The variety show "Potsun to Ikkenya" (ABC TV/TV Asahi network, Sundays), which searches for isolated houses in remote areas using satellite photos as clues, will air a two-hour special on May 31st from 6:56 PM, focusing on the lives of loving couples in Fukuoka and Shimane prefectures. The guests will be singer Rumiko Koyanagi and TV personality Orin.
The search team headed to a house in Fukuoka Prefecture. In a peaceful village nestled at the foot of a mountain, the team approached a couple working in their yard. The husband was 93 years old and the wife 90. They showed them satellite photos, but the road to the house was apparently quite narrow, and the wife chuckled, "I tried going there once before on my motorcycle, but I ended up tipping over halfway through..."
As the search party left the settlement and entered the mountain path, they encountered a seemingly endless stretch of cliffside roads that looked as if they could collapse at any moment. Eventually, they passed a beautiful landscape of contrasting mountains and reservoirs, and gentle hills spread out before them, with low-lying tree fields and impressive Japanese houses visible on the slopes. They were greeted by a 67-year-old man. He and his 64-year-old wife cultivate "Yamakawa mandarins," a specialty of Fukuoka Prefecture, on a 3-hectare mandarin orchard. They have been cultivating mandarins for 50 years. The preview video also shows the couple offering their harvested late-season mandarins to the search party.
The search team also interviewed an 81-year-old and a 78-year-old couple who tend to terraced rice paddies in a remote mountain area of Shimane Prefecture. The couple lives in a village at the foot of the mountain and once owned more than 50 terraced rice paddies, with rice farming being their family business. Now only four terraced rice paddies remain, which have been inherited by their 49-year-old second son. The father and son visit almost every day to tend to the rice paddies.
The terraced rice paddies are located deep in the mountains, so remote that even local residents say they "get lost on the way." During planting and harvesting seasons, grandchildren come to help, creating a lively atmosphere. The search team closely follows the rice planting process and explores the family's life in the mountains.
