Journalist, Line Producer & Filmmaker based in Japan
Tamami swapped city life for rice farming in the country © NZZ Format
Tamami swapped city life for rice farming in the country © NZZ Format

„Rice Fields Instead of Tokyo:
Young Women in the Japanese Countryside“

They have had it with the monotonous white-collar lifestyle in megacities like Tokyo. Instead, they prefer taking to the rice paddies in their rubber boots. My 30-minute documentary debut (German with English subtitles) portrays young Tokyo women who courageously turned their lives around and gave a super-aging mountain village a new lease of life.

After over a decade of working as a line producer for international TV and documentary productions, this is the first documentary I wrote and directed myself. It premiered on Swiss television SRF1 in November 2022 and was broadcast on German national television 3sat in April 2023 as well as again on SRF1 in December 2023. Each time it achieved a viewership share of between 10 and 11 percent. The documentary can also be streamed online on nzz.ch at the link below.

This is what the documentary is about:

Young newcomers have a lot to learn from the elderly like the Yagawa family in Ishidani © NZZ Format
Young newcomers have a lot to learn from the elderly like the Yagawa family in Ishidani © NZZ Format

Fascinated by the knowledge of the elderly, Tamami has been absorbing everything like a sponge. She enjoys learning everything about rice cultivation and the wild vegetable plants growing along the mountain slopes. Time is of the essence: Almost everyone in the village is well over seventy.

An „NZZ Format“ documentary from Japan about the courage of a young woman to turn their lives upside down and roll their sleeves up, and the consequences of their decisions for an entire village.

Stream the documentary in full length here – see closed captioning for English subtitles:

nzz.ch/panorama/reisfeld-statt-tokio-japans-junge-landfrauen-ld.1713404