What is Shikoku Part 1: Country Livin`

The Hidden Value of America's godawful education system

There are four major Japanese landmasses. Honshu, the island with Tokyo, is where the action is. Hokkaido up north, the Japanese Alaska, is the last frontier, complete with bears and sidelined indigenous people. Kyushu, the southernmost island, is a dizzying mix of ancient lore, due to being the first island settled by the Japanese, and foreign influences, thanks to Portuguese traders and missionaries. And then there was Shikoku.

Is Shikoku the forgotten stepchild of the four main islands? It's tough to say. It certainly has its share of history. Kobo Daishi himself is from northern Shikoku, and the pilgrimage that he made famous brings Buddhist adventurers to the island in droves. Just like the rest of Japan, Shikoku has seen its share of bloodshed. The Malcolm X of Japan, Ryoma Sakamoto, was a Shikoku native. Stridently anti-modernization in his early life, to the point of plotting to murder a rival politician, Sakamoto changed his views to embrace the Westernization of Japan before being himself assassinated by a rival samurai faction. (It happened a lot those days.) So what is Shikoku like today?

I've been to all four, and while the industrial scale farming in Hokkaido is larger, the culture of Shikoku is much more rural. Farms are on a smaller scale, several acres of rice fields or orchards managed by a single person or couple. These farmers are, by and large, elderly.

I was trying to put my finger on what is missing in Shikoku, and then it hit me- people my age. There are almost no Japanese people in their 20s and 30s in rural Shikoku. I can count the number of times Ive seen them using my fingers. There are school kids up to high school age, and then you see parents in their 40s, but what the hell happened to the inbetweeners? Was there an age-selective plague? Or a massive military campaign, a la USSR in WWII, where all the young men have literally been slaughtered in the gears of war?

The explanation I came up with is that the rural areas of Shikoku are victims of the success of the excellent Japanese education system. In America, which in education ranks somewhere between like Bolivia and Botswana, you get enough high school drop outs, teenage pregnancies, and washout star athletes that small rural towns remain stocked with younger people that for one reason or another have decided to stay put. Maybe they'd like to leave Palookaville, but there just isn't a pressing reason or logistical possibility to leave the town. And the town stays alive.

But in Japan, education is paramount. Top graduates from Waseda University, the Japanese Harvard, become high school teachers just as often as they become bankers or consultants. The quality of instruction, the expectations on students, and the results are among the best in the world. Do you honestly expect for young people this bright, motivated, and ambitious to work at a gas station in some rural mountain town? 99% of people would rightly say, of course not. Go to the best college you can, get the best job you can, make as much money as you can, and make it big. But without your slackers and dumbasses and dropouts, what happens to the rural towns?

The answer is that they seem to be getting older, and older, and older, and then they slowly fade away. In town after small town in Shikoku, you see houses, shrines, and rice fields that have simply been abandoned that are being steadily taken over by nature. Anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 of the elementary schools have simply shut their doors, and now serve primarily as tsunami evacuation areas. The much publicized Japanese population crisis, in my opinion, is overblown. Japanese people are choosing to have children and raise families, but they are raising them where there are jobs and opportunities, and that does not describe rural Shikoku. It can be a little melancholy.

But if you love nature, and squatting in abandoned properties, or filming a post apocalyptic television series, you may have just found heaven on earth. Sounds grim right? Well, as usual its not that simple. This train of thought will continue in Part 2.