Dying People

I once lived in an old Japanese house for two years in a small village, not far from here. During these two years, I attended five funerals in the village. The village consists of less than hundred people, so the death rate is much higher than the average Japanese rate: about 0.8 death for hundred per year.
The dead are all elder people, except one at his fifties. First funeral was for an old woman living in my neighbor. She had been ill and I only met her once while she was alive. Second was an old man lived in front of her house. He had been ill too, and I'd never met him, although after his death, I had a chance to talk with his son. Then an old woman lived upper side of my house, then the younger man lived next door. These two, I met frequently, and sometimes talked about weather or the crop in the vegetable garden. The last funeral I attend was for an old woman, and it was just a month before I left the village.
The death rate of the village was high, because there lived many older people. There were young families, but when you walk in the village in the day light, you would find people older than late sixties only, except for the foreman in his iron work, the soon to be dead man roaming out from his bed, and me. Later in the afternoon, eleven or twelve children at various age would come home from school, and their parents would come home in the dark of the night. More than half of the population were older than sixty five, retire age of most companies in Japan. They were dying one by one.

This village is not as bad as other villages in the hillside. There are many villages in this area which consists of only older people, or only with one or two younger families. The people over seventy are stronger generation in Japan. They had endured the hard times during and after the World War, and they had eaten no junk foods when they were young. They can live longer, stay healthier until they finally die, compared to the generation of their sons. But they must die sooner or later. There will be no filling up of the vacancy they left. The population will get smaller and smaller until the village will not work as a habitable community. People are dying, and the village in the hillside and mountains in Japan are dying, too.

I have some friends who dared to choose to live in such dying villages, but they are all struggling. One young family cannot stop the community dying. There are many works a village has been doing, and they all had to be stopped when the village gets older. For instance, there should be somebody who cut weeds in the summer to keep the village from buried in the jungle. When nobody can handle sickle or grass cutter, the fight against weeds must end, defeated.
There are those who make a prophet that those mountain villages will vanish in ten years to come. There are those who hope there will be much more younger generations will return to the place of their ancestors from cities. I wonder which of them is right.

Early morning work

Farmers are early raisers everywhere in the world. Especially in the summer, it is too hot to work in the daytime out in the field. Traditionally, Japanese farmers would wake up before the sunrise, set out in the paddies and gardens in the dim light of the dawn, work two or three hours before the breakfast. They would work outside after that, maybe work inside the barn, and after the lunch, take his long nap. Then they would start his evening work at three or four, until the sundown. Very hard workers. Almost twelve hours or more of hard labor was the standard.
Now, the time has been changed. People work nine to five, or six, in the office even in the rural area in Japan. The descendant of the old time farmers are now workers in offices and factories.
But in the rural area, many of them still hold their paddies and gardens of ancestors. They harvest rice and vegetables to sell. Some stopped to sell, but they still plow for their own consumption. Those farmers are called 'kengyo-noka,' a part-time farmers, in Japan. Actually, almost 90 % of Japanese farmers are part-time, as in the statistics.
They don't regard their farming as their occupation. If you ask them "What is your job?" they will answer their daytime jobs, like office worker, teacher, driver, and manager. They never tell you they are part-time farmers unless necessary. They think farming as their household job, like repairing pipes, cleaning rooms, cooking, or annual ceremony for their ancestors. Farming is more of ritual than earning for them.
And they keep their tradition as an early raiser. They wake up early morning to cut grass in the field, or water their paddy. Only an hour, for they now cannot take their nap, but they still are the hard workers. Light jobs before going to work, they will call it "Asameshi-mae," an easy task.
"Asameshi" is a breakfast and "mae" is "before" in Japanese. So, literally, this word means "before the breakfast." They will farm before breakfast easily to keep Japanese agriculture intact.