Are there places that get somewhat lawless due to their isolation or have a culture and dialect that is perceived as “Backward” or “old fashioned” by urbanites? Are there Japanese equivalents to moonshiners, backwoods folk, and survivalists?
I lived in Kagoshima for a year and drove through some of the mountains in Kyushu which look similar to some parts of Appalachia I’ve been through and it got me curious.
https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/15cbs57/are_there_mountain_regions_in_japan_similar_to/
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All of Shikoku basically would be commensurate with Appalachia, although you could also argue that for Tohoku.
Kagoshima is unique as a poorer prefecture for really emphasizing education
Up in Tohoku there are no left handed people over the age of 14, and even then there are very few. Apparently all left handed people have that “fixed” when they are kids.
Though mountain regions exist in japan it’s really not as remote as the vast the mountains in Appalachia. I’m sure there maybe some moonshiners making their own ドブロク but probably not too much hardcore backwoods folks or survivalists
I mean, I’ve known Tokyoites who look down on anyone with an address that isn’t in one of the 23 ku, so I have to think there are quite a lot of people who look down on more rural locations. But…
>Are there Japanese equivalents to moonshiners, backwoods folk, and survivalists?
Basically no. Like people living in rural areas all over the world, I think it would be normal for some number of Japanese people to in the country to be more self-reliant than people in cities. For example, every few years or so we see a story about a wild boar getting into somewhere populated like a school or something and then some local oyaji calmly gets out their rifle (from a locked case at home) and shoots it or whatever. And I know a guy out in the sticks (read; on a really low-use spoke rail line from the city) who infuses shochu with his own flavors. But like someone totally isolated from civilization with a bathtub still who lives off of whatever roadkill he can find? No.
Every time I go on a trip through the Japanese countryside, the thing that I marvel at is that even when I am about as far from urban areas as I can imagine, houses are all clustered together with tiny yards. I keep thinking, “you know, you have space here to spread out. You don’t have to build right next to each other.” The only explanation I can think of is that people want it that way.
It also has to be said that rural area votes tend to have more weight than city area votes, even to the point that Japanese courts have ruled elections unfair (but of course, that never invalidates the elections…). And the LDP in particular likes to court rural votes. My impression is that through the 80s and 90s a form of that courtship was building infrastructure in rural areas, so that tiny villages with barely anyone there will still have elaborate town halls with fancy auditoriums and bronze statues of young nude women and hard-working school boys.
You may find a toothless elderly farmer in very rural villages, bent over because growing up just after the war, they didn’t get enough nutrition. You will definitely find villagers who have a lot of pride in their rural village and its festivals. But there’s more to Appalachian culture than just being country folk. I just don’t think the kind of lawlessness and isolationism that we associate with Appalachian people really exists in Japan. I’m not saying it’s zero, but it’s got to be so rare that it’s basically zero. Less “go to this area to see lawless people” and more “this one village has *a* guy who probably has some mental health issues who lives on his own away from everyone else.”
I would expect that if there are survivalists in Japan, it’s more rich people who watched a lot of imported zombie movies or played a lot of Death’s Stranding and decided to emulate the aesthetic than people who grew up with nothing and ended up living opportunistically off the land.
I wouldn’t say lawless but a lot of people actually consider Kagoshima to be as you described. Japanese people who aren’t from there can’t understand the dialect and consider Kagoshima people to be backwater yokels. Even my husband, who was born in Kagoshima Prefecture, jokes about the 田舎者 there whenever we visit the area.
not exactly what you’re looking for, but [tsugaru-ben](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsugaru_dialect) is pretty interesting in that it’s so divergent from standard Japanese that a lot of people can’t understand it
from [https://tsugaruben.net/](https://tsugaruben.net/):
>Marketing without fail has attempted to capitalize on the interest, culminating in the famous Toyota Passo commercial in which Tsugaru-ben speakers are portrayed as French people as the pronunciation and unintelligibility makes it sound like French to those outside Aomori.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFXffsPfR0I
>…*regions* in Japan similar to Appalachia in the U.S.?
Sure. *All* of them.
* **Poor**: Check.
* **Inbred**: Check.
* **Trashed out with dead cars**: Check.
* **Random toxic dumping**: Check.
* **Zero local opportunities**: Check.
_________________
The three big differences are:
1. No drugs.
2. Education.
3. Universal health care.
Oh, and “willingness” to work at super low levels of income since any welfare measures are below subsistence level.
If you wanna know what people do in the boondocks, just watch the ポツンと一軒家.
Inunaki valley
Kyushu is where I grew up, it fits the description, though not perfectly.
There are many off-grid homes and farms. They are not completely independent, and most are still part of a loose community of houses. But, in some areas the number of abandoned houses is more than number of occupied houses. So the people there are very isolated from the other groups. The local dialects are very strong. I had to unlearn a lot of slang words when I moved to Tokyo, because no one understood me and I was teased.
Moonshiners, yes. Many of my father’s friends hunt deer and boar, and brew their own shochu.
I guess a corollary question might be: are there “back-to-the-landers” in Japan? Like folks who grew up in urban areas who want to escape for a “simpler” life in the countryside.
Kochi baby. Great prefecture as well.
Some Inaka friend of my father and law brought him a jug of fermented hornets. That’s as bout as yee yee haw mutherfucker that you get anywhere in the world
You are asking if there are regions of concentrated, generational rural poverty in Japan and the short answer is no, because Japan doesn’t shit on its own people in quite the same way.
The longer answer is that poor people exist, poor communities exist, and communities exist which have regional accents, cuisines, and styles. Plenty in the mountains but not only there. But there are sufficient social structures to lift people out of poverty or at least help in Japan. And as the population shrinks, young people are leaving their small towns and concentrating in the cities.
Edited after making sure I wasn’t confusing Kumamoto for Kagoshima:
An interesting fact is that Kagoshima was once a place where sugarcane was cultivated. Sugar was a massively profitable crop in the Edo period but sugar agriculture is absolutely brutal work. In the middle of the second millennium all around the world, wherever sugar could be planted and grown, you would find a small group of people forcing the labor of a larger group of people and enriching themselves off of it. In the Kagoshima area this was the Satsuma clan, who forced their peasants to grow sugar instead of other crops, and you had to sell your crops to them at their low prices or they’d kill you. This was a type of agricultural oppression unlike anywhere else in Japan. I think you could certainly draw some comparison between this system and what created the poverty in Appalachia; a rich class crushing the freedom and rights of a community of workers for their own profits. The Satsuma even restricted trade generally so that there was kind of a “company store” thing going on.
I’ve heard rumors of remote Buraku villages that aren’t shown on maps…is there any semblance of truth to this?