Weekly Report/ Education: Urban children find chance to study in rural areas less attractive

A program under which urban children live and study in rural communities away from their families has been scaled back nationwide.

While the host regions face such problems as merger of municipalities, fiscal pressure and an aging population, the recession is also behind the decline.

The sanson ryugaku rural homestay study program, once set up with the aim of helping local revitalization, is now at a turning point.

Hamatonbetsu in northern Hokkaido is a town facing the Okhotsk Sea with a population of about 4,200. Its main industry is scallop fishing and dairy farming. Of the six town-run elementary schools, two will be closed at the end of the current fiscal year.

Toyokanbetsu Elementary School is one of these schools.

It had accepted pupils from cities since 1995 and at one point they made up most of the student body. The school, however, stopped accepting new pupils in fiscal 2007.

"We started it in the hope of revitalizing the community but I've come to see that we can't save the area through the rural study program," said Fumio Ogawa, a 58-year-old dairy farmer who played a central role in the project.

The school had 53 pupils in the peak year of 1965, but the number fell to about 10 in the 1990s.

Although the number of local children was not expected to rise, many local residents did not want the school, which plays an important role in the community, to close, Ogawa said.

Around that time, the under-populated districts began adopting homestay study programs and their efforts were making news nationwide. Ogawa and other residents formed a group known as the "group to promote studying in the natural beauty of northern Okhotsk" and began working together with school officials.

Although the study program in "host-family style," where just the children come over to study, was the popular style in various parts of the country, Ogawa and his group encouraged the whole family to come, hoping that they will settle down in the area for good.

They worked out a plan to offer a 660-square-meter plot of land for free on condition that the family build a house within three years; and promoted the plan in Tokyo and the Kansai area.

The town accepted the first visiting pupil in 1995 and the number rose to eight the following year.

As if in concert with their efforts, the town adopted an ordinance to subsidize the program in 2000.

Although the number of local children attending the Toyokanbetsu Elementary School fell to just two in 2002, the number of visiting students steadily rose to 18. In fiscal 2003, the program was commended by Taro Aso, the internal affairs minister at that time, as an effort to revitalize the community.

Yet the main purpose of the program--to attract permanent residents--was not effective. "The biggest reason was that people found it hard to find steady jobs in the region," Katsuyuki Kikuchi, a section chief at the town's board of education, said.

Today, there are only three families who decided to stay in the town after their children finished elementary school.

Nice but not idyllic

Natsuko Yoshida, 55, originally from Ishikawa Prefecture, lives with her husband and two sons who are in junior and senior high school.

"Living in a rural area is nice but not everything is idyllic. It would cost a lot of money to pay for high school and college," she said.

As the financial situation of the town deteriorated, the town's subsidies for the homestay study program was criticized by the town assembly.

Also, as similar programs came to be offered around Japan, it grew increasingly difficult to attract children, according to Ogawa. Inquiries, which numbered 100 annually in peak years, fell to about 15 at the end.

Among the prefectures in Japan, Hokkaido has accepted the most students from the cities.

According to the Hokkaido board of education, the program began in the prefecture in 1988. The number of both the host schools and the participating students increased from 1991 on and hit a high around 2000.

At one point as many as 34 elementary schools accepted nearly 150 children. The number, however, began falling in 2006 and this fiscal year, the number of children accepted dropped to half of the peak year and the number of elementary schools fell to 18.

The same applies to other parts of Japan. According to figures released by the Zenkoku Sanson-ryugaku Kyokai, an association focusing on the homestay study program, 302 schools across the nation had adopted the program by fiscal 2008 but since then 127 schools have either discontinued the program or closed.

The rural study program is believed to have started in 1976 in the village of Yasaka (presently Yasaka district in the city of Omachi) in Nagano Prefecture.

A teacher organized the program hoping to help "children from the cities grow up strong in agricultural or mountain areas." The move eventually spread nationwide with the expectation of revitalizing the local communities.

According to a representative of the association, it was easier for the organizers in Hokkaido to impress children with the prefecture's image of being blessed with vast nature. In addition, compared with other regions, more schools in Hokkaido have hosted rural study programs for the whole family to boost the local population.

But in many cases, the host schools were small and were eventually swallowed up by the wave of school consolidation.

On the other hand, the city-run Yasaka Elementary School in Omachi, which was the first to host the rural homestay study system, continues to offer the program after the region changed from Yasaka village to Omachi city as a result of a municipal merger.

The program is organized by a foundation called the Sodateru-kai headquartered in Tokyo.

In Omachi, the visiting children attend school while living half the month with full-time staff at an accommodation facility run by the foundation, and living the remainder of the month with local farm families.

The foundation has three other facilities in Nagano Prefecture. No other region has adopted this method.

"Since the program cannot be handled on the side, we run it through the foundation. Unless the initiatives of the residents, administration and schools match, it would be difficult to succeed on the local level," a foundation representative said.

Speaking on the general tendency for the program to shrink in size, a spokesperson for the nationwide association of the program noted that it is probably due to the fact that people focused too much on the survival of the schools.

"We must help the visiting children acquire social skills, teach the local children more about their hometown and uphold an educational ideal which only a rural homestay study program can offer," the representative said.(IHT/Asahi: October 17,2009)