Rural or Suburban?

I've always been a bit troubled by the label "rural" or "countryside" for our location when I see the cars speed by on the two-lane road that is used as a shortcut to the city, which is only 20 minutes away. Our villages are part of a township of 20,000 people! Our village of Nunomia has grown from 80 households in 1990 to 120 today! We aren't exactly isolated from the mainstream and it isn't exactly bucolic so why don't we just say we are a suburb of Kumamoto?

Well, in March of next year, we are actually slated to become part of Kumamoto city and added to their population but I will bet my bottle of sake that people will still refer to our area as a village and the countryside. In Japan, a rural community is defined as one that has a population of under 30,000 people!(http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa060997.htm) I guess someone in Tokyo figured that was pretty small. In the US, a rural community is defined as less than 2,500 people! In Sweden, you are an urban center if you have more than 200 people! The government can draw their maps and create their definitions, but for me, it is more about the perception people have than anything concrete. I've heard Japanese people call Kumamoto city (with a population of more than half a million) a countryside city. This area has long been agricultural and so the entire region is considered inaka - country or rural, with a connotation, I believe, of being rather unsophisticated, narrow-minded and ultra-conservative. There are days where I agree completely.

Jonan town and Nunomia are even more remote than Kumamoto because we are on "the other side of the river." Apparently, it's like being on "the wrong side of the tracks." I used to teach adults in the city who thought that I was in the sticks, the boonies, a completely different region from their own. They'd wrinkle their noses and grimace and ask me why I wanted to live "there". I guess there is a difference when you cross the bridge: no high rises, many more open fields, houses clustered in villages, fewer public services, no sewers, no water system; we have volunteer fire fighters, limited public transportation, and more community activities (that you are obligated to attend - see previous note - I'm not sure people get shunned in the city!). There definitely is a community feeling that you don't get in a city: everyone knows everyone. Everyone here knows my underwear size for example and they know what time I get up. They look at your laundry, they enter your home unannounced, they come up on the deck to play with your dog as if they live with you, they know how your kids are doing in school and they know the names of your pets, past and present. People in the countryside have a history of working together; they keep a close eye on one another; they keep one another informed. Some might call it gossip but hey, these people know what's going on next door. If you have any questions about any villager, go ask that lady three houses down and she can fill you in.

Our village is along that big road next to our field, called Uki uki road that leads to the Jonan Bridge, that crosses the great dividing river (Midori Kawa)that leads to Kumamoto city. That bridge wasn't built until the mid-1970's. There are bridges further up and down the river, but especially for people who didn't have a car, leaving the village wasn't very convenient until fairly recently. My husband remembers going to Kumamoto city once a year as a child! Now he commutes there daily for work, as do many others from Jonan. My mother-in-law still feels like it's a major expedition to go to the city (judging from the size of the bag she packs when we take her out for an afternoon). Her world is here. She was born in a neighboring village on this side of the river and has lived within a 5 mile radius for over 85 years. Even the people in Jonan town proper consider the villages to be more rural than they are - and we are only minutes away! Being rural in Japan is less about distance, population and geography than it is about mentality.

However, the truth is that the city is encroaching upon us: there is more traffic, farms are selling out, city folk are moving in for the cheap land, the space between urban and rural is shrinking. Yet I think people have in their minds that this is rural and city buy-out is going to change their perception!