Back in Mizusawa

Yoko and Nowa in the old part of Mizusawa

July and we’re back in Mizusawa, as regularly as migrating birds, every summer for many years already. This is Yoko’s hometown and I’ve grown to feel it’s mine as well. Nowa has spent most of her summers and some New Year's vacations there too. 

I’ve also watched it change, both economically, socially and geographically. Mizusawa has some history, although it’s short by Japanese standards where history is measured in centuries and millennia: the town was founded in 1889 and made formally into a city in 1954. But by now, Mizusawa is no longer a city in its own right. In 2006 it was merged with the neighboring communities of Esashi, Maesawa, Isawa and Koromogawa to form the new city of Oshu. The former cities (shi) were downgraded to the status of wards (ku) in the newly formed Oshu-shi. It probably made sense in some administrative manner. Life in Mizusawa didn’t change noticeably and the old Mizusawa city hall close to our house was turned into Oshu city hall.

Our house

We are in Iwate prefecture (ken) in the middle of the Tohoku region in the northern part of the main Japanese island of Honshu. Oshu-shi is almost 500 km straight north from Tokyo. It is located in a north-south valley, with the tall mountains of Akita-ken rising to the west. A coastal mountain range separates the area from the Sanriku coast further to the east. This is very lucky as the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of March 11^th, 2011, that destroyed many of the coastal towns, such as Rikuzentakata, Ofunato, Kamaishi and Kesennuma, killed more than 15,000 people, and caused the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, hardly affected Mizusawa’s surroundings. Sure, the massive shakes were felt here strong enough and electricity was cut off for two weeks in parts of the town, but that was the extent of the damage.

Mizusawa was a small town, at least by Japanese standards. It used to have a bit over 60,000 inhabitants when it was put together with its neighbors. It is a center of an agricultural area with expansive tracts of rice paddies, apple orchards and vegetable gardens. Consequently, many of the inhabitants are rural types and the age structure rather old. Although Iwate (like Akita) has plenty of hot springs, the main resort areas – like the famous Hanamaki Onsen – are further north from Mizusawa, in the mountains. Mizusawa did have some things going for it, though, that made it different from some of the other small rural towns. It was an administrative center for the region and it had a big hospital.

Rural outskirts

Small rivers and canals run through the old part of town. Some houses along them are old and somewhat dilapidated but new ones are appearing here and there. The waterways are generally clean and there are fish and crayfish in the main channel. Some beautiful gardens line the creeks.

Urban canals

Interestingly, the town is also host to one of the six International Latitude Observatories, which has for decades brought visiting scholars and scientists to the town from all over the world. All these observatories – in California, Ohio, Maryland, Italy, Turkmenistan and Mizusawa – are located near the 39^o08’ parallel to measure the Earth’s wobble. You can still go for days without seeing another foreigner, but at least people are quite used to seeing my kind of big blond gaijin in town. This summer, there are three American kids enrolled in the Mizusawa elementary school.

The shinkansen station

Oshu-shi lies about halfway between the two largest cities in Tohoku: Sendai (pop. 1.1 million) to the south and Morioka (pop. 297,000) to the north. The main Tohoku shinkansen bullet train track goes through Oshu-shi and makes a stop at the Mizusawa-Esashi station. Some people are surprised that the shinkansen makes a stop at the juncture of these relatively small towns, but there is a logical explanation: Ichiro Ozawa (b. 1942). The perennial opposition leader and powerful politician actually hails from Mizusawa and remains quite popular in these parts. Even we received a congratulatory message from him when we got married at the Komagata shrine here in town (this didn’t please my mother-in-law who was a regional planner in the prefectural government and no fan of Ozawa’s). In a type example of politics of patronage, Mizusawa received a shinkansen stop.

A ceremony at Komagata shrine

There’s a twist to the story, however – a twist that explains some of the later developments in the urban geography of the area. Mizusawa is also on the regular north-south railway line on which the local trains to Morioka and smaller towns in Iwate travel. Naturally, the original plan was to build the Tohoku shinkansen line so that it would take the same route and the bullet trains would stop at around the existing Mizusawa station. The station area at that time was the heart of the city, with a thriving main street containing many shops and restaurants and a couple of hotels. Apparently the chamber of commerce feared that a shinkansen station would disturb their idyll and voted against it. Instead, the shinkansen would stop some kilometers further east, in a relatively unpopulated area between the cities of Mizusawa and Esashi.

How wrong could they have been? What happened was that the area around the new shinkansen station started to develop, as many people preferred to live close to the transportation hub that would take them to Morioka, Sendai and all the way to Tokyo. The area around Mizusawa station declined and shops started closing.

Universe -- A new shopping center

In a parallel development, Mizusawa became much more car-oriented. The old center with its narrow streets was made for walking and biking. Now shopping centers with expansive parking lots were developed on the outskirts of the town. The outer roads turned into strip malls with car dealerships, pachinko parlors with slot machines, chain restaurants and other establishments. The best hotel in town is no longer the Mizusawa Grand on the main station street (where our wedding reception was held) but the MizusawaPlaza Inn to the east from the local train tracks. Full disclosure: Plaza Inn is owned and operated by one of Yoko's best friends, Mami Kikuchi; the girls went to junior high school together. The hotel is very popular as a wedding location and boasts two excellent restaurants: a traditional Japanese restaurant Kikusui; and the Western Quattre Saisons. (Typically of the modesty of the Japanese people, the successful businesswoman Mami who in addition owns other restaurants in Iwate still drives a tiny Suzuki Lapin.)

With Mami and her Lapin

As in so many Japanese towns, there is a fancy multipurpose cultural center in Oshu-shi as well. The Z Hall that contains a large concert hall and hosts a variety of events (and where my brother-in-law Jun works) was also built to the east of the tracks towards Esashi.

There was a time a decade or so ago when it was rather depressing to walk along the main street by the station, as so many of the shops were closed down and very few people would be on the street. A large number of small bars were still operating in the narrow small streets north of the main drag but the evenings tended to feel rather lonely, while younger people drove to the family restaurants in the shopping centers and strip malls. Even the classic Takatoyo fish mongers moved further out.

Jun sings at Urara while Akira tends bar

Then something seems to have happened again and the area no longer feels dead. New shops and cafés have opened around the station, as have big and shiny karaoke joints to compete with the rustic Urara, a karaoke bar run by Yoko and Jun’s aunt Eiko and her husband Akira. One reason may be the development of new housing and opening of a shopping center, Universe, not far from the old center a stone’s throw from our house. The son of the owner of a classic coffee shop, Rengaya, a couple of years ago opened a stylish yet cozy café called Jazzrise, which boasts a great collection of jazz vinyls. It has to be said, though, that the collection is no match to that in Ray Brown, a jazz bar just a couple of blocks away from our house, which Yoko’s uncle Toshikatsu, a keen jazz man, introduced me to.

The old station area has recovered somewhat

Apart from the scientists at the Observatory and a few of us big noses who have married into the Mizusawa society, new groups of foreigners have appeared in recent years. I have heard Russian spoken in the supermarkets and a few years ago noticed groups of Pinoys and other Southeast Asian women, who presumably have moved to the area to get married. In Japan like in many other developed countries, young women move to cities leaving men to farm without ready access to spouses.

Rural Japan is facing a serious problem of depopulation and aging, with planners and researchers talking about ‘ghost towns’ (my friend Brendan Barrett, a professor at Osaka University is one who has written about the unfortunate phenomenon). Apart from the obvious social problems and the declining services in rural areas, this has also serious environmental consequences as old managed agricultural landscapes disintegrate into abandonment. Somewhat counterintuitively, this even threatens biodiversity as the rice-based agricultural and water management systems developed here over millennia – known as satoyama – maintain a rich and delicate balance between natural and human systems.

The main river has clean water, fish and crayfish

Luckily, these problems are not evident here and Oshu-shi is far from a ghost town. It has a fairly stable population of some 120,000 inhabitants and, as the existence of new cafés and bars attests, there are enough of young people in the town (and many have offspring of their own, which is obvious when visiting a shopping center). The city has enough of diversity in employment – from civil service to commerce to health care to science to agriculture – to support a reasonable level of cultural amenities and good restaurants (one of the best – anywhere! – is Ermitage, a French-Russian style establishment, which has attracted visitors from far away since 1983). It is well connected to the wider world through the shinkansen, as well as the Tohoku expressway. Hanamaki airport is less than 40 km away.

The water is clean and abundant, the locally produced food superior, and the climate pleasant (especially this summer when many places in Japan have broken heat records and dozens of people have died as a consequence – the new normal with climate change, I’m afraid – the somewhat cooler and less moist air of Tohoku is a blessing).

Mizusawa still may not be a thrilling center of excitement, but it is a good place to be. And it feels like home.

Tambo (rice paddy) art on the city edge