Experience Local Life through a Community‑Led Educational Farm-stay Programme in Miyama, Japan
Challenges
In the mountainous rural landscapes of Miyama, communities have faced persistent economic pressures that limit diversified, stable rural incomes.
Miyama faces two interlinked challenges that directly shape local employment, rural livelihoods, and the viability of local tourism economy. First, there is a pronounced seasonality gap in visitor numbers between peak and off-peak periods. This compression of visits into a few months leads to unstable and intermittent work for residents, hosts, guides, drivers, caterers, and local suppliers, creating sharp fluctuations in income, irregular shifts, and difficulties retaining trained staff.
In 2023, overnight stays, both domestic and international, totaled just 19,000, while same-day visitors approached 690,000.
Second, despite abundant scenery and ancient sites, there are few participatory activities that allow visitors to deeply engage with Miyama’s culture and nature.
Results
In response, the educational farm-stay programme was designed to stabilize and strengthen local employment by targeting school segments less sensitive to climate peaks and by developing season specific, participatory experiences rooted in everyday rural life.
The programme’s core strategy is to create tourism employment by turning household routines, farming cycles, and cultural practices into structured, paid experiences that attract international school groups throughout the year. Building on Miyama’s experience with domestic student hosting, organizers focused source market development on Taiwan and Australia, where school calendars support travel beyond leisure peaks and curricula value culture and nature immersion.
Local bus companies and travel coordinators receive predictable contracts tied to school arrivals and set routes, creating ongoing driver and logistics jobs.
The local DMO offered several capacity-building opportunities, during which host families learn about legal responsibilities, diverse meal requests, and safety and security protocols.
Approximately 70% of programme revenue returns directly to the community, host families, local transport, and on the ground coordination, anchoring wages and stipends locally and justifying reinvestment in guest areas, small equipment, and skills. By 2024, the programme welcomed 1,042 international students (up from 168 since 2015), including 127 Australians who tend to stay more than two nights, an immediate lift in total paid shifts per arrival and a direct contribution to longer stays, deeper engagement, and steadier cash flow.
Educational farm stays align perfectly with off-peak demand, unlock longer itineraries, and strengthen local value chains, turning the rhythms of rural life into employment and income that persist beyond the spring–autumn peaks.
Lessons Learned
By converting everyday rural activities into participatory modules, the programme moved Miyama from seasonal dependence toward immersive educational tourism that books across months and triggers multiple paid tasks in each participating household. This shift creates predictable work, raises revenue generation, and makes it viable for families to keep investing in skills and spaces.
Another important takeaway is the expansion of tourism employment across the local value chain. Tourism work is not limited to hosting; it extends to assistant guiding, culinary preparation, activity facilitation, interpretation, driving, scheduling, cleaning, and light maintenance. This variety creates entry points for youth and women and builds progression pathways toward higher responsibility roles.
Despite its achievements, the programme faces several operational challenges. Local host families must develop a stronger understanding of cultural differences and assess their own hosting capacities more accurately. Furthermore, there remains a need for clearer communication of the programme’s tourism concept to external stakeholders. Certain travel companies have misinterpreted the homestay experience as an affordable form of accommodation, resulting in requests for late arrivals or early morning departures, which are inconsistent with the cultural exchange and educational objectives of the initiative.
Finally, local revenue retention is central to durable tourism jobs and building resilient local economies. With about 70% of programme income flowing back to households and local operators, the farm-stay model anchors wages locally and encourages communities to become more integrated within the tourism value chain.
Explore more practices
Discover how other Best Tourism Villages are driving rural development through tourism.