Miyajidake Scarecrow Village: A Closed School with a Full Class

A little body language

Inside, a group had gathered around a wooden table, with one figure leaning into the conversation from behind, a hand on a neighbour’s shoulder. I seemed to have arrived halfway through a discussion. The hand on the shoulder made it difficult to tell whether he was joining in or trying to get a word in.

A broad intake

In the classroom, the old wooden desks and children’s pictures on the walls made the setting immediately familiar. The faces were less easily placed.

There were small figures in children’s clothes, but also faces with decades of experience drawn into them. Near the back stood a handmade version of Kumamon, Kumamoto’s black bear mascot, taller and rounder than most of the class.

The school had closed. Admissions appeared to have become more flexible.

From the front, it was easy to imagine a lesson, a song, or the moment before either was brought under control. The old furniture did a great deal of the work: put the same figures in a row against a wall and they would be a collection; give them desks and they became a class.

A full social calendar

School was only one of the gatherings assembled here. The exhibition recreates scenes of rural life, extending the company well beyond the classroom. At a wedding celebration, the guests sat around low tables while a shamisen player supplied the entertainment. Their broad smiles suggested that the formalities were well behind them.

Behind the gathering stood an old-fashioned television. Someone had taken the trouble to give it a picture, too—a small extravagance in a room where the guests already had plenty to occupy them.

Making the next person

The straw appeared again in a display labelled “Body-making, step 2.” Two figures sat on the floor with an unfinished body stretched between them. Its legs were still bundles of straw, with none of the clothing that had made the other figures so easy to read as people.

The scarecrows were making another scarecrow. John von Neumann’s idea of a self-replicating machine appeared to have reached the straw-and-gardening-gloves stage.