Islands of dreaded exaggeration

A while ago a link on facebook caught my attention. It is a blog entry about Amakusa, my current hometown. The facts seem pretty accurate, and the author clearly did some research, but his tone and impressions of the place are just downright depressing. He came here looking for things to be run down and depressing, so he ignored everything that wasn’t and then basked in whatever he could claim as such. He claims in his comments that some of it is meant in jest, but I’m afraid his sarcasm or humor didn’t translate to me very well.

I debated whether or not I should link this article on my blog, and finally decided that it was worth it to see another person’s point of view (although I will taint you all with my opinions first). Keep in mind that this guy is but one view of the area and that my view is very different. Amakusa has its fair share of problems, and perhaps even more than is fair. We are the fastest depopulating area in Japan and we have some major issues with gambling related poverty (Hondo alone has at least 4 pachinko parlors, which is far more than I feel any town the size of Hondo should be able to support). We have a rapidly aging population as does the rest of Japan, although it is probably more noticeable here. But despite what this article will have you think, we are not constantly within a cloud of gloom and doom. The sun does shine. Children laugh and play outside, people smile and greet you on the street. He fails to mention some of the rich culture here, such as the Haiya festival that draws in a good amount of tourism every year.

Reading this article I had to stop several times to laugh and roll my eyes. It really isn’t as bad as he makes it sound. For example, he speaks of the closest train station in Misumi as “utterly deserted and overrun with grass and weeds.” This is gross exaggeration and I don’t even think that the picture he posted gives the impression he was trying to convince his readers of. The trains run about once an hour, so if he wasn’t there near a time when a train arrived of course there weren’t going to be many people. No one hangs out at Misumi station. And we have a station attendant, so the place is never really deserted. And while there is some grass visible on the tracks (which by the way they are doing on purpose in many places as a way of helping the environment, though I don’t know if it is the case here) it hardly appears overgrown. Things only get worse from there.

He presents many statistics to try to back up his gloomy narrative, but doesn’t present some obvious possible explanations for them. For example, he relates how the passenger volume on the Misumi line declined substantially between 1986 and 2007. He seems to see this as evidence of Amakusa slowly dying. However in the previous sentence he mentions how express services stopped in 1986. Hmmmmm… That is the same year that the decline started. Is it possible that with the loss of the express services people realized that the train now took just about as long to get to the city as it would take to drive their own cars (which anyone from Amakusa would have to drive to the station anyway)? He also brings up our depopulation but uses a stat comparing the number of 17 year olds to the number of 19 year olds. Seventeen year olds are still in high school, which Amakusa has several of (although a good number of students do attend high school off of the island). However, a nineteen year old could be a university student and Amakusa certainly isn’t large enough to support one of those. So any university student is clearly not living in Amakusa at that time. I’m not claiming that all of the nineteen year olds are in college as some have joined the workforce straight out of high school, but it is something to consider while analyzing the statistics. A better comparison would have been 17 year olds to 25 year olds. By that age, those who attended university out of Amakusa and returned would be accounted for. And in fact it would probably be better to compare 14 years olds who are still in junior high school rather than 17 year olds who may or may not have already left the area for school. This statistic could very well be similar to the one he presents but I feel it would be a more accurate comparison to analyze the depopulation of the area.

I feel this quote really sums up his attitude, “Where was the spectral gloom for which I had come in quest?” He actually seems disappointed when his first impressions of Amakusa are not horrible. But instead of praising Amakusa for what it has avoided, he selectively presents only those things that can somehow support his preconceived notion of the area. Perhaps the thing that makes me the saddest is that it is a very well written piece. This is not some bit of drivel on the internet that can easily be overlooked and ignored. The author is well spoken and paints a picture for his readers so they can easily come to share his view. I hate to think that many people who had never heard of Amakusa will now think of it as such a dreary and depressing place. I have never, not even on my most depressed days where I hate everything about Japan, seen Amakusa in such a negative light as he does. He does not come to Goshoura, although part of me is morbidly curious of what he would have thought of my island.

You can find the post here and judge for yourselves. Oh, and I advise staying out of the comments as it kind of devolves into bickering and isn’t really insightful in anyway. It is a long piece and hardly light reading, so tackle it when you have some time on your hands. I don’t want to leave you all sad and depresses though, so once you finish reading come back and enjoy these adorable pictures of T-shirts that my students made about Goshoura that are sure to make you smile.