Keeping Out Fire, or Keeping Out Trouble?

I have not walked down Bukeyashiki-dori, the street of the old samurai residences, in years.

The reason is simple. It is not a road I use for daily life, and I would rather not get in the way of the visitors. There is no need for a local to slip past behind someone lining up a photograph. After avoiding it for a while, not walking the most famous street in my own town became the normal state of affairs. The road I do use is the Hisaichi-Kakunodate Line, a prefectural road that ends at the station. It has parking for visitors too, but there are no samurai houses along it, so I let myself use it.

At the southern end of that famous street is a piece of ground that has stood empty for the first time in sixty years.

A decision to build nothing

Across the middle of Kakunodate runs a band of land called the hiyoke, a firebreak. An earthen embankment was raised and the ground kept clear, in order to separate uchimachi, where the samurai lived, from sotomachi, where the townspeople lived. If fire broke out on one side, it was not to reach the other.

What matters is that this was not leftover land. The people who laid out the town decided that nothing would be built there. They made a decision to use it by not using it, and they held to that for centuries. It looks like vacant ground, but it was the place with the clearest intention in it.

A sixty year interruption

For a long time the town hall stood on that firebreak. It was put up as the town office, it went on serving as a municipal building after the merger, and it lasted some sixty years. When a new building was completed near the station, it finished its work, and after that it was demolished.

Around the time the demolition was settled, people said that now, at last, the restoration of the hiyoke could be discussed. While the building stood, the conversation went nowhere. Once it was gone, things would move. There were suggestions about a lawn, or an open square.

How many years has it been since then? As far as I know, nothing has been decided.

The same emptiness, the opposite meaning

The land is empty again. In appearance, it has gone back to the Edo period.

The meaning, though, is reversed. The old emptiness was the result of deciding to build nothing. The present emptiness is there because nothing has been decided. The same bare ground, turned inside out.

Asked what to put there

I will be honest. Not one use for it comes to mind.

If you tell me that is a failure of imagination, I will not argue. But let me offer one excuse. Look around the town and the vacant lots and empty houses only keep increasing. Gaps are opening everywhere, like missing teeth. In that condition, being asked what should be done with a single block in the middle is a question I have no way to answer.

What is needed is not a use, but an order. Which ones, for whom, and to what end do we take first? With that standard in place, the hiyoke could be answered as item number whatever on the list. Without it, there is no answer to give. It is not that nothing comes to mind. It is that nobody has handed out a map.

Every time, it is unclear who it is for

There is one more thing. If that ground is put in order, is it for the visitors, or for the people who live here? I cannot see it.

That is not limited to this case. When paid seating for visitors appeared at Kakunodate no Omatsuri, the town festival, when I heard the vision about being number one in happiness, when I heard the talk about digital this and that, the thing that caught was always the same place. Before good or bad comes into it, who it is for has not been settled. And while that stays unsettled, those of us on this side have no way to judge whether it is good or bad.

The hiyoke is the plainest physical example. In the middle of town sits a piece of land, cleared, with no decision about whose it is.

Granted, and still

There is an argument that the hiyoke should not be lumped in with the other vacant lots. It borders the preservation district and belongs to the origin of the town itself. Restoring it is not a question of use but of putting something back, and it does not compete for priority with ordinary empty ground.

That argument holds. I have no reason to oppose the restoration itself.

But the same question survives it. Once it is restored, whose land is it? Is it put back to be shown to visitors, or to be used by the people who live here? Restore it without deciding, and a tidy piece of open ground simply stays tidy and open.

Keeping out fire, or keeping out trouble?

The hiyoke was land kept clear in order to keep fire out.

So what is that ground keeping out now?

As long as nothing is decided, nobody complains. The moment it is put to some use, the voices arrive: why that and not this, why not in our chonai, our own part of town. As a way of keeping trouble out, deciding nothing works extremely well. Less a fire break than a trouble break.

And in writing this, I noticed something. I do not walk that street less out of deference than because I have no business on it. The most famous street in town lies outside the daily life of the people who live in it. I am not avoiding it so much as never having had it on my route at all.

The empty ground is probably the same. Land left standing with no decision about who it is for goes on standing as land nobody has any business with. It is not that it goes unused. It is that no reason to use it has been handed to anyone. That the street is not my road, and that the hiyoke is nobody's place, are two sides of one picture.

Nothing stands on the hiyoke now. If anything stands there, it is the decision not to decide.