There Is No Me in Minka

a two page spread of a large book on a wood table is open to a black and white photo from the 1950s of an early 19th century sake shop in hiroshima, with a vast single room and a high ceiling made of impossibly thick curved wood beams. the ground floor is filled with white rectangles like tables or tanks or something related to sake i guess the point is these sick beams tho
Mukai-ya, a sake shop in Hiroshima built in 1832, 📷: Futagawa Yukio via Nihon no Minka

The months after coming back from Japan are always when it hits the hardest, the desire to live in a minka by the sea. Except most minka are not by the sea, so you’d have to move it there. Or you’d have to live where the minka remain, in the mountains.

a large photobook from 1962 sits open on a wooden tabletop to a large black and white photo that fills two pages. the image is of a village in kyushu japan with thatched roofs, stretching toward a small hill in the background. nihon no minka
whole bunch of minka in Satsuma Shinashi, Kagoshima, I think, 📷: Futagawa Yukio for Nihon no Minka

Instead, I just pull out my copy of Itõ Teiji and Futagawa Yukio’s incredible 1957-59 survey of minka, 日本の民家, and soak in it. I read Craig Mod’s accounts of walks, and consider that rapidly depopulating rural Japan is probably not the place for foreigners to grow old in.

And then I rewatch Minka, Davina Pardo’s extraordinary 2011 short film about the love and life of two men and their house. And as I wonder if Yoshihiro Takishita still has any minka lying around, waiting to be reassembled, and then I’m like, yeah, three hundred years in, the heating really does sound like an unsolved issue, maybe I’ll just visit.

Previously, related: Kusakabe House, Takayama