I wonder if the area around my grandfather's village is also a dangerous place. It's right in the middle of a typical depopulated village, and since there are a lot of relatives around, it was pretty peaceful. There's a national highway a little ways off with a convenience store. When I was a kid, I went to my grandfather's house for the Obon festival and decided to walk to that convenience store by myself. In the countryside, villages are separated by nature. Just as I got past one patch of nature, instead of taking the regular road, I tried to take a shortcut right through the middle of the neighboring village. But when I stepped inside, I was shocked. Right in the middle of the village, where nobody should have been—just like at my grandfather's place—the villagers had gathered, lit a fire on the public road, and were holding a meeting sitting in a circle. When they noticed me, all conversation stopped completely, and they just stared at me in silence. Men and women, young and old, all just staring straight at me. I was so scared that I went straight back to my grandfather's house and cried, without even being able to explain why. What on earth were they doing? This was only about 13 or 14 years ago.
It was deep in the mountains of Niigata. People talk about the warmth of the countryside, but in reality, while grandparents and people with blood ties to them might be welcoming, people from a village just a few dozen minutes' walk away are total strangers. Their adherence to individualism is actually much stricter than in the city.
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