The Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale Draws Hundreds of Thousands. How Does It Help Revive Japan's Ever-Declining Countryside?

A hard fact: like every art festival, it can only bring attention and a brief flow of visitors — it still can't cure the countryside's decline at the root

Two hundred and thirty kilometers northwest of Tokyo, Onozuka, a 68-year-old farmer, helps look after the abandoned Higashikawa Elementary School — which is also a work of art, by the French artist Christian Boltanski.

This was once Onozuka's own school. When he was a pupil, the postwar baby boom packed the classrooms full. By the time it closed in 1997, 11 students were left.

The mountains here are in Niigata Prefecture, the "Snow Country" of Yasunari Kawabata's novel, where the snow season runs more than half the year. As a young man Onozuka went south to Kanagawa Prefecture to study flower growing, then came back to Niigata and raised carnations and lilies in the village for a few years until he could no longer make it pay. The postwar "dankai generation" has reached retirement age, and its children and grandchildren have all been pulled away to big cities like Tokyo.

"I'm still on active duty," Onozuka told QDaily. He and one other farmer still work 20,000 square meters of rice paddies, one crop of Koshihikari rice a year, and in the idle snow season he drives a snowplow around the village. Whether he'll go join his son in Tokyo once he "retires," he can't say. Many of the village's old people sigh that "the next time the kids come back, it will probably be for my funeral."

Since last year Onozuka has volunteered at the school — unlocking the doors, switching on the lights, receiving visitors from everywhere. When there is nothing to do he goes in alone, sits quietly, and thinks: not bad at all.

As a Boltanski work, the closed school is called The Last Class. Lights flicker in the dim gymnasium, straw covers the floor, fans push out waves of hot air. Black acrylic panels line the corridor walls; it isn't hard to guess that they once held photographs of the school's history, or notices. In the chemistry lab the artist recorded villagers' heartbeats, and from that collection he built a "Heartbeat Archive" on the island of Naoshima, in the Seto Inland Sea. Boltanski works with everyday things — old clothes, photographs, mirrors. He says he likes to wrestle with death and with life, so that people can see what is disappearing and what is being erased.

When the piece was finished in 2003, Boltanski gave the villagers a private preview. The old people brought objects tied to the school: trophies, a worn-out racket, letters, cigarette packs. All of it was stored behind a wall in the music room.

But who was Boltanski? Why was he making these things on "our land"? In the early years, Onozuka says, he kept his distance from the school. People weren't sure what that foreigner was doing inside it, or why so many strangers came all that way to see a place with such an eerie feel.

The man who brought Boltanski and several hundred other internationally known artists to rural Japan is Fram Kitagawa. In 2000 he launched the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale in Niigata Prefecture: once every three years, fifty days each time. Kitagawa wanted to use art to revive Japan's ever-declining countryside.

"Echigo-Tsumari" is not an administrative district but an old place name, covering roughly 760 square kilometers in southern Niigata Prefecture, including the city of Tokamachi and the town of Tsunan. It is larger than Tokyo's 23 wards, and 70,000 people are left in it. The previous triennale drew 510,000 visitors over its 50 days. The seventh edition opened on July 29 this year.

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Kitagawa is Onozuka's contemporary, part of the same postwar "dankai generation" — people who never experienced the war directly but watched Japan's economy take off and its bubble burst.

Kitagawa was born in the city of Takada, Niigata Prefecture (today's Joetsu), but to people in Echigo-Tsumari he was still an outsider of doubtful standing.

In the three years before the first triennale, Kitagawa held more than 2,000 briefings, large and small. Some locals flatly opposed the whole thing. Why spend money on art? Instead of buying costly "ornaments," why not spend more on repairing roads, or building a nursing home? The giant pumpkin Yayoi Kusama installed on Naoshima was once taken by fishermen for a new kind of bomb.

Besides the briefings, young volunteers had to knock on doors one house at a time to explain what an art festival was, and to ask whether they might borrow land, tools or a pair of hands. The volunteer corps is called Kohebi-tai, the Little Snakes; most of its members in the first edition were art students, and many of them were scolded until they cried. Villagers decided Kitagawa was a cult leader and warned the young art students not to be taken in by him, and not to come around "preaching" again.

Ultimately, what Kitagawa and his people had to answer in those early years was this: "Why are you putting your things on my land? What has it got to do with me?" The doubts and the questions have not stopped since.

Before Kitagawa, Niigata had floated all kinds of regional revival schemes — build a Leonardo da Vinci museum to pull in tourists, say, or have local government pay to lure companies out of the cities. Nothing came of any of them.

"That is bubble-era thinking. People feel that only building something physical means you are really doing anything." In 2015 Kitagawa published The Power of Rural Regeneration: Ten Ideas from the Art Triennale (《乡土再造之力：大地艺术节的 10 种创想》), where he argues that roads and nursing homes will not stop the countryside from growing older.

As a young man Kitagawa took part in the student movement and protested the forced seizure of farmers' land for Narita Airport: big construction carried out under the banner of urbanization and modernization, usually at the expense of some particular group. Later he also opposed the curriculum at the Tokyo University of the Arts, on the grounds that the entire art-education system served capital and American power.

Art Front Gallery, set up in the 1970s, is now one of Japan's best-known art institutions. In the 1990s, on the "Faret Tachikawa" project, Kitagawa had already tried making art inside a city's public facilities and spaces: he invited 92 artists from 36 countries and together they produced 109 works. Not long after Tachikawa, Niigata came to him, hoping he could bring art into public space in the countryside as well.

For a veteran curator, gathering a group of world-class artists was not the hard part. What to make, and what could be made, was something Kitagawa was unsure of that first time. He remembers taking a few minutes to introduce Echigo-Tsumari to the artists — not how beautiful the scenery was, or how good the wild vegetables tasted, but mostly how the countryside had declined. "I wanted that to be the starting point for their work."

Beyond broad labels like snow country, urbanization and aging, what exactly had happened in the countryside, and what was still happening? It took Kitagawa and his team more than twenty years to work that out.

Zou Qiuhua, from Taiwan, came once as a tourist, went from visitor to Little Snakes volunteer, and now works for Art Front Gallery. She remembers that the young volunteers were startled the first time they saw masked palm civets: they were so cute, why would locals want to hurt them? Now she can explain where the civets came from without pausing. In the boom years people planted trees all over the mountains for construction timber. As the economy changed, the coast along the Sea of Japan slowly emptied out, the population drained away, demand for timber collapsed, and nobody tended the forests. The trees grew too close together and squeezed out the forest's variety of life; low-lying plants, short of sunlight and nutrients, thinned out or vanished. Civets and monkeys, unable to find enough to eat in the woods, came down the mountain and raided the farms.

"The mountain forest is sick." Once you know the cause, technical fixes such as cutting artificial gaps in the canopy can solve some of the immediate problems. The Little Snakes learned all sorts of local knowledge from residents while also brokering the relationship between the artworks and the community. Collecting materials, borrowing and moving machinery such as cranes, maintaining the finished pieces — bit by bit, local people took part.

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The works that get the most attention belong to star artists; over seven editions the triennale has produced a set of landmarks people travel to just to photograph. Yayoi Kusama's Tsumari in Bloom stands beside Matsudai Station, and volunteers, or guides drawn from the local aunties, will tell visitors that the outer layer of petals has to be taken off and stored before the snow season, or heavy snow will crush them.

In 2015 Cai Guo-Qiang built a Mount Penglai out of local materials in the courtyard of the Satoyama Museum. This year Leandro Erlich, the Argentine artist of the moment, painted an empty pond in the same spot: an optical trick that projects the sky and the surrounding buildings onto the courtyard.

The Chinese architect Ma Yansong and his firm MAD Architects designed several viewing platforms at the far end of the Kiyotsu Gorge Tunnel, where a mirrored dome and a sheet of water turn the viewer into scenery in someone else's photograph.

Checking off several hundred works one by one is not easy, though. They are scattered across village after village.

"Efficiency is a trait of cities. Japanese cities are concentrated, and everything develops toward sameness. But in Echigo-Tsumari the situation is the exact opposite of the urban value of getting the most, and the newest, information in the shortest possible time." Kitagawa says he wants visitors to see the real countryside along a route that has been stretched out, rather than a few carefully chosen fragments served up together.

There is another main reason, of course: in the early editions there were very few supporters, and only some local governments and individuals were willing to offer scattered pieces of land.

Unlike the campaign-style exhibition-building common in China, no administrative power forced anything through. The talks between Kitagawa's people and private landowners are slow, and they are still going on. In 2008 they simply set up a nonprofit, the NPO Satoyama Collaborative Organization, which stays in the area outside triennale season and handles the complications as they come.

"You finally get one landowner's agreement to put an installation in his field. Then another man comes running over: you've dug past the line. Only later do you find out the plot has five owners. You can't take the next step until every one of them has said yes."

Not many landowners have 20,000 square meters of flat land like Onozuka. What Echigo-Tsumari mostly has is fragments of terraced paddy. When the nonprofit went through the terraces, it found that close to a third had no identifiable owner: some owners had moved to the big cities, others could no longer be traced at all. Those terraces have simply been left to go fallow, to fend for themselves, with nobody sure what to do about them. That, Kitagawa says, is the brutal reality of an abandoned countryside.

Kitagawa is the triennale's general director, which means he cannot bow out gracefully when the show closes, the way a traditional curator can. Beyond the busy fifty days that come round every three years, the nonprofit runs exhibitions, events and workshops out of season, leads work in farming, tourism and product development and sales, and operates three restaurants and guesthouses converted from closed schools and empty houses.

The nonprofit now holds contracts on more than a hundred terraced paddies in Echigo-Tsumari, land that is either ownerless or belongs to owners too old to farm it. The Russian artist Ilya Kabakov set statues in one of them, silhouettes of people at work. Tomoki Fukushima owns that paddy; he now leaves it to the nonprofit and his nephew to look after together.

The nonprofit launched a Rice Terrace Bank, through which city dwellers can pay online to adopt a terrace and receive the rice or vegetables grown on it. The farming is done by the nonprofit's staff and volunteers, who have also hired farmhands from the area and from outside it. The Koshihikari rice is sold online and supplied to the three restaurants the nonprofit runs in Echigo-Tsumari. The restaurants, the guesthouses and the upkeep of the artworks have all created some local jobs.

In the first few editions the triennale's money came mainly from government; later, conglomerates and foundations such as Benesse provided funding. Kitagawa has also worked with brands — BMW, for instance, lent eight cars in 2015 to ferry VIPs around. In the recent editions, ticket sales and the nonprofit's own income cover more than 80% of the budget.

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Yukihisa Isobe was one of the first artists invited into Echigo-Tsumari. One of the most important artists of postwar Japan, he went to the United States in the 1960s and turned to regional planning after he came home. At first, Kitagawa says, he did not want to commission an installation from Isobe at all; he wanted him to do fieldwork.

In 1999 Isobe began recording the Shinano, Japan's longest river, which runs through Echigo-Tsumari, in video, drawings and sound.

His work for the first edition was Where Has the River Gone? (《河川去哪儿了》), which used 700 yellow poles three meters high to mark where the Shinano's channel had run a hundred years earlier. Planting them required the agreement of 28 landowners along the banks in Kaino. At first people thought digging holes and standing poles up in freshly plowed land was simply outrageous; gradually they came around, and some even suggested tying flags to the poles so you could see the wind shift, which might be more interesting still.

After the 2011 Nagano earthquake, a mudslide hit the Echigo-Tsumari area. At the next triennale Isobe again used yellow poles to mark the ground the mudslide had covered (A Monument of Mudslide). A German engineer worked with him to build four silos beside the slope, which was still moving; the collapsing earth and rock was funneled into them as a defense, to hold back further collapse.

He wanted to remind people that these disasters are not entirely natural. The Miyanaka Dam, the only dam on the main stem of the Shinano, belongs to JR East's Shinano River power station, which in the end sends its electricity to the Tokyo metropolitan area to run trains on the Yamanote and Chuo lines. Some environmentalists point out that pumping too much groundwater causes local problems, affecting irrigation and the life in the river.

For this edition he laid a giant inflatable tube along the ground to trace a water pipe buried 280 meters below, and called it A Monument of Siphon. Along with the natural resources, manpower has been siphoned off to the big cities too. Country people get a chance to leave the mountains and see the world outside. But in places that are net exporters of resources, what is left?

Seizo Tashima, a picture-book author of 78, has taken part in several editions; he turned an abandoned school into a "three-dimensional picture book." This year he worked with the American poet Arthur Binard to look at human society from the point of view of a pit viper.

Binard counts as half Japanese. He and his Japanese wife have lived in Hiroshima for years, and he has written haiku in Japanese. Over the past two years he and Tashima ran a survey in Echigo-Tsumari, going to see farmers who had dealt with pit vipers: people who had seen one, killed one, been bitten by one, or eaten one. Some felt a kind of awe; others were baffled — why pick something so strange to study?

They found that the pit viper has a finely made body, sharp eyesight, and can even delay fertilization. "But all humans think is that it's frightening and highly venomous," Tashima says. The school, hung with colored strips of wood, looks a lot like a children's playground, but he and Binard still wanted to raise some serious questions. "The 'other' is always discriminated against, whether in the war in Syria or inside Japan. Other races, other species — perhaps their only crime is not being one of us."

Language and culture being what they are, artists who really do research on the ground are still a minority.

The artist Katsuhiko Hibino has been based long-term at the closed Azamihira Elementary School, where he has set up an editorial office called The Day-After-Tomorrow News, with young students helping to edit it. Their work is no longer confined to the short exhibition every three years: since 2003 they have put out 24 issues a year.

"It seems only what happens in Tokyo or Osaka counts as news," Kitagawa said in one interview, calling this the regional imbalance created by concentration in a single pole, with cities monopolizing most political and economic resources. The Day-After-Tomorrow News follows what is going on at the margins: the front page of issue 362, for instance, was a 75-year-old man living in the shadow of a nuclear plant. The village where Azamihira Elementary School stands has 60 people left. The paper's readers are locals, and also Japanese readers further afield.

"Maybe people can find out what is happening in these places, or in their own hometowns."

(Cover image / Osamu Nakamura, Ma Yansong's work Tunnel of Light; the wide header image is a work by the Belgian artist Carsten Höller, supplied by Hanhe Culture. Hanhe Culture is the Chinese partner of this edition of the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale and took part in China House.)