Transcriber: Akinori Oyama Reviewer: Takahiro Shimpo
You know, here in Kyoto, in this lovely hall
a lot of well-dressed people carrying iPhones.
Or, if you go to Osaka,
you see people with their Louis Vuitton.
Everything looks fine.
And, of course, it is fine.
Japan is a very wealthy country
with one of the strongest economies in the world.
But there is a problem, and it's called depopulation.
If you travel a little bit outside of the cities,
it'll look like this. This is what we call the shuttered towns.
The farther you go into the country side,
the more severe it is because there is inequality.
Japan is losing population, but not equally.
The big cities are actually thriving.
Small cities are in big trouble.
In fact, you see something like this,
houses broken down, streets with nobody walking on them.
In the very little towns, it's quite severe.
We did a styrofoam model
of this little fishing village in the Inland Sea.
We painted the houses where people are living in red
where you can see that this town is about to die.
The Japanese government has been aware of the problem,
but unfortunately the policy for 50 years was building things.
"Let's cover the country in concrete.
Let's do something about the rivers, build highways, dams
turn even small streams into little shoots.
Every year add another patch."
Here, you can see what happened last year and what's going on this year.
Huge highways that are built for no particular purpose.
You can see on this one, which cost billions of dollars, no traffic at all.
(Laughter)
It wasn't just civil engineering.
It was also monument building.
The idea was if you could cover the whole town in concrete,
that would somehow make it modern and it would thrive.
They built museums like this one
that drove this poor little town into bankruptcy.
Or, the Gold Tower that nobody knows what to do with.
(Laughter)
And, I love this mosque-like... This isn't Iraq,
this is Tsushima, a little town of 1,500 people
where they spent 20 million dollars to build something like this.
And, what happened is, that in the meantime,
sadly, it didn't work.
The people left the villages, agriculture collapsed,
forestry collapsed, and so then, they poured more concrete in.
Is there not another way?
Here, I want to step back and become a little personal.
I came to Japan as a little boy in 1964 with my family.
That's almost 50 years ago.
And, then later, when I was in college I hitchhiked all over Japan.
Like a lot of young people, I was looking for my Shangri-La.
And, I was really lucky because I found it.
It's this magic place called Iya,
which is a very distant, remote part of Japan.
It's in the mountains of Shikoku.
Shikoku to this day is the least visited
of the big four islands of Japan.
Even within Shikoku, Iya is deep in the hills.
This is where the Heike warriors escaped in the 12th century.
It was so remote.
Sometimes they call it Japan's Grand Canyon.
I love this place and I noticed
back in the 70s that it was already depopulated.
There were abandoned houses all over the place.
I thought, "Gosh, I'm a poor student, but I could maybe own one of these."
So, I started looking around and I found this
which I bought in 1973.
We named the house Chiiori.
I talked to the villagers and they sold it to me for 1,500 dollars.
The land.
The house was junk, worthless.
So I got the house for free.
But actually this house is 300 years old.
And, it's more than 300 years old.
It's actually thousands of years old, the lifestyle here,
it goes back before the Japan we think we know,
before tatami and before rice.
You see these wooden floors.
There's a floor hearths, the irori floor hearths,
which is like having a camp fire in the middle of your living room.
(Laughter)
But smoke comes out of it and it turns everything black.
So, even the ceiling is black.
We re-thatched the house over the years,
but originally I had no money, I couldn't even afford thatch.
So we got old thatch from a house they were tearing down.
And, you can see, I look like I came out of...
a sooty old thatch, coiming out of a coal mine
The thing about this house, though, is that's fast forward decades.
We got tens of thousands of visitors.
So much so that our prefecture, which is called Tokushima,
looked at their statistics and they said,
"There are all these foreigners coming to Tokushima. Why?
Oh they're going to Iya, but why?
They are going to this place called Chiiori. Where? What?"
So, they called us up and they said, "Why?
You don't have a big Gold Tower and you don't have a huge Kangei Hall.
You don't have a highway. You don't have all these great things.
What do they come for?"
And, I said, "Well, it's what I call
the appeal of nothing special."
That's actually pretty big.
Actually our slogan in Iya today is
(Japanese): "There is nothing".
What that means is, for example, if you're traveling to go to Paris,
of course, you want to see Louvre and Notre Dame,
but once you've done that, the joy of Paris
is walking in the little back streets, taking in the air.
That's the true appeal of a place.
And, of course, that's what people come to Iya for.
This is the magic.
I started thinking, "My God, this country is covered
with tens of thousands of abandoned houses.
Thousands of them even better than Chiiori.
Couldn't we do this in other places?"
So, I started doing regional projects.
One of the first ones I did is in this little island called Ojika.
Ojika is what I call the Iya on the sea
because it's even harder to get to than Iya.
It's way off the coast of Kyushu.
It's so hard to get to
that this is where the Hidden Christians escaped.
When Christianity was banned they went on this island
and built their little church and hid there,
practiced there for 300 years until the banners left it.
But this town is in terrible shape, detoured, losing population.
They've built museums and highways.
They did all that and it didn't work.
So we got together with the town.
We came up with a project
to redo 7 old houses and one restaurant.
Of course, when we find the houses, the floor is falling in,
the roof is leaking, they are a mess.
But it can indeed be fixed up,
as you can see from this, restored Japanese traditional zashiki.
But here is where I want to step back for a minute and just say
I'm not a curator,
and I'm not a professor, and I'm not trying to say
"This is how it was in Edo. This is how it was in Meiji."
I am not interested in making a museum.
You know, some kind of a show-piece.
What I want to do is bring these houses into the modern age
because that's the only way that they can live.
What you don't see in this photo is under that tatami is redone wiring,
completely redone plumbing,
insulation, lighting, heating, cooling.
All these things that make it possible for modern people to actually be there.
And, you have to do more than just this
because modern Japanese don't sit on the tatami anymore, right?
So how can you enjoy a beautiful house
in a way that fits your modern lifestyle?
Well, next to that tatami room, we built this Western sunken living room.
Which was maybe too successful because people just hang around here
and they never actually go into that beautiful zashiki.
And, the puzzles, always, with these houses are,
I was told, "Alex, you can't build the table here
because there is this column."
Well, we built it. (Laughter)
The other thing I tried to do is what I call a modern intervention.
By that I mean valuing the traditional space,
but let's do something that's completely new and modern about it
and really make people feel
that they are in the now not just in the past.
So here was the long room that was going to become the restaurant.
What we did was we bought this 7 meter-long table.
We call it a long table, long table for a long room.
You can actually sit under there, you can put your legs down and sit.
And it turned this place -- although it's an old space -- into a very new space.
This is our restaurant in Ojika at night.
Back in Iya, which has exactly the same problems,
we were doing a project with the town,
and we are doing 8 houses there.
We started with a hamlet called Ochiai,
which is about a 20-minute drive from my place.
And it's way up, you can get vertigo just by standing there.
Our very first house was this one,
which is "you take one look and want to give up really".
(Laughter)
But it's 200 years old and has an incredible structure.
So, what do you do?
You had the leanings and they had to be straightened.
You take it down to its original structure,
rebuild the roof and rethatch.
And here is another thing I want to say,
people think restoring these houses
is "miya daiku", traditional carpentry all the way.
But that's not my approach.
We're using thatch because it's part of history and culture of Iya,
but we are also using water-retardant materials for the roof.
This is what it looks outside.
Here, you can see where the insulation is going on the inside.
When the house is done,
you have this traditional Iya-type floor with the floor hearth.
You have the view, this incredible view over that valley,
but right next to it you've got a place with a kitchen and a table and a chair.
You can have your morning coffee.
You can be at home.
This is what we started with.
This is what we ended with.
You can see it's the same house. (Chuckles)
(Applause)
It took it from being unlivable to being livable.
In the meantime,
I've done dozens of houses all over this country.
And, the funny thing is that my own house was pretty much the last one.
We finally got around to it last year.
So, this is Chiiori as it had been.
We took off the roof.
We rethatched.
We called in a thatcher.
And here again, we went from this,
to this.
And, I love my beautiful new thatched roof,
but I think what I love maybe more
are my beautiful, double-paned glass windows.
Because what that means is we can sit in this house
and watch the snow coming down and be in comfort.
Here is the restored living room
which looks exactly like the old living room,
but under those floors is under-floor heating.
We have a proper kitchen.
We've put in proper toilets.
This is maybe the most important photograph you'll see today.
(Laughter)
And the bath.
And, the thing about it is, why do all this?
I am not really here to talk about,
"Let's fix up some pretty houses." That's not really the aim.
The aim is what can we do about these troubled regional towns.
We were told and we did it in Ojika and we did it in Iya and they said,
"Why would they? People don't come to these places.
They won't come."
I'm happy to say that this summer
in both, Ojika and Iya, we had 90% occupancy.
It basically means they were full all summer,
which is even better than Kyoto.
It amazed us, we didn't think that would happen,
and especially because when I started I was aiming at the foreigners
because they said "Alex, the Japanese don't travel this way.
They'll never come." So I said, "Never mind. We'll get foreign travelers."
But it turns out that in Iya we're at 70%,
in Ojika almost 100% Japanese,
which means, the Japanese would love to see their natural environment.
They would love to go to these little towns,
they just don't want to suffer.
(Laughter)
But when it's provided they will come, and they do.
So what this means, is it creates a new industry.
Toru, here, manages our project in Iya. He's from Shizuoka.
The young guy lived hundreds of kilometers from Iya, but he moved here.
It was unthinkable. Young people would never move into Iya.
But not only him, we've got others coming now.
Miss Nakaishi, she's holding our Iya tofu.
They call it "iwa tofu", rock tofu,
because you can actually hold it with a rope.
Well, this was dying out.
Nobody knew a use for it.
Now, what happens when you get tourists coming in?
They want to try the local food.
They want to take something home as a souvenir.
So, it's come alive again.
Back in Ojika, here's our long table.
First, the visitors had parties, and the locals started having parties.
And, all of this brings money in.
It means that they're not stuck,
they don't have to reach out to the government again,
and concrete another river, and build another empty museum.
There is a new industry for these places.
Japan is so rich.
The natural environment, the fantastic traditional culture,
the wealth of beauty and materials, of sprit of lifestyle
that you find in these old places.
It's there and it can be saved.
And I think we found the way to go forward.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)