Kamiyama Community Food Lab

Kamiyama Village, Tokushima Prefecture - 33°57'27.0"N 134°16'59.8"E

Travel Log - June 27, 2019

Kamiyama Village, Tokushima

Kamiyama- which translates to “God’s Mountain”- is located on Shikoku, one of Japan’s most southern islands. The landscapes I pass through echo Haruki Murakami’s descriptions in Kafka on the Shore. The village is located so deep in the mountains that from a distance it looks as though the clouds are hovering only a few meters above the houses. 

I’ve borrowed a bicycle from the guest house, and I ride through the cascading tea fields and into town. Humidity hangs in the air. It’s so hot.

In Kamiyama, I spot more people that appear close to my age than in Sado and Kamocho. It feels like a depopulated place that’s already moving forward in a visible way. There are just as many haikō and empty houses, but there is a different kind of almost-urban life here. Storefronts are occupied by people on laptops, there are artisanal coffee shops, book shops, and pizzerias. Posters for an upcoming art festival are papered onto telephone poles. People spill out of a bakery that looks onto a wheat field. There are children playing in a schoolyard. 

Kamiyama Village is located one hour by bus from Tokushima City. Nestled in the mountains, it is a place with longstanding agricultural traditions and practices that navigate the site’s extreme topography. Terraced productive gardens are supported by tanada stone retaining walls- a particular technique of wall-building that has existed in this community for over two hundred years. Kamiyama is most well-known for the production of sudachi, a citrus fruit in between lemon and lime, as well as heirloom wheat. Kamiyama has recently seen an influx of millennials, particularly those in the IT industry, who have set up outpost offices in vacated storefronts. Many have young families and have moved to, or back to Kamiyama in pursuit of a better quality of life. 

The village is home to a successful community initiative called The Food Hub Project. This project exists primarily as a cafeteria restaurant and bakery that promotes the variety of local wheat, vegetables, fish and dairy in Kamiyama. The bakery was intended to sustain the wheat production of the region, responding to the collective concern towards the declining number of farmers. Freshly baked bread was not common in the village prior to the Food Hub, and the bakery is now a bustling place of social interactions. The intention of the Food Hub is not to expand their bread or agricultural production far out of Kamiyama. A larger concern is to preserve the unique agricultural knowledge of the region, and contribute to a less impactful, closed-loop way of living. 

When interviewing one of the coordinators, he expressed, “we are not here to make a huge profit. The Food Hub is not here to make sure Kamiyama products end up in high-end grocery stores in Tokyo. Instead, we hope to use food as mode of communication, that connects small producers to small consumers like us. We’re not anti-mass produce, but we can’t rely on it forever.” The Food Hub is a model for other shrinking villages in Japan, but other countries in the Global North that will soon need to embrace smaller futures can learn from their thinking. 

There are a number of adjacent programs run by the Food Hub, such as a Chef-In-Residence program and workshops for elementary school students. The Food Hub also partners with the Kamiyama Agricultural High School, a vocational secondary school that attracts students from all over Tokushima Prefecture. 

The Community Food Lab builds off of the agricultural school and the Food Hub Project, proposing labs and other spaces of experimentation and research that would allow for Kamiyama to further develop its agricultural identity. The haikō site is located at the base of a steep slope and branches off the main road. The building typology responds to extreme topographical conditions; the existing gymnasium is stacked on top of three levels of classrooms. 

The Food Lab would focus not only on new forms of production, but also address the larger goals of the Food Hub Project to develop a decentralized food system. The Food Lab would involve research into methods of composting and other strategies of closed loop agriculture, as well as farm fishing. The proposed program addresses the fact that Japan relies on imported goods for the majority of its food consumption, and new methods of self-sustenance are increasingly required. 

The architectural interventions are mainly contained within the stacked building structure. An exterior freight elevator is added to allow for materials to be moved throughout the building, such as vegetables grown in the building, seedlings, soil and ingredients for the restaurant and cooking school. On the inside, interior walls are removed of the classroom floors. Six meters is offset from the perimeter of the building to allow for circulation on each level, as well as flexible, semi-conditioned workspace. The existing floor past this space is removed, exposing the steel structure. New floor plates are added into the structure, creating double height spaces and new vertical relationships. This interior “core” is wrapped in glass, resulting a conditioned space for more experimental programs, such as a composting lab, a fish farm, a seed archive and a cooking school. The steel roof is replaced with transparent material that would allow for the prior gymnasium space to function as a greenhouse. 

This project is intended to generate ideas about new agricultural futures. With the design of flexible spaces that build on existing agricultural histories as well as new thinking, what could emerge from a community that is already acting proactively about how they might live? How can we learn from places trying to live “smaller” in the face of other pressing global matters, such as climate change? Kamiyama may be an important player in this discussion.