東京・中野の六畳ワンルームに住む三十二歳の会社員、佐藤さんは、毎月の家賃に十二万円を支払っている。築四十年の建物で、洗濯機は廊下に置かれ、窓を開ければ隣のマンションの壁が目の前に迫る。それでも駅まで徒歩五分、深夜まで開いているコンビニが三軒あるという利便性は、地方では望むべくもない都市生活ならではの贅沢である。
Ms. Sato, a thirty-two-year-old office worker living in a six-mat studio in Nakano, Tokyo, pays 120,000 yen in rent every month. The building is forty years old, the washing machine sits in the hallway, and opening the window reveals the wall of the next apartment block right in her face. Even so, the convenience of a five-minute walk to the station and three convenience stores open until late at night is a luxury unique to city life that the countryside could never offer.
一方、二年前に岡山県の山あいの集落へ移住した田中夫妻は、月三万円の古民家を借り、庭で野菜を育てながら、夜には満天の星空を見上げる暮らしを送っている。空気は澄み、子どもは野山を駆け回り、近所からは採れたての野菜が頻繁に届く。都会では金を積んだところで得られない種類の豊かさが、そこには確かにある。
The Tanaka couple, by contrast, moved two years ago to a hamlet tucked into the mountains of Okayama. They rent an old farmhouse for thirty thousand yen a month, grow vegetables in their yard, and gaze up at a star-filled sky at night. The air is clear, the children run freely through the hills, and freshly harvested vegetables arrive from the neighbors with surprising frequency. There is, undeniably, a kind of richness there that no amount of money could buy in the city.
コロナ禍を境に、地方移住への関心は急速に高まった。総務省の調査によれば、東京圏からの転出超過が続いた時期もあり、それまで地方創生を叫べど叫べど動かなかった人の流れが、初めて明確に逆転したのである。リモートワークの普及があっての変化であり、通勤という鎖から解放された層が、住む場所そのものを根本から問い直し始めた。
The pandemic became a turning point that sharply raised interest in moving to the countryside. According to surveys by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, there was a stretch during which net out-migration from the Tokyo metropolitan area persisted, marking the first clear reversal of a flow that years of regional-revitalization slogans had failed to budge. The shift was possible only because remote work had taken hold; people freed from the chain of commuting began to question, from the ground up, where they ought to live at all.
ただし、ブームの熱に浮かされた移住が、必ずしも幸福な結果をもたらすとは限らない。地方の現実は、SNSで流れてくる田園風景の写真からは決して見えてこない。実際に住んでみてはじめて、想像と現実の落差に愕然とする移住者は少なくないのである。
Yet a move driven by the heat of a trend does not necessarily lead to happiness. The reality of rural life is something the pastoral photographs circulating on social media simply cannot convey. It is only by actually living there that many newcomers come to be stunned by the gap between the image and the daily reality.
田中さん夫妻が最初に直面したのは、車なしには生活が成り立たないという厳然たる事実だった。最寄りのスーパーまで八キロ、病院に至っては片道三十分の運転を強いられる。公共交通機関は一日数本のバスのみで、それすら来年には廃線になるという噂が絶えない。
The first thing the Tanakas confronted was the hard fact that life is unsustainable without a car. The nearest supermarket is eight kilometers away, and getting to a hospital means a thirty-minute drive each way. Public transit consists of a handful of daily buses, and even those, rumor has it, may be discontinued next year.
地域コミュニティとの関わり方も、移住者にとって看過しがたい課題と言えよう。都会の匿名性に慣れた人間が、濃密な近所付き合いに戸惑うことも少なからずある。地元の慣習はおろか、ゴミ出しのルール一つとっても、新参者には分からないことだらけなのが実情だ。
How to engage with the local community is another challenge newcomers cannot overlook. Those accustomed to the anonymity of the city are often disoriented by the density of neighborly interaction. Let alone local customs, even something as small as the rules for putting out the trash is, for a newcomer, a thicket of things they simply do not know.