Japanese high-flyers turn to farming for change of pace

SANMU, Japan , Sep 27: A veteran cinematographer of dozens of ''Godzilla'' movies, Kenichi Eguchi traded his camera for a tractor two years ago to begin farming a couple of hours away from Tokyo, his long time home.

Eguchi, 59, joined a growing number of Japanese drawn to tilling the land after long careers in the urban rat race.

''I would find myself looking through the camera lens and thinking, how much longer am I going to be doing this?'' he said.

He enjoyed his 30 years in the movie industry, Eguchi said, but grew tired of the wrangling that was inevitable on film sets swarming with tense actors, directors and technicians.

Farming offered a slower pace of life and freedom to set his own schedule, although his wife Toshiko says he still works long hours.

''Nobody is forcing me to work these hours,'' Eguchi said. ''I do so by choice.'' Tateo Igarashi, at the National Chamber of Agriculture, a semi-governmental body, said he talks to many city dwellers who want to take up farming in a quest for a calmer lifestyle.

Igarashi, who advises those wanting to make the switch, says some high-flyers seek a change of pace in their lives after they have scaled the corporate ladder and feel they have reached their professional limit.

''They ask themselves, is this busy life all there is for me?'' he said.

The Eguchis grow more than a dozen crops in Chiba, near Tokyo's international airport, on a modest plot about the size of a football pitch, a few minutes' walk from their rented home.

Their organic vegetables have found some customers among the local inhabitants as well as an upscale restaurant in the capital.

Eguchi said he was happy with his decision, although it has meant a sharp drop in income.

''I didn't start farming to make a lot of money,'' he said.

He earned 800,000 yen (,800) selling produce last year, but spent 600,000 yen on various expenses. This year is likely to be better, he said.

Toshiko, 64, confesses she has drawn on her husband's retirement money to help fill the income shortfall.

SOON-TO-RETIRE BABY BOOMERS

Like Eguchi, a growing number of those wanting to try their hand at farming are among the 8 million baby boomers in Japan born between 1947 and 1949 who will start reaching retirement age next year.

Japan's Agriculture Ministry hopes those in this cohort, now aged 57 to 59, will become a force to help boost the country's farming population which is dwindling due to an absence of young people that want to become farmers. Of the 80,000 people who became new farmers in 2003, one-fifth were in their 50s and just over half were in their 60s, the ministry said in this year's white paper on agriculture.

The number of farmers in Japan, including part-timers, totalled 5.56 million in 2005. That's about 4.3 percent of the total population of about 128 million people. The number of farmers in Japan is down from 5.8 percent a decade earlier.

Many people see farming as a hard life with low pay, while the city retains its attractions for the young. As a result, Japan's farming population has aged due to an absence of young successors.

Japan is the world's top net importer of farm products, a fact that can be blamed largely on the nation's shrinking farming population.

An official at Japan's Agriculture Ministry said that it does not expect the baby boomer generation to take a leading role in reviving Japan's farm industry.

''(But) we believe (the baby boomers) can help diversify Japan's farming sector to show that there are many ways of farming,'' the official said.

Eguchi says he enjoys farming but he might not have changed jobs if his son and daughter had still been in school and needed his financial support.

Now he says he can't even think of doing anything else.

City life, he said, has lost its appeal.

''On the rare occasion I do go to Tokyo, I feel blinded by all the bright lights,'' he said.

REUTERS