(2023-12-31) Mod Goodnight 2023; Marioka

Craig Mod: Goodnight 2023, What a Year, I love Antibiotics. (Focus on section about Morioka, followed by his referenced older pieces.) The most unexpected / delightful / slightly terrifying thing to happen “outside” of my core work this year was my recommendation / write-up on Morioka, and its selection as the “#2” (it’s technically not a “ranking” but everyone interprets it as such) place to visit in 2023, right after … LONDON. Ha ha! So, as you’d expect, this caused quite the commotion in Japan (Why?! Morioka?!)

Between mid-January and November of this year, I must have done 30-40+ interviews across every major TV show and newspaper

My answers to making great mid-sized cities were almost embarrassingly banal: health care, social services, well-maintained and extensive infrastructure (trains!), sensible zoning, low costs of living. (“Sure, the soba’s delicious, but let’s talk about delicious healthcare.” — a phrase no one had before uttered on national TV) I made a few Japanese news folks tear up talking about how special it was to have a functioning social safety net.

Great mid-sized cities get their texture not from Starbucks, but from bizarre, creative local businesses. And the best way to allow those local business to thrive is all the above — support people fairly, and they will do interesting work. This you must believe

for me, Morioka’s power lay in its sense of miryoku (charm) blossoming from all the young proprietors of small businesses, the walkability of Morioka’s streetscape, and the resulting ambience of a city with a bright future

How do cities like Morioka and its ilk generate their positive energy, become beacons, archetypes of great places to live, full of people living fully, with palpably sustainable futures? As smaller rural towns become economically untenable (dwindling population, lost blue collar work), and metropolises continue to bulge, these mid-sized cities will become more and more important as options, IMO.

It’s difficult to underestimate the positive economic impact all of this has had on the city. It’s probably safe to say some additional $100M+ USD have flooded Morioka’s economy this year. I’m most proud of that — and hope they can use these additional resources to continue to strengthen their social nets, creating a virtuous cycle of enabling even more people to move there, to build rich, meaningful lives, to create interesting art, restaurants, shops, crafts, educational resources, and more.

It’s also uncanny to be thanked so vociferously by the town (a motion was made a few days ago at a town hall meeting to make me an Honorary Citizen, so I’m told).

Morioka - Wikipedia

Morioka (盛岡市, Morioka-shi) is the capital city of Iwate Prefecture located in the Tōhoku region of northern Japan. On 1 August 2023, the city had an estimated population of 283,981 in 132,719 households, and a population density of 320 per square kilometre (830/sq mi). The total area of the city is 886.47 square kilometres (342.27 sq mi).

The People of Morioka

The City, Morioka

this previous trip I wanted to spend more time walking and photographing the city, but the schedule was unrelenting. That said, I did nab a few details. It’s a great place to walk, and given a day or two, you should have a good feel for the overall layout.

Why Morioka? Japan Answers.

Sure, Morioka — a city of almost 300,000 — was cool, but was it rubbing-shoulders-with-London cool? It became national news.

I’ve seen firsthand the effects of an aging population and of the flight of young Japanese to big cities such as Osaka or Nagoya or Tokyo. I’ve interviewed and photographed hundreds of older people — including farmers, loggers, cafe owners and barbers — left behind in their shrinking villages.

After a decade of this work I’ve become sensitive to cities and towns with strong socioeconomic foundations that elevate their residents, enabling them to live rich, full and creative lives. Cities that feel — to distill it to a single word — healthy. Morioka felt exceedingly healthy.

The city wasn’t overrun by the increase in visitors, people told me. Shops, hotels and restaurants simply felt a healthy bump of new patrons.

The Morioka Experience - Roden Newsletter Archive

February, 19, 2023

Once Japanese media found out who I was, and that I spoke Japanese, the interview requests came pouring in. I thought it would just be one or two and we'd be done, but I ended up doing some 20 or so interviews

My interest is largely in the stories of everyday people because I'm looking for answers or hints or archetypes to very basic questions: What constitutes a life well lived? How do you pull richness from the quotidian? The more people you talk with, the stronger your archetypes become. Answers are everywhere if you make the effort to look.

As countrysides depopulate, and children relocate to big cities, it's these mid-sized cities like Morioka (pop. ~300,000) that offer viable alternatives

sort of like if a hand descended from the clouds and anointed Asheville, North Carolina as the second most important city in the world for 2023.

In the same way that Asheville is a kind of magnet for southern creatives that maybe don't want to go all the way to New York City, Morioka has similar vibes. There's a vibrant community of designers, architects, musicians, craftspeople, chefs, and coffee connoisseurs

Two weeks ago I went back.

NHK, Japan's public broadcaster, announced my return. I was invited to meet with the mayor. And also the governor.

I thought the meeting with the mayor was going to be a quiet affair. No such luck. I arrived at the office to a packed press room of maybe thirty people. Everyone stood and clapped when I entered

I was invited to an on-stage discussion at a kind of town hall meeting for creatives — the audience of 50 or so was all musicians and chefs and designers and artists

*This kind of small business texture is the antipode to mega-developments in Tokyo by developers like Mori — huge structures with all the same shops, inaccessible to small business owners, without any kind of grain or patina.

Morioka is all grain, all patina.*

when you run the numbers, it's wild. Even just 30,000 additional tourists a year, spending a few hundred dollars, unlocks 100+ million dollars in revenue over the next decade

Even more wild, this was all enabled by my membership program, SPECIAL PROJECTS. I went to Morioka because SP gave me permission to do my pop-up walks. Over the last five years, I've walked and explored as much as I have because of SP.