Kosegare

The name given to a network of young farmers in Japan – used to mean, “farmer’s son.”

Harumi Ozawa reported for The Telegraph on the trendy young Japanese who are swapping the city for the countryside in order to bolster the country’s ailing farming industry.

According to Ozawa, young people worried that Japan currently imports about 60 percent of what it eats are keen to ensure the long-term security of the country’s food supply:

“No matter how big Japan’s economy is, no matter how much cash it stacks up, this country will soon be unable to buy so much food from overseas,” Yusuke Miyaji, 31, recently told a crowd of young farmers.

“I want to make a job in the primary sector cool, striking and profitable,” said Miyaji, dressed in overalls, to applause from his audience. “Kids should dream of becoming farmers, not baseball players!”

Miyaji, who comes from a pig farming family, has created a network called Kosegare, a word meaning “farmer’s son,” that has attracted more than 200 young farmers and supporters who share his sense of crisis.

Ozawa noted that roughly 1,520 square miles of farmland in Japan is now abandoned and that 70 percent of the country’s farmers are aged over 60.

Seeing the dire situation of farmers, even girls with trendy hairstyles and long painted fingernails in Tokyo’s fashionable Shibuya shopping district have jumped onto the rural bandwagon.

Shiho Fujita, a 24-year-old singer, music producer and model, is leading a squad of “girl” farmers who have cultivated rice in the countryside, and dishes out advice in her blog on growing courgettes and tomatoes.

“It may be difficult for girls and young people to start farming instantly,” she writes. “But if the agro-industry becomes more exciting by young people joining it, then Japan’s farming will definitely change. And I think Japan needs it.”

Update | There is some debate over the translation and usage of this word, and the definition has been modified accordingly.