One of the JET programme participants of this year, Mr. Pyke van Zon, reported to us about his new life in Mima city. Please read on to find out how he experienced his first two months there!

At a local festival in Mima		Welcome party for Eefje (wife of Pyke) with the Mayor of Mima

To be completely honest, I’m very much used and accustomed to life in the city. I’ve been born in a city, raised in the suburbs near a city, lived in cities abroad (Nagasaki and Kyoto, to be precise), and lived together in a city with my wife. My father-in-law, who lives in the Dutch countryside and has a piece of forest where he hunts, has jokingly referred to me as being a “city boy” many times. Not to say that I’m completely out of my element when I’m not in a city; quite the opposite, actually. I love going hiking, and have seen my fair share of beautiful (Japanese) mountain paths. However, I have never experienced living outside of a city, or at least outside of a somewhat heavily populated area. So you could say that moving to Mima, a small town on Shikoku, the least populated of Japan’s four main islands, was a bit of a change of scenery for me.

Technically, Mima is a city. In 2005, several towns and villages in the Mima region merged together, forming Mima. The city has a little over 30.000 inhabitants. This is by no means a small amount, of course, but there is quite a lot of space, meaning the people are rather spread out. Around 90 people live on 1 square kilometer, as opposed to Amsterdam, where I was born, where about 3500 people live on that same square kilometer.

Shikoku, the smallest of the four main islands of Japan, is also the least populated. Having long been isolated from the rest of the country, bridges built from the late 1980s onwards were supposed to bring in people and business. Instead, however, many of the younger people moved away to the larger cities on the other islands, resulting in an shrinking and aging population. The north of the island is relatively speaking the most densely populated. When I travelled along the southern coast of the island a few years ago, the effects of this greying society were visible in towns that had clearly once been booming, but that had now been more or less abandoned. The people we met were either parents and their young children, or older folks. People of our age (late teens through 20s) were almost completely absent.

With this image in the back of my mind, I wondered what my life here would be like. Having lived in larger cities in Japan as a student for two years, I had socialized a lot with other people my age at university. And, being used to the city all my life, what was it going to be like living in a small town? Of course, I needn’t have worried.

It might sound like a bit of a Hollywood-small-town-cliché, but people in Mima are very warm and friendly. They may seem a little startled at times; they rarely see foreigners, and then all of a sudden a two meter tall guy shows up in their town. I guess I’d look twice too. After this initial surprise, many people will come up to greet me, or ask me where I’m from, what I’m doing here, and most often about how tall I am. When relations or friends of co-workers come to our department, I’m sometimes asked to stand up to show them my foreign tallness, which is then met with the obligatory giggles and sounds of astonishment at the length of this human sky scraper. It may sound weird (and it kind of is), but there is absolutely no ill intent. The people I’ve met are genuinely excited and grateful that someone from abroad, like me, would come all the way to their town, which they themselves identify as being ‘inaka’, or countryside.

And they are correct, Mima is very much ‘inaka’. That translates, in this case, to being surrounded by nature. In exchange for tall buildings, Mima is surrounded by tall, green mountains. Through the city flows one of Japan’s cleanest rivers: the Yoshinogawa. And there are a lot of rice paddies. Living on the countryside also means that there is only one train line with mostly little one or two car trains, and several buses to bigger cities have seemed to vanish in the last years due to a shrinking population and the fact that everybody has their own car. Being Dutch, I had prepared myself for a lot of cycling and using public transport, but even I have had to admit that a car is no excessive luxury in a place like Mima (or Shikoku in general). So fortunately, I have been able to purchase my co-worker’s second hand car last week, all of a sudden drastically increasing my mobility.

So in Mima we’ve got nature, space and of course the necessary supermarkets and a few restaurants. While Mima doesn’t have shopping centre or a ‘nightlife scene’, these things are available to those who want them in the larger cities nearby (Takamatsu to the north, and Tokushima to the east), which are quite accessible by car (which, as mentioned, now is an option for yours truly).

I have absolutely loved living in Nagasaki and Kyoto as an exchange student, to the extent that I would gladly live there again sometime in the future. But Mima offers me a new perspective on Japanese life and culture that can’t be found in those types of larger cities. It can be challenging at times, being one of the only Westerners in town (there are a few other American English teachers), but the people have been warm and open and extremely helpful. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop being a city boy, but for now, I’m very much enjoying the life on the Japanese countryside.

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