Japanese mountain community’s first baby in 52 years celebrates first birthday

Parents want to raise baby in rural community, and community is happy to have her.

The town of Kaneyama in Fukushima Prefecture isn’t particularly populous, having less than 2,000 residents. Kaneyama’s Tarabu district, though, is an especially small community, with only 12 occupied households.

So it was a very big deal when Tarabu residents Dai and Emiko Aonuma welcomed a baby girl into the world, because not only is she the couple’s first child, she’s the first baby born in Tarabu in more than half a century, with the last recorded Tarabu birth being 52 years ago.

Neither Dai nor Emi are natives of the area. Dai grew up in Yamanashi Prefecture, and Emi in Kanagawa Prefecture. They did meet in Tarabu, though, with Dai coming to the community in 2020 while traveling around the country in a converted kei truck motor home after hearing about its hot spring waters, and Emi being drawn to the area to study karamushiori, a traditional method of reed weaving for making textiles, in the nearby town of Showa. The couple married in the summer of 2023, and their daughter was born that November via home birth in Tarabu, with the assistance of a midwife.

They decided to name their daughter Tara, naming her after Tarabu (though written with different kanji characters), and the community has shown the baby just as much love. A year after her birth, Tara is happy and healthy, receiving checkups in the town’s welfare center, which until now has primarily been used for treatment for Kaneyama’s senior citizens (over 60 percent of the town’s population is over 65 years old). Local grannies, such as 90-year-old “Big Sister Isako,” have helped Dai and Emiko adjust to both the local lifestyle and being parents, teaching them recipes to make use of locally available produce and how to use a traditional body-wrapping cloth called a sarashi to strap little Tara to their backs when the parents need to use both hands for tasks other than holding their adorable daughter. Another woman who moved to the community has also become Tara’s personal hairdresser, giving the girl trims as needed, as there isn’t a kids’ salon in the area.

Similar to Nozomi, the one-and-only first-grader at her school in a rural part of Ehime Prefecture, Tara is likely going to have a very unique childhood. It’s one her parents hope is filled with warm connections to their community, though, and it looks like that’s a feeling shared by their neighbors.

Source: Yomiuri Shimbun, Fukushima Television
Top image: Pakutaso
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