Iide Town
Kohei Goto

“Beauty” dwells in coexistence with severe natural

Speaking of “beautiful original scenery” for me, it is the scenery that the bulb light shines through window, and the snow piled up on a thatched roof while the snow is keep falling silently. Such a memory of my childhood might be the origin. If it survived the harsh winter and the snow melted, the plants begin to sprout and the soil smells like a steamy. My pleasure at the time was going to the riverside bringing a lunch box filled with rice and miso. Then, we dig something native such as Hiroko (a type of green onion family) or Nobiru out of the soil. I ate rice and it with miso in a hurry after washing it with water of the river. That was fun. It was the period there is no lunch box for cherry-blossom viewing.
“The fight against water” is indispensable in helping to talk about Iide-machi. Yonezawa Domain was a respectable, but people’s lives were poor, in particular, there is a history that has been desperately fighting to get the water. 150 years ago, the Lord Yozan Uesugi cleared a tunnel through Mt.Iide with a summation of the technology and carried out the irrigation work to draw the water flowing to the Niigata to Yamagata side, but it was exactly “the difficult construction of the century” which took two decades to finish.
“Beautiful” scenery here in Iide-machi has always born in side-by-side with the risk like heavy snowfall. I think that a third party who saw it gets a feel of “beauty” in there because they endure and survive in the harsh nature.
Necessarily, people are liable to jump to “something easy” or “something looks easy to get”, but originally the person must gather to the problem unlikely to be resolved, and vector of people’s interest must be directed to tough tasks. I think that is exactly the origin of the society.
One of the future economic policies Iide-machi set forth is creation of a recycling society called “an area selfsufficiency”, in which the local resources that have been produced in Iide-machi, such as agricultural crops, energy like electricity, and others, can be consumed in the region as much as possible. In the town, we plan to achieve “local production for local consumption” in 30-year’s plan, but the final objective of as administrative is happiness of townsmen than anything.

Interviewed in April, 2016
Writer : Hideko Takahashi / Photographer : Hiroyuki Tamura