“You may wonder why a merchant of children’s clothing would take up selling rice,” begins Ryo Saegusa, president of 151-year-old Sayegusa & Co. Ltd., a Ginza apparel business that has always been involved with children’s well-being. “Growing up in the concrete jungle of big cities, children today have fewer opportunities to experience and learn about Japan’s old customs,” Saegusa says. “I asked myself what more we could do for their future, and eventually decided to launch a program that would give them the chance to live closer to nature a few times a year.”
Searching for the best locale to host the program, in 2014 he settled on the hamlet of Kotaki in the village of Sakae, Nagano Prefecture. Kotaki had 13 households living by the Chikuma River, the longest in Japan. The location was inconvenient and out of the way, with heavy snows in winter, but still it was surrounded by nature and steeped in nostalgic elements of the old countryside.
