November 29, 2018
Disaster-hit town in southwestern Japan pinning hopes on young power for survival
The southwestern Japan city, hard hit by heavy rain and floods in July last year, sees insufficient progress in restoration works in the affected regions, but community leaders are determined that they must move forward while striving to find a new path of survival for its future. Asakura City, Fukuoka Prefecture, has recently launched an event to demonstrate its resolve for restoration widely to in and outside of the city.
Stage programs for the two-day event featured mainly performances by local kindergarten kids and high school students and other youngsters. 
The mishap left 35 people dead or missing in remote communities in the upper reaches of small rivers, flattened and destroyed hundreds of houses, and damaged farmland and forests.The slow progress in the post-disaster works is attributed in part to lack of consensus among people involved about how to rehabilitate the affected communities. People are divided over how to resume their life, some of them hoping to return to original places while others seeking to have safer places to build their new life.
Experts agree that the city needs to have a broad-based, carefully refined restoration plan, not cosmetic programs, for its long-term survival.
The disaster came at a time when its population had been steadily shrinking in the past decades. This was the case with many other local cities and towns across Japan amid an aging of society.
The population of the city came to 50,500 as of October 2018, 15 months after the disaster, down from about 60,000 in 2005.City leaders hope to come up with a grand design for its survival, which is expected to focus on beefing up agriculture as its core business. But the city needs to explore a new, innovative approach to strengthen its farming business, by introducing, for example, an information technology-based method to explore a new type of farming, an expert says.
Asakura is geographically close to big consumer markets, notably Fukuoka, the prefectural capital, and it is traditionally strong at producing peaches, persimmons and other fruits,To introduce such new approaches for farming, efforts must be made to bring in a new breed of young farmers by making the region more attractive to the young generation.
The event site was occupied by booths carrying foods, farming products and items like handicrafts.One of the hottest areas at the grounds was a booth where customers, including kids with parents, were seen trying hard to pack as many oranges as possible into a given single net for a fee of 500 yen each.
The energies of young people displayed at the event is expected to give impetus to the restoration efforts for the affected regions and people from now on.