Shining a Light on the Taboo of "Endings"

I was born and raised in Tokyo, but I spent my three high school years in the Oki Islands of Shimane Prefecture. I happened to learn about the high school on the island from a TV show and was drawn to the idea of a life where I could enjoy my favorite pastime, fishing, all year round.

While living on the remote island, I witnessed firsthand the various problems faced by Japan's depopulated regions. Living in a community with a declining population, I began to wonder how we could bring this community to a gentle close. There are many universities that focus on regional revitalization and town development. On the other hand, the issue of how to manage the decline of regions that cannot be revitalized is rarely discussed. After reading "Tettai no Nōson Keikaku" (Rural Planning for Retreat), published in 2010, I learned that there was a professor at SFC involved in such activities.

The town of Ama is said to be a leading example of regional revitalization. However, even within Ama, there are communities facing the threat of extinction. These are people who cannot expect an influx of new residents and are prepared for their homes and communities to end with their generation. When the national and prefectural governments champion "revitalization as the only just cause," people and regions that don't fit this narrative are left with a sense of guilt. In reality, there are likely more regions that cannot be revitalized, yet they receive no attention at all.

I felt a sense of unease with the "taboo of endings" shared by Japanese society, and the desire to understand its origins became the driving force for my research. SFC was one of the few places where I felt I could independently research negative issues like "how to end," "how to wind down," and "how to close."

Even at SFC, there was no one directly researching methods for municipal withdrawal or managed decline. I realized that precisely because there is no one-size-fits-all solution, the narratives of the residents rooted in that land are crucial. Therefore, after being accepted to SFC, I contacted Professor Yuichiro Shimizu, a specialist in political research using oral history methodology, even before enrolling, and joined his research group from the spring semester of my first year.

The purpose of oral history is to understand events that cannot be clarified through written historical materials by listening to the narratives of those involved. For example, even if a narrator's story contains falsehoods, it can reveal the societal context that compelled them to lie. The research process of oral history involves organizing and cross-referencing people's narratives with written historical documents.

Numerical data released by national and local governments have a certain degree of reliability. However, when dealing with regional decline, you cannot simply draw a line based on numbers, such as saying "the population has fallen below a certain number, so there is no hope for recovery." The stories told by the people involved are also information that should not be overlooked.

While oral history research is time-consuming, the disappearance of communities is also an urgent problem. Driven by a desire to take action myself, I established an NPO to support communities through their process of decline.

I hypothesized that the aversion to letting a community end is rooted in a historical context where death has been concealed and transformed into something outside of everyday life. Therefore, in May 2020, I founded Mujō, Inc., and started a business aimed at redesigning how we encounter death in the modern age. We are developing services such as "Sōsōshiki," a memorial website creation service for those unable to attend funerals, and "Jitakusō no Koko," a funeral home specializing in at-home funerals serving Tokyo and the three surrounding prefectures.

By redesigning our relationship with "death," which everyone faces, I hope it will become easier to discuss various "endings," including the decline of communities.

Both research and business are important and time-consuming activities. Therefore, I decided to take my time graduating from my undergraduate program, taking leaves of absence along the way. At a typical university where graduating in four years is the norm, this idea might seem strange. But at SFC, in a good way, nobody cares about such things. Being able to step away easily without worrying about what others think is another advantage of continuing research at SFC.

A feature of SFC's classes is the opportunity to gain broad exposure to various academic fields. You can discover clues for approaches that connect to problems not confined to existing academic disciplines. Students interested in multiple specialized fields don't need to limit themselves to a single research group. You are free to join multiple groups, and even if you don't belong to any, the professors will support you if you consult with them. Being able to access an extremely diverse range of fields on a single campus is SFC's strength.