Could this Japanese town be a blueprint for how we should all be living?

It’s early in the morning when 50-year-old Chikako Nakatani walks to the biomass plant in the town of Shimokawa, in the far north of the island of Hokkaido, Japan. But she isn’t here to work in the plant, which, for the past 10 years has been burning waste wood from the community-owned forestry industry, providing 68 percent of the heating and hot water for the town. Rather, she is there to forage a by-product of this initiative—the humble shiitake mushroom.

The heat created from the woody biomass plant not only heats water and powers boilers in a multitude of public buildings—including the hospital, school, childcare center, elderly care home, affordable housing and a public hot spring—but also warms an onsite greenhouse where each day tons of the edible fungus are produced. These mushrooms are often sold to suppliers around the prefecture. But many are misshapen or too small to make the cut for suppliers—resulting in five kilograms being thrown away every single day. That was until Nakatani moved here from Osaka in 2021 and started asking for unwanted mushrooms to use in her restaurant.

“I grew up in the third most densely populated city in the country,” explains Nakatani as she dishes out food onto a row of 10 plates lined up along the bar in her restaurant, Takoyaki Komachi. “But when I lost a close friend to stomach cancer, I needed to escape everything I knew.” Coming to Shimokawa after a year in the Philippines—where she learned how to cook a variety of dishes using no meat or animal products, and ran cooking classes online during the pandemic—she saw an advert asking for someone to take over the main restaurant in town. A phone call later, and she arrived.

“As I’m from Osaka, everyone loved the idea of me serving the prefecture’s signature takoyaki [deep-fried dumplings typically made with octopus],” she told me. “I wanted to start a vegan restaurant for environmental reasons, but the concept is still very new here. So for now I serve the takoyaki but I am slowly introducing locals to the vegan diet.”

On the plate in front of me is an array of the restaurant’s mushroom-based dishes—including octopus-free takoyaki, stuffed peppers, gyoza and vegan shepherd’s pie. And for afters? Cheesecake, with the cheese substituted for, you guessed it… blended shiitake mushrooms.

The result of a menu—which uses unwanted mushrooms, grown via a renewable heat source that’s powered by waste wood from an industry that offers work to younger members of this small city—is surprisingly delicious (and yes it did taste remarkably like cheesecake). But this was just a taste of some of the forward-thinking initiatives I would discover this town has been trialing for over a decade.

The “FutureCity” government initiative was launched in 2011 as a way of encouraging sustainability by identifying places where communities were already trying creative solutions to deal with population decline, environmental issues and aging society in unique ways.

Settled by the Japanese in 1901—before this, Hokkaido was home to the Indigenous Ainu people, who mainly lived along the warmer southern coast—it was a place of vast swathes of forest with no villages or towns to speak of. Therein lay an opportunity for a thriving lumber industry, exporting wood to the rest of Japan. Mining for gold and copper soon followed.

By the time the mining and lumber boom was at its peak in the 1960s, the population had swelled to nearly 16,000. Then came the perfect storm of cheap foreign imported wood flooding the market, unregulated deforestation, and a destructive typhoon. The town’s fortunes changed overnight. People began to leave by the thousands. By the 1980s, the mines closed, the railway that had been so vital was abolished, and all that remained was a small, aging population.

“People were worried that Shimokawa would just disappear,” says Shinji Kameda, who works for the town’s council and who I met on my arrival earlier that morning in the visitor center at the heart of town (heated, naturally, using biomass). “We knew something had to be done.”

He explains how in the year 2000, when the population had dropped below 5,000, the decision was made to focus on tourism as a potential revenue stream. The outcome was the construction of Shimokawa’s Great Wall (one of the councilors had just been to China).

The structure may not have been original but the idea behind it was: Walls are historically constructed to keep people out, not bring them in. The stones came from a farmer who discovered them when he was clearing his land for agricultural use. He offered the stone to the project free of charge. To provide jobs for locals, residents of Shimokawa were hired as builders. To bring in visitors, the town offered any tourists who came and helped the chance to memorialize their aid by carving their names into the rampart.

The wall decidedly did not become the savior it was hoped to be. Since its construction, the population in Shimokawa has not dramatically bounced back, although the decline has slowed. Rather, its saving grace may be a new, bold—though less visible—project: A designation as a FutureCity.

The “FutureCity” government initiative was launched in 2011 as a way of encouraging sustainability by identifying places where communities were already trying creative solutions to deal with population decline, environmental issues and aging society in unique ways. In 2014, 11 places were chosen with the northernmost being Shimokawa—the only one in the whole prefecture of Hokkaido.

Grants were awarded and the area was thrust into the spotlight in a way not seen since the lumber and gold rushes of the 60s. In 2015, the UN identified 17 sustainable development goals that align perfectly with the FutureCity strategy. Shimokawa worked these into their program too—appointing people like Shinji Kameda to help concretize them into all plans going forward.

“In 2009, over 51 percent of our residents were over 65,” he explains. “That just isn’t sustainable. We knew we had to entice younger people here and to do that, we needed to focus on community and opportunity. We needed to offer a good standard of living as well as jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities. By 2016, with some of our initiatives in place, we had raised the number of people aged 15-64 from 46 percent to 63 percent and residents aged 0-14 had increased from two percent to nine percent.”

“The fact that I can work here, make a living and get out into the forest whenever I want makes this the best place in Japan. My friends didn’t understand why I would leave the city at first, but now they get it.”

- Azusa Assa

Though the population hovers now around 3,000, it is the presence of younger residents that is changing the town—people like Nakatani who look to run a business that locals as well as visitors will love. “When I first moved here my friends thought I was crazy.” says Nakatani. “But now they’ve visited and see what I’m doing, many are considering a move up here.”

Final figures are yet to be released giving an accurate picture of Shimokawa post-COVID-19, but in 2020, migrants that year sat at an impressive (given the population size) 32.

On my second day in Shimokawa, I meet my guide, Fujiwara, in the town-owned hillside forest, filled with Sakhalin fir, Japanese larch and ezo pine trees. Fujiwara is a 38-year-old former government worker who moved from Sapporo six years ago to escape the endless hours at his desk. Now, he’s a forest guide who takes people out into the woodland to partake in forest bathing and learn about the environment. 

After our stroll, listening to the call of nuthatch birds, identifying a range of mushrooms, and watching black kite birds soar on the winds, he tells me about the surge in new residents like him. “A lot of people in their 30s have done the Japanese work culture, feel burnt out and want a slower pace of life,” he says. “We are the typical newcomers now.”

Before we leave the woods, he takes out a small saw and tells me to cut some of the tiny trees that line the path and will never grow taller due to their location. “You’ll need these for the next activity,” he explains.

With forestry being the main industry here, there is a continuous long-term cycle of planting and cutting happening. Part of that cycle is weeding out a lot of smaller specimens to prevent overcrowding in the forest, which can prevent other trees from growing to maturity. The townspeople have since come together to find a way to make this wood useful rather than simply discarding it: These small specimens and saplings are now sold to an essential oil factory in town to be pressed and used for oils.

We leave the trees for the make-shift lab in the community center, where I meet with another recent transplant—38-year-old Azusa Assa, who moved here from Tokyo a couple of years earlier to get back into nature. “Take the smaller leaves off and squeeze as many as you can into the beaker,” she instructed as I learned the art of making my own essential oil products from what would have been waste wood.

There was a group of eight of us in the class, and we spent the afternoon laughing as we experimented with a range of scents and concoctions, feeling like wizards. But the real magic, Assa tells me, is Shimokawa itself.

“The fact that I can work here, make a living and get out into the forest whenever I want makes this the best place in Japan,” she says. “My friends didn’t understand why I would leave the city at first, but now they get it.”

When one business thrives it helps promote another, who promotes another. One success benefits many more.

The following day, I enjoy a yoga class, taught by 34-year-old Haruhi Tada, who is originally from Fukushima. After meeting her husband (a former Shimokawa resident) and surviving the earthquake and tsunami in 2011, they both decided to leave and start a family somewhere safer and quieter. She has since set up a forest pre-school, teaching adults and children how to play in nature and connect with their environment. 

For lunch I dine on a bento box—a classic Japanese pack lunch—made by a local man who, I’m told, came back to the town three years ago and set up his own company. All the vegetables featured inside it are grown locally for low-food miles, and the bread provided is made in the town’s bakery.

This was a continuing theme in Shimokawa: When one business thrives it helps promote another, which promotes another. One success benefits many more. From a recommendation made in the bakery, I explore the town on foot and discover a wood carver who, in his 60s, runs workshops to teach people how to make their own chopsticks.

Kondo Shouji ensures all the wood he and his students use is otherwise unwanted—another by-product of the public forest. By doing this, he hopes to keep billions of throwaway ‘waribashi’ chopsticks (primarily imported from China) out of landfills.

Over the next couple of hours, I learn how to work with the grain of the wood to plane my pair. I practically glow with pride as Kondo hands me my lacquered finished chopsticks. “When people make them themselves, they are more likely to reuse them,” he explains—handing me a carrying case to wrap them in, made from an old kimono bound for the trashcan, fashioned by another local artisan.

The next day in nearby Nishiokoppe—a short drive from Shimokawa town—I find myself  with a fishing line in my hand standing above the Shokotsu River. I’m pulling on a rod hoping to tempt a rainbow trout—an invasive species released into it during the 1900s—to help relieve pressure on the native yamame trout. It’s an activity run by Ryoko and Junpei Igota, who moved up here from Yokohama on Tokyo Bay back in 2005.

Junpei is a hunter by trade and mainly works in land management to help tackle the ever-rising deer population that decimates large portions of the forest, as well as farmers’ crops. He decided a way of engaging people was to offer eco-tourism with an environmental edge—hence the invasive fish catching—which he will later fry at the renovated former schoolhouse in the town for our dinner. But when it comes to the deer hunt, it’s his wife, Ryoko, who has been most instrumental in making this as sustainable as possible.

“When we moved up here, I didn’t like the way that all the skins were simply thrown away,” she explains. “So I taught myself how to tan and prepare deer hide and now make crafts from it and teach tourists how to do the same in workshops.” Their business model sees them welcome hunters into the area—who eat the meat they kill—and then they work hard to ensure they use every part of the animal that cannot be consumed.

I made my final stop on my way back to Sapporo, at Inoue Milk Ranch in nearby Takinoue. The farm has been in the same family for three generations, but in the last two decades, owner Hiroyuki Inoue changed his business model to free-range, thinking that happy cows make for tastier milk.

At first, his method was laughed at by other farmers—he makes less milk his way. But having decided to pasteurize his product on sight and use it to make ice cream—where every pint can be traced back to a certain cow (all with names), he can charge more than his neighbors. Not only that, but he has also opened his fields to allow visitors to walk among his prized milk makers on a mindful stroll excursion. His dairy is now a popular tourist attraction, but even better for him is that his daughters have now moved back to live in the town with their small children, and have a viable family business to take over one day. One of them has even started her own café.

As I looked from the eyes of the cow I was strolling alongside and back over to the family who was welcoming a couple of cosplay-dressed Tokyoites who had heard about the place on Instagram, I couldn’t help but think, that although I was simply standing in a field, I was actually amid a developing blueprint to how the cities both here and around the world may one day look in the future.

As it stands, the ‘FutureCity’ we should maybe be betting on isn’t some high-tech cyber city—but more an intentional return to how we all used to live—in tight-knit communities that locally make all that we need with fewer products, suppliers and impacts. In Shimokawa, it turns out, the salve is simplicity.

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