Sado Island Rice Village 

Sado Island, Niigata Prefecture, 37°52'41.9"N 138°20'21.8"E

As stated in the introduction, each site chosen for this thesis exemplifies ways in which local communities are working to slow down the predicted population loss. The following design proposals are provocations, as opposed to technical resolutions, that build on these existing efforts. 

Travel Log - June 10, 2019

Sado Island, Niigata Prefecture

It only takes three hours to get to Sado Island from Tokyo. One bullet train that shoots through the forests of Gunma and an hour on a ferry bring me to an entirely new landscape, shrouded in mist. Driving to my hotel, I pass only a few cars and an elderly woman wrapped in a plastic raincoat, puttering precariously up a steep slope in an electric wheelchair. The scene is reminiscent of the photos in newspaper articles on depopulation I had read, which often depict an elderly person travelling alone in an empty landscape.

The streets consist of boarded-up storefronts, abandoned hotels and closed pachinko parlours. It’s off-season, but most of these places look permanently vacated. A number of shops have signs that say things like, “thank you for fifty years of business”. There is an unplaceable eeriness to the silence. The number of casinos, hotels, bars and restaurants make it seem like the streets were bustling with people only days ago. It’s raining.

  I pass the occasional farmer clad in rain gear working in a field. Many of the paddy fields are large areas of exposed soil, meaning they are no longer in use. It’s easy to tell which ones have been abandoned because productive rice paddies look like reflective pools brimming with water. In many places, the absence of people emphasizes how strikingly beautiful and unmarked the landscape seems: thick forests, vast, wild, fields and endless, untouched beach. Foliage reaches up on shuttered houses and shrines. It’s as though the island is slowly eating up what’s been left behind of a distant village life. 

I’m sitting in a café with Tanaka-San, who recently retired from his position in the Sado City Hall and now runs a tourist business, renting cars and renovating akiya into vacation homes. “There just aren’t things for young people to do!” he exclaims. “There are no universities, no stores that the young people like, no movie theatres or places to have fun. We’ve recently developed a satellite campus for the vocational school in Niigata City, which has helped, but change in general is slow. People are bored here, and then they leave.” 

The Sado Island Vocational School was established in 2008 as a way to promote regional crafts and skills to younger generations, and a response to the lack of post-secondary education on the island. One of the primary reasons for out-migration on the island has been to attend universities and colleges on the mainland. Most high-level education in Japan is focused on preparing students for types of employment than can only be found in urban areas, causing students from rural areas to secure jobs and lifestyles away from their hometowns. Informants from Sado Island have also argued that the jobs found in cities are on average more secure, with better benefits and pay. “Rural life is a lot of hard, physical work!” a farmer declared in an interview by the Shrinking Regions Group. “City people are shocked by how much more rigorous and demanding than sitting at a computer in an office day after day”. There is little incentive towards moving back to conduct physically intense labour, and the tourist industry of Sado often results in irregular employment. 

The vocational school, a satellite campus of the Niigata Sogo Gakuin, which is located on the mainland of Honshu, provides education in traditional crafts and building construction as well as trades such as forestry and environmental management. While saké brewing isn’t incorporated in the vocational school’s program, local breweries associated with the Niigata Saké Brewers Association have established intensive courses open to the public to learn more about the brewing process, tasting and business opportunities around craft saké. Obata Brewery’s education program, “Gakkogura”, consists of a number of different courses of different lengths open to Sado residents, foreigners, and other visitors from across Japan. Students learn the history of Obata Brewery’s signature “Manotsuru” saké and the ways in which every part of the process is made local. Manotsuru is a type of saké that has been produced with rice farmed using regional and sustainable methods; the fields are feeding grounds for toki that have been fertilized with local oyster shells. The toki is an endangered bird and motif on the distributed manotsuru saké. 

Similar to Obata, a number of Sado Island brewers are interested in educating future brewers as well as advertising their product with an environmentally symbiotic narrative. Manotsuru saké fits into a network of other human and non-human actors that includes the brewers, the traditional equipment used, farmers, rice paddies and the birds that live in the landscape. Sado Rice Village proposes a merging of the existing brewery-run saké-making courses with the Sado Vocational school and designing the classroom spaces in the same complex as related industrial spaces. The school site is located in Hamochi, an area of the island where organic rice farming has been thoroughly re-integrated, and the most sightings of the endangered toki occur. 

Another more recent project within the saké brewing community is finding opportunities for re-using waste materials, such as the beifun, rice powder produced during the milling process, and kasu, a starchy rice paste that emerges during the pressing of the saké post-fermentation. Both of these by-products are base ingredients for a number of other Japanese traditional food products; pickles and other preserves, rice cakes, flours and other specialty goods. Kasu can also be used to produce fertilizer for rice farms, cattle feed, as well as other household products such as cleaning solvents. The skills and equipment needed for making these products are become increasingly less common, and The Rice Village, the design proposal for this region, incorporates facilities that produce these goods in a public and social setting. While providing space for traditional practices, adjacent programs that could potentially develop micro-industries in new ways are added. For example, rice vinegar can be produced in the same facility as saké, using the same fermentation process and tools. The Village would support the making of specialty vinegars and related products that could be paired with the other agricultural production in Sado. 

The Village is primarily an educational and demonstrative space with some economic output, where new forms of education and collective making would stimulate small rice-related businesses in the community. Through spatial organization, the cycle of rice cultivation, fermenting, waste management and re-use visible and accessible to visitors and members of the community. Additionally, a daycare is included in the project, with the intention of the early learning program to be strongly connected to the agricultural and processing culture of the complex, as well as the surrounding rice producing landscape. 

The daycare, which is proposed in a time when paid childcare is still uncommon in Japan, speaks to changing national policies. Is it possible that integrating childcare with workspaces and other educational facilities could change the way a community’s views toward it? The Village imagines a scenario where mothers would be able to work in the vocational school, or the brewery or winery next door and take lunch breaks with their young children. The rice that is processed in the brewery is taken from the same plant that makes up the wall assembly of their children’s daycare, and rice that is served at meals in the community kitchen. Could the accessibility of processes involving rice cultivate a new village life? 

The architectural scheme of the project consists of cutting up the existing school building and inserting new volumes to create similar proportions to the existing village fabric on the island. The vernacular Sado villages are characterized by narrow alleyways that open up to shared gardens, and the project recreates this spatial intimacy. The metal sheeting of the large existing gymnasium is removed while leaving the roof structure behind, creating a trellised outdoor space. The trellis functions as a structure for hanging dried food and growing plants for shading. The space is then filled with smaller volumes that resemble houses in a village, each with a different function. The existing classroom building is split to create two smaller volumes and a passage to the rice storage building. Programmed public spaces are inserted within the complex – such as a community firepit and a playful, productive landscape which are intended to develop new forms of recreation and revitalize old ones. 

As Tanaka-San remarked in the interview, he feels there is a correlation between population loss and a particular lack of entertainment. That being said, everything that the island is “missing” – movie theatres, fashion boutiques, concerts, kabuki theatre – are all undoubtedly urban activities in Japan, geared towards consumption and popular culture. The design projects of this thesis respond to this idea of “boredom” that results from the lack of these particular activities, exploring different methods of recreation, work and daily patterns that contrast city life.

In the Rice Village, recreation, education, and industry overlap to create a productive, intergenerational environment. Is it possible that through these overlaps, a new sustainable way of life could emerge? Perhaps one that does not put fun, work, and family into different categories, but allows for a sustainable combination of them all?