing so, he was lifting the weight of parental expectations from his older brother’s shoulders, who had opted for a life in the city. Volunteering at the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale in 2018 had changed his view of the 100-year-old parental home that he had returned to. While he had previously only seen it as a decayed house (boro-boro no ie), he had, after the festival, learned to appreciate it for its sturdy craftsmanship. Although he was not sure about wanting to keep it as his own dwelling in the future, the experience had taught him to see it as valuable enough to maintain it (daiji ni shitai).

A man in his 70s told me about his son, who was working in Tokyo after finishing university. He had never shown an interest in returning to the countryside, but volunteering at an akiya art installation seemed to have changed his mind regarding his childhood home and possibilities for its respectful renovation. Both kominka art installations as well as examples of the infrastructure created alongside by making use of vacant spaces had made him reconsider his parental home as a potential resource.

New projects see the light of day on a regular basis but especially during the festivals, when more visitors and returners stay in the areas. During my fieldwork, I also witnessed the realization of several former akiya kominka reform projects: two second houses, a guest house in Oku-Noto, and the emergence of a shared workspace in central Tōkamachi City, where the only daughter and heir of a kimono-cloth trading family had followed the art festivals’ vacant house project in search of inspiration for reforming her own building. She intended to make new use of the vacant former cloth warehouse and the dormitory for the company’s employees located on its second floor. It was a building from the 1960s, and its outward appearance was therefore not as inviting. The inside, however, although run down, displayed the hidden charm and the potential of Japanese-style wooden construction. Encouraged and helped by some newcomers experienced in akiya kominka refurbishment, she embarked on the renovation of the upper floor of the warehouse. She hoped to convert a large room into a shared office space with desks and small, individual working rooms for artists and people working in the creative industry. With the help of volunteers, some recruited locally, and some recruited through target-oriented digital platforms from as far as Tokyo and beyond, the rooms were refurbished from scratch. Old familial furniture, such as kimono chests and kitchen cabinets, were sandpapered and converted into open shelves and other newly functional furniture. The result was stylish rooms with a touch of shabby chic nostalgia, appealing to a young urban clientele, and achieved with little money but a lot of creativity, enthusiasm, and hard work. The motivation for the volunteers to take part in this project was manifold, but overall, their search for inspiration for their own future projects and an opportunity for hands-on practice were driving forces. There was the young family father, who was about to inherit his grandfather’s kominka, the young woman who had married into a local farmer’s family and wanted to open an antique shop in the family’s old storehouse (kura), and the elderly man whose house was filled with old stuff from three generations that he wanted to pass on to a better use, among others.

A couple in their 70s in the Noto area had for many years neglected any appreciation for their kominka and its contents, despite a richly filled kura. They experienced a turning point at the Oku-Noto Triennial that led to a critical private endeavor during pandemic restrictions. Although not interested in art per se, the way some old houses had been used to display objects they had thought of as common and without value inspired them to look at their own belongings with renewed interest. The result was a tidied storage barn converted into a combined tea and library space furnished with tables, seats, lampshades, and shelves made from old wooden ploughs and ladders that had been collecting dust for decades. These were further supplied with cushions made from used summer kimono fabric. The refurbished room became a valued gathering space for family, neighbors, and neighborhood children during the COVID pandemic. Even the extended family’s teenagers discovered the space to be convenient for studying for their mid- and end-term exams.

These cases of gradual changes in mindset leading to attempts to embrace alternative solutions that fit one’s lifestyle are in line with an increasing number of enthusiasts of townscapes, restaurants, teashops, inns with or in refurbished akiya kominka that are not only frequented by tourists but also increasingly by residents (Hirose 2017; Manabe 2008; Takahashi 2017). Under the catch phrase “slow life in a kominka” for example, interested people are advised on how to find one’s ideal building in one’s ideal municipality, already existing exemplary projects, as well as the pros and cons of choosing a kominka as a dwelling when relocating to the countryside (Dual Life Ijū 2023).

In summary, this type of space functions as a spatial retreat from busy everyday life and a place to relax (ochitsukeru basho) and regenerate (iyasareru). Kominka are thus increasingly valued as perfect environments through which to escape the busy every day.

Proceeding on a paved way

Kitagawa Fram’s projects using old houses have forerunners that indirectly have paved the way for their success in inspiring the broader public, beyond just the band of people interested in old houses.

Attention to and reassessment of kominka are not chronologically uniform processes but rather have been a continuous topic for books and lifestyle magazines aimed at professionals and enthusiasts alike. For a long time, the maintenance of an inherited old house or the renovation of a bought one seemed to be the preserve of those with the necessary expertise and economic capital. Architects Ishida Sumio and Karl Bengs are two of the pioneers that were recycling and reusing old houses and their materials long before such practices were encouraged by environmental and human health considerations. Ishida established Makanbo Architectural and Construction Office in 1975 with the aim to reuse timber to renovate and rebuild kominka. Such exquisite material, he maintained, could not be condemned to becoming construction waste. However, it was around the turn of the twenty-first century that he began to perceive an emerging public interest in the re-use of kominka as dwellings. This interest spurred him to contribute to a manual for renovation of Japanese-style houses that was aimed at the broader public (Ui 2001, 3f.).

Karl Bengs, meanwhile, moved to Japan from Germany in 1979. Some years later, he established himself in Taketokoro, a small hamlet in the mountains of the Tōkamachi area, when the hamlet was on the verge of extinction. Since settling there, Bengs has rebuilt ten houses in the hamlet and revitalized the area. Over time, he has rescued more than 60 houses – a large number of these mark the townscape of nearby Matsudai, where his office is now based in a similarly renovated kominka. Lately, he has gained attention beyond Japanese lifestyle enthusiasts as a result of some documentaries broadcasted on NHK. One of these documentaries’ comments:

By renovating deteriorating vacant homes into beautiful habitations, they have attracted new people to the village, including families with young children. Both long-term residents and new transplants revel in the abundant nature of the village’s environment. The charming interiors of the refurbished kominka fuse Japanese and Western aesthetics, while the gardens that surround them flow with water from local springs. (NHK 2021)

Bengs came to Japan determined to save Japanese kominka not because of their age and history alone, but because of the superior quality of the materials used in their construction and the unique craftmanship involved. He aimed to convert the kominka into valuable assets worth preserving. To do so, he dismantles the old houses completely and rebuilds them, respecting the original style while still adapting the building to the needs of a contemporary lifestyle. According to him, now 40 years later, consciousness of the value of traditional Japanese construction has finally reached a more diverse, broad share of Japanese society:

World War II brought forth irreparable damage to historical buildings in many countries including Japan. And today, new buildings, which have been built within the last 30 years are creating just as much damage. Social structures diminish when a city’s redevelopment plans destroy the region’s unique buildings. The term “new” is defined as valuable, and “old” is defined as worthless. Simultaneously, the tradition and craft regarding kominka are getting lost. Quantity is chosen over quality. Only recently, humanity’s way of thinking has started to change, and people have started to regain awareness of the value and fascination of kominka and the aura it creates. People started to realize the multiplicity and richness of the concepts as well as its uniqueness. (Bengs 2023)

This shift gained momentum with the Showa Retro boom that started in the 2000s and which continues to date. The boom is characterized by a nostalgic yearning for the 1960s lifestyle, when modernity crept into average urban Japanese post-war homes. The boom started in trendy urban areas but rapidly extended to rural areas and towns, where there tends to be plenty of housing that can allow for the recreation of this sought-after original atmosphere, and it has contributed to the popularization of period-inspired cafes and shops. Successful establishments are regularly showcased by rural municipalities to advertise self-defined lifestyle possibilities to potential relocators. It becomes a means of tapping into an existing infrastructure which is deemed to be especially attractive to young urbanites, the target group for rural area revitalization programs.

However, the shift toward a renewed appreciation of old-style housing takes time. This is not just in terms of getting people to think about these old houses as possible dwellings, but also in terms of the work of repair and renovation, as hinted at in the many books that chronicle the restoring, rebuilding (Hattori 2001; Asō 2003), and reusing of kominka for different purposes (Ui 2001; Nakamura 2022).

The engagement of professionals and NPOs by local administrators and the use of cultural events, such as art festivals, which are in line with the vacant house projects can help encourage such a shift.

Conclusion

Perhaps recognizing that modern convenience and comfort are ultimately inevitable, while at the same time feeling that we have lost something vital and irreplaceable, offers us the chance to begin living a more solid, rooted existence. In other words, by looking back, we may discover other possibilities closer to hand. (Nakagawa 2005, xii)

Akiya as art sites alone do not have the power to change minds and set trends. They are embedded in art events that, in turn, are part of larger social developments and cultural trends. Over time, these sociocultural developments have left their traces on how traditional housing is viewed and to what extent a kominka is seen as an asset worth preserving. However, the appreciation that artists and other yosomono show toward the buildings, their contents, and the stories associated with them, along with novel uses for these homes and materials help open residents’ eyes to other ways of dealing with these old houses. This enables the broader public to reassess its stance towards kominka, and it can have other positive side-effects, as in the case studies presented here.

The artists’ different perspectives introduce a range of tentative but feasible ways of using these houses, away from hidebound traditional uses toward other alternatives more suited to contemporary life. A continuous influx of yosomono is indispensable to achieve this, and this shift in perception takes time. The building of a new dwelling on an empty rice paddy amidst several vacant kominka is still the norm; this was abundantly evident to me during my stays in the field. For most of my interlocutors, kominka did not even feature as housing options. Even when interlocutors expressed curiosity, their worries about expenses, the desire for something new and “modern”, and fears of affecting neighborhood relationships prevented them from investigating kominka as possibilities for their own inhabitation. The prevailing political support of new housing construction further added to these perceived barriers.

Nevertheless, a slowly but steadily growing number of people, across ages and life stages, are rethinking their attitudes to kominka. This has shown potential to encourage both owners of kominka and their families who are searching for appropriate ways to deal with their property and inheritance, as well as other potentially interested users, to come to terms with obligations toward both older family members and their ancestors.

Besides aiding the conservation of regionally varied and socio-culturally valuable Japanese-style houses, the maintenance of kominka has three other important dimensions. First, such kominka are an attractive asset for rural communities as they appeal to urbanites in search of a slower life in the countryside. This is a group comprising around 40% of those living in the big cities (Naikakufu 2023, 23–25) that are considering relocation. Second, relatively new settlers are often behind initiatives that reuse vacant kominka to make a living for themselves. They serve as exemplars while simultaneously contributing to the revitalization of village life. Their efforts also help showcase the chic atmosphere and comparatively cheap housing that is attractive to urban visitors. Finally, there is an aspect that still is at a beginning stage but will gain momentum in the years to come: the renovation of kominka speaks to the need to pursue sustainable ways of building and living in the Anthropocene, and it will encourage the restoration of existing buildings and the reuse and recycling of construction material.

When it comes to rural revival, the use of vacant kominka and other community buildings as spaces for art installations and related events is but one step towards a reassessment of these buildings and the cultural and material heritage that they represent by those who have been alienated from this heritage in a quest for “the modern”. Highlighting the inherent craftsmanship and cultural value of these houses supports the re-appreciation by both those within the community and those coming or returning from outside, the yosomono, of what had been depricated as outdated and worthless.

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Anemone Platz

Anemone Platz is Associate Professor in Japan Studies at the Department of Global and Area Studies, Aarhus University. Her current research interest revolves around individual choices of living spaces, such as imaginaries of home and its implementations.