In a town where houses keep increasing even though the population should be shrinking

New houses have started to be built again in a place that used to be a rice field.

On the corner of the road I always take on my commute. In the spot where rice stalks swayed until last autumn, heavy machinery moved in this spring, and before I knew it, brand-new walls had gone up. Banners for the housing development are fluttering, and the words "6 lots in total" sway in the wind.

I think, "Huh." Even though I hear words like "population decline" and "vacant house problem" on the news every day, in the scenery right before my eyes, houses are increasing rapidly. If I walk a little further, there is an old house standing alone with its shutters closed, yet just a few hundred meters away, shiny new houses are lining up.

It's a strange sight, I think, and I find myself stopping in my tracks.

I suppose there are many reasons for it. That new houses are safer than used ones, that you can tailor the floor plan to your own life, or that it actually costs more to fix up an old house. It's not that anyone is to blame; this scenery is likely the result of each person carefully choosing their own way of life.

Even so, when I see the vacant lots where I caught insects as a child, or the rice fields that used to be so noisy with the sound of frogs in the evening, turning one by one into square plots, I feel a small, hollow sense of loneliness deep in my chest.

The owner of that rice field must have struggled with the decision, too. Not enough hands to keep it going, no one to take it over. If that's the case, it might be better for it to become a place for someone's new life. If you think of it that way, the rice field becoming a house might not be an "end," but a "passing of the baton."

A young couple moves into the new house. A small child pedals a tricycle in the garden. The feeling I had for the frogs in the rice field—that "this is my original landscape"—is something that child will surely feel for the scenery of those lined-up houses.

The scenery I feel lonely about is also a "starting scenery" for someone else.

The Kamakura-period essayist, Kenko Hoshi, left behind this passage in the seventh section of "Tsurezuregusa" (Essays in Idleness).

"The world is wonderful precisely because it is not fixed."

—The world is wonderful precisely because it is uncertain.

Thinking that someone from seven hundred years ago wrote something like this makes me want to laugh. The scenery changes and it's lonely, but because it changes, new lives are born. People have likely carried both of those feelings within them for a long time.

Of course, I don't want to dismiss everything by saying "it's just the flow of the times." There are many things about the loss of greenery that I want to stop and think about. Even so, rather than just lamenting the changing scenery, keeping a thought in some corner of my heart that says, "I remember that rice field," is, I think, one way of living with the scenery.

That's why, lately, I try to be a little more conscious of the scenery on my commute. Today's vacant lot, today's field, today's old house. I burn into my memory the scenery that might change by next year. Sometimes I take pictures. It's not for any particular use, but the fact that "someone was watching" remains within me.

If there is scenery in your town that has disappeared before you knew it, I would like you to talk to someone about it tonight. "That place used to be a rice field, you know"—I feel that just by saying that, the scenery returns to this world, just a little bit, once more.

In the midst of changing scenery, I think that remembering is a small resistance and a small gift that we can offer.