My Favorite Cities: A Tale of Three Cities—Sendai, Nagoya, and Hakata | Yasuo Takagi (Dean of the Graduate School of Health Management)

2009.12.10

As I specialized in sociology in college, I still love to walk through various cities and rural villages, and this time, I struggled quite a bit with which cities to feature. I have many memories of places like the old bookstore district in Kanda, Tokyo, and downtown New York, but this time, I will stick to the three cities where I was assigned to work alone as a university professor.

Sendai is known as the "City of Trees," and its beauty during the season of fresh green leaves or in winter with its bare trees is often emphasized, but it was one summer when the "yamase" wind blew that I truly felt the essence of this capital of the Tohoku region. It was a strange experience where the sun shone brightly high in the sky, yet only the wind was cold. I later learned that the year suffered from cold-weather damage, and the poor rice harvest became a topic of conversation. Although I only experienced this once during my four-year stay, it is said that during the Edo period, cold-weather damage leading to famine occurred once every three years, with a major famine happening once every 10 to 30 years. The harshness of Tohoku remains unchanged even today.

Nagoya is a central city on the Tokaido route, and in the year 2000, when I was assigned there, juvenile delinquency and child abuse originating from Nagoya made national headlines. While pondering the causes, I came across the term "kitaribito" (newcomers). Many workers flow into the Nagoya area, which has numerous factories, from various regions across the country, but they often do not interact with the local people from traditionally agricultural communities. This brought to light the image of couples, far from their hometowns, struggling to raise children without support from the community or their parents. The synergistic effect of the urban and the rural is the source of Nagoya's energy, and as the film "Okuribito" (Departures), set in Tohoku, became popular, the word "kitaribito" has become a nostalgic term for me.

Hakata is not only the gateway to Kyushu but also the gateway to Asia. In the past, Moji and Shimonoseki were the respective gateways (just look at the magnificence of Mojiko Station), but their roles were superseded with the advent of the age of air travel. High-speed ferries also operate between Busan and Hakata, making it a vibrant city. My laboratory hosted a graduate student from the Graduate School of Economics at Hokkaido University for six months, and when I asked for her impressions upon her return at the end of March, she recalled, "There were so many place names that appear in textbooks." Hokkaido often appears in history textbooks only from the Meiji period onward, so it must have been a fresh experience for her, having been born and raised in Hokkaido. Incidentally, her research theme was the development of medical facilities in coal mining areas, which she connected to the fact that many workers migrated to Hokkaido following the closure of coal mines in Kyushu. Kyushu, which industrialized and civilized early, also accumulates "social sediment" just as quickly.

Cities, throughout history and across the world, are places where wealth and poverty accumulate, and the faces of these three cities have each become beautiful memories for me.

(Date of publication: 2009/12/10)