Rethinking 関係人口
what is a kankei-Jinko(関係人口)
There is a word in Japan that is quite popular in the whole countryside revival discussion right now in Japan and that word is 「関係人口」 or Kankei-Jinko.
Kankei-Jinko is a word coined by “local” journalist Tanaka Terumi-san who claimed that this is a “population of people who may not necessarily live in the town, but want to be involved in that town. For example, people who occasionally come to the town to visit, buy local specialty products. These are people who give energy to the rural towns by being its fans.”
Some background history is needed to understand why this kankei-jinko is such an important concept in the rural countryside, and in the broader terms of rural studies. To start, Japan is currently in a state of population decline where the fertility rate is at around 1.4. Spoiler alert: This as you may guess is not sustainable since you need 2 people to make babies. On top of this, Japan has also an aging population, and the country is facing both a diminishing number of young children while experiencing an increase in the older population. Now this has so many implications and consequences like social security, the labor force, healthcare etc. Not to mention Japan has no immigration policy at the moment so we have one of those internship programs that brings people from Southeast Asia to work in our 3K or 3D jobs (Dangerous, Dirty, and Demeaning). That’s a whole different topic that we won’t go into this time.
On top of all of this the rural countryside has another problem, the internal migration of youth from the countryside to the large cities. Youth from the rural countryside leave their hometowns for jobs, different lifestyles, and more opportunities that they see in the larger cities.
What this means is that there is just a complete depletion of both the general population as well as the youthful population and the increase in the number of the senior population. That’s just not sustainable.
In response to this population decline, the local government has been trying to bring back the flow of young people back into the countryside. As a result it has been just a sell-out festival, where the local government would be giving thousands of dollars out to young people to come live in the countryside. Instead of trying to create a new frontier of alternative living in the countryside, local governments artificially tried to create a flow through subsidies. On top of this, they were trying to support something as drastic as moving from the city to the countryside.
Kankei-Jinko comes into this discussion because it essentially reimagines what a “population” means. When the word population comes up, we all tend to think people who physically live in a certain location. However, now with the internet and SNS, I feel as though an affective (emotional) community is entirely possible. People no longer have to live in the location that they are wanting to be involved in in order to actually be “involved.” We’ve got crowdfunding, Facebook pages, Instagram, FaceTime, and other forms of technology that keeps us connected to a physical location hundredths or even thousands of miles away. By taking advantage of this phenomenon, Terumi-san claims that a town can have both its physically present population and its involved population or kankei-jinko.
Terumi-san breaks up the different levels of a kankei-jinko as follows:
Local Specialty Shopping: Buying products made in that town
Donating:Paying part of your taxes to a town in the countryside
Regular Visits:Physically visiting the town
Local Volunteering: Going to the town to volunteer
Double Residency: Having a second home or a satellite office in that town
The significance of this breakdown is that there seemed to have been this paradigm within people that in order to be “involved” in the countryside one had to move there, making it a very high hurdle to overcome. Yet as Terumi-san states, one can have varying degrees of involvement with different levels of responsibility. This flexible way of thinking about involvement is the opposite of what the local governments were trying to do. Instead of trying to create more involvement (mostly in the form of moving) through the incentives of subsidies, what was really being needed were more points of involvement at different levels.
In this way, a town can have a small population of physical residents, but can have an unlimited amount of “involved populations”, giving one solution to the whole diminishing population problem. Even without having people actually move to a town, by increasing locations of involvement it is entirely possible to develop a town and make it an exciting center for people.
Though this may seem pretty straight forward when you read it, Terumi-san came to this conclusion by doing an anthropological study on the youth of current day Japan. By analyzing current trends, Terumi-san found that the youth of Japan were wanting to find a place to get involved in, to feel like they mattered, and to have a “hometown”. Now all of those things may seem like something that can be achieved anywhere, but I feel as though this is the consequence of the state of modern day alienation. Even though people are in the central hubs of socialization, even though they have smartphones that can now connect you to thousands of different people in a single swipe of the finger, they feel like they are alone, that their existence does not seem to matter to other people. This may sound quite extreme, but this modern day form of alienation is a very prevalent topic in Japan. In popular media and in Japanese studies the word Kodoku-shi or “dying of loneliness” is a topic that is well covered. People are losing the feeling of being socially relevant and end up dying of loneliness. One may think that in a place like the city bustling with people it would be very hard to feel lonely, but what happens is that people become desensitized to socialization. Not to mention you have to pick and choose when to socialize in the cities because you might get drained from over socialization if you say hello to every person you see. Thus, what Terumi-san found was that people were wanting a place where they could get stuck in, a role within a community, a place to get involved and call their own. When things get too big, too complicated and or saturated, people want something simple and real to hang on to.
So it wasn’t like Terumi-san created this term and thus exists an involved population, but she saw this social phenomenon happening, so she made it into a concept, and once something becomes conceptual you can take that model and recreated it elsewhere.
i was a kankei jinko
To give you a concrete example, as the title above describes, I was part of this kankei-jinko before moving here to Omori. I made regular visits to the town and got involved here not because it was good money or anything, but because I simply wanted to get involved with the lifestyle here. By being a kankei-jinko I was able to bring a fresh new perspective into the town and its lifestyle, like using local ingredients in western dishes. I was also able to use my skill as an English speaker to help out with any English translation that was needed.
So from my example we can see that as a kankei-jinko even though I didn’t live in Omori, I was able to give a new perspective and provide a skill that the town needed. In return I was able to live and be in a pace that gave me social fulfillment.
so why is shun suddenly writing about kankei-jinko?
Well there are a couple of reasons.
First of all my dad actually sent me some pictures he took from a news report on tv which mentioned Kankei-jinko.
The scene above says “Kaikei-jinko: A solution for diminishing population!?”.
This news segment was showing how Kankei-jinko will be the solution for the rural countrysides that are facing inevitable diminishing population of its youth. In particular they seemed to have been focusing on having people from Tokyo or other big cities to come get involved in the countryside.
Popular media seems to have finally caught up with this buzz word, but the concept of kankei-jinko is not new news within the community that I’m involved in. Having a large number of this involved population is keyt to a town in the countryside, so I am not going to say kankei-jinko is not important or anything because it is.
What does irks me is the phrasing “Kankei-jinko: A solution for diminishing population.”
So what’s nagging you shun?
Well, I recently had a really interesting meeting with a professor from Kumamoto Prefecture, his name was Professor Tokuno. He’s sociologist who’s been doing a lot of research into families in these countryside towns. He seems to be most famous for his “T-model Village Inspection” where he goes to a town and does research to essentially create a family tree of the residence and where they currently are. The “T” represents the family tree where you have a father and a mother and a child. The point of doing this is not to just group family members to those who stay in the town and those who have left, but to specify where family members actually are.
In my opinion, the importance of doing such a study is to break that binary that when youth leave the countryside they just go to Tokyo or other large metropolises. From his research, Professor Tokuno found out that there was a gradient to where the youth were moving to. Some moved to the next town, others may have moved to a city within the prefecture, while others did move to large cities like Tokyo.
To cut to the chase, what the professor found out was that these “youths” may actually be living a lot closer to these rural countryside towns than in the popular imagination. Instead of simply focusing on the youths who have no family relations and live far away from that particular town, he claims we should focus more on these relatives and people who live closer and have personal ties to that location. Now this may sound like quite a conservative way of thinking, I did when I first heard him say that, but after he explained his reasoning it made a lot of sense. Professor Tokuno has done extensive ethnographic research in towns that have fallen victim to natural disasters. When he saw the volunteer efforts after the disasters he observed that those who continue to help out with the rebuilding efforts are those who live close to that town have familial relations in there. Professor Tokuno found that the volunteers from farther away usually did not continue to help out with the rebuilding process in the long term.
and all of this means?
Media wants to make the countryside a redemption story, so much is about that shock factor of having the rural countryside and the city youth together as a package (Reminds you guys of anybody?…). And you know what, that is not particularly a bad thing, by all means the countryside needs that fresh breath of air that these youths from the cities bring. However, when the media takes these stories, they tend to fetishize it because those are the stories that catch people’s attention. But as we have seen with Professor Tokuno’s research, those who become more long term players may be those relatives and people who live closer to the town.
The countryside does not only need youths who are trying to find their social place coming from afar, but also people who will be able to frequently help out with the town on the ground, who are in a closer proximity as well. Instead of just focusing on these big movements from Tokyo to the countryside, we should also focus on the interexchange between local towns as well. That is another form of Kaikei-jinko, which may be less trendy but equally as important.
Terumi-san also touches on this on the last pages of her book where she states that the discussion of Kaneki-jinko has been largely limited between Shimane and Tokyo within her community which she finds constricts the conversation about the topic.
In other words, the concept of Kaneki-jinko is a very useful for the rural countryside where there is a diminishing population of youths. However, the scope in which this concept can be used is being largely constricted through the connotation that Kaneki-jinko is about the interaction between a rural towns and a large city.
I want you guys to take a look at this website that Japan’s Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications made about Kaikei-jinko. When one looks at the catch copy of this page, it is at the top where it says “Would you like to find your nostalgic hometown?”. This is clearly only being advertised to the people in the large cities of Japan who feel emotionally displaced or as Anne Allison, a professor of anthropology, claims the “refugeeization” of the Japanese people in the cities. People in the cities feeling that they are losing their social place and are becoming these emotional refugees, which is a similar phenomenon that Terumi-san also observed in the light of studying Kankei-jinko. I doubt that the people who already live in the neighboring local towns would want to find their other “nostalgic hometown”, people don’t want something that they already have. What this means is that Kankei-jinko is already having a connotation that is about the interaction between big cities and rural countrysides even within the government.
Although on the website the Ministry states that they are advertising to those who have roots to the land (Pattern number one above claims that) and show in the graph that they also recognize the distance in which they live from said location(the two right illustrations of people), I just did not see any of this in the actual plans that they were advertising. Most were pushing the attractiveness of having a second home in the countryside, of having a second Furusato (nostalgic home). I feel like we can see a certain narrative being pushed here.
let’s wrap this up shun
Why don’t we go back to the phrase that I mentioned earlier:
“Kankei-jinko: A solution for diminishing population"