Notes from SEEPS Camp 2026 — Takashima, Shiga, 28–30 July 2026. Indonesian version: Tiga Hari di Tepi Danau Biwa: Pertanyaan dari Sebuah Kota Kecil Jepang.
On the afternoon of 28 July, I arrived at the platform of Ōmi-Takashima Station around 12:10 p.m with a small bag and a laptop full of maps. It was hot, humid (typical of summer in Japan), and cloudy. The station was quiet, like other areas of the Japanese countryside. Behind the town were mountains, and in front of it lay Lake Biwa, Japan’s largest lake. Twenty minutes later, the hard rain came — the kind of downpour that belongs to summer in the land of the cherry blossom.
Source : own photograph
Later, five other participants arrived at the same station. We came from Nagoya, Kyoto, Kyushu, GRIPS, and NIES. Some studied energy, some studied forests, some studied waste, and one of us — me — studies Indonesian villages and districts from space. Together, we were among the eight participants in SEEPS Camp 2026, the summer camp of the Society for Environmental Economics and Policy Studies, Japan.
A bus took us to a guesthouse on the shore of Lake Biwa. For the next three days, that guesthouse was our seminar room, our canteen, and our dormitory.
I want to write down what happened there, from my own personal perspective.
Day 1: The question nobody asks in a classroom
The first session was titled “Life After Grad School.” Five senior researchers came to talk to us: from Ritsumeikan, Tohoku, Hokkaido, Hitotsubashi, and Osaka Metropolitan University. They sat in front of us and answered the question that PhD students think about at 2 a.m. but never ask in a seminar (zemi) room: what happens after graduation?
In a normal conference, we present results. We discuss identification strategies, standard errors, parallel trends, heterogeneity, placebo tests, and robustness checks. Nobody presents the part that becomes one of the nightmares of a doctoral student after the diploma arrives — How do you choose a first job? How do you keep a research agenda alive once administrative work (especially in Indonesia) and teaching begin? How do you learn to say no to offers that sit far from your expertise?
That evening we continued at a local izakaya. This is where the honest conversations happened. Not about p-values, but about choices in life.
I am in my fourth year at GSID, Nagoya University. In about one year, I will finish, go home to Indonesia, and start a new chapter in my life. So I listened to that session as a human and person, not as a student or researcher. My notebook from Day 1 has very few numbers.
Day 2 morning: A town that decided to be specific
The second day was the reason I came.
At 9:30, we walked into Takashima City Hall. An officer from the environmental policy division gave us a lecture on how the city uses its natural resources. Then we visited a local company, Horizon Co., Ltd. — a leading Japanese manufacturer of binding machines for book printing. Then we went back to the city hall and discussed what we had seen.
Source : https://www.seeps.org/web/en/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/camp2026_progreport.pdf
Takashima is not a prosperous industrial city like Nagoya. Its economy rests on Lake Biwa, forests, farmland, and tourism. It has a history — it grew along the old Saba Kaidō, the “mackerel road” that carried fish from the Sea of Japan to Kyoto, then the capital of Japan. It has landscape — Shirahige Shrine with its gate standing in the lake, and the famous Metasequoia Avenue. Like many small Japanese municipalities, it has a population that is ageing.
What impressed me was not the strategy. It was the substance of the conversation.
The officials did not talk about “the regional economy” in general. They talked about this forest, that water source, this company, that road, and the season with the most visitors. When we asked questions, they answered in detail. Their picture of their own town ran very deep.
Source : https://takashima-kanko.jp/en/
I sat there, and for a moment my mind went to my own country.
Indonesia has around 80,000 villages and urban wards, and 514 districts. We collect a village census, PODES, that covers almost all of them. The central government has transferred Village Fund money to those villages for more than ten years. In my own research, I use that data together with satellite images — nighttime lights, air quality — to see what actually changed on the ground.
And yet most of our policy conversation happens at a very low resolution. We debate the national number, the provincial number, the average. One programme is designed in Jakarta and sent to 80,000 places, none of which are the same. My last two papers, one on the Village Fund and one on village cooperatives, both ended at the same conclusion: the design was uniform, but the villages were not.
Takashima was the mirror image of that problem. A small place that knows itself in detail, inside a developed country that is fighting against itself — an ageing population. Indonesia has thousands of small places we know only in aggregate, inside a country that is still growing.
I do not think the towns and villages of Indonesia should copy Takashima. Our towns and villages have very different problems, budgets, and age structures. But the camp made me ask a sharper question: the data our villages hold is already rich. Why do policymakers still argue at the national level?
Day 2 afternoon: Eight minutes each
After lunch we gave our self-introduction presentations. Eight minutes, half about ourselves and half about our research, and the rule was simple: make it understandable to people outside your field.
That rule is harder than it sounds. My work sits between spatial econometrics, satellite data, and Indonesian village policy. In a seminar, I can “hide” behind method. In eight minutes, in front of people who study forests and energy in Japan, I could not.
So I showed maps. I showed the air over Java during mudik, the annual holiday migration, measured by a satellite that reads nitrogen dioxide. When millions of people move from the cities to the villages for one week, you can see it in the sky.
Nobody asked me about my estimator. People asked about the phenomenon. That was the right kind of question, and a good reminder for a researcher who wants to speak to the public.
The evening ended with a BBQ by the shore of Lake Biwa, then free time, the bath, and a quiet night by the water, where now and then the sound of crickets broke the stillness of that summer night.
Day 3: The train home
On 30 July, we checked out at 10:00 a.m and said goodbye at Ōmi-Takashima Station at 10:15. Three days is short. But I came back to Nagoya with three things.
Source : own photograph
First, a small place is a valid unit of analysis. Not a rounding error inside a province. Takashima’s officials treat their town as a single economy, and they truly do.
Second, the environment is not the opposite of the local economy. In Takashima, water and forest are not constraints on the economy — they are the raw material of it. In Indonesia, we often frame village development as a choice between conservation and growth. That framing turns development into a trade-off.
Third, a research career, like a region, needs a clear address. That was the lesson from the Life After Grad School session on the first day. You cannot be everywhere. You have to choose one place to stand, and then connect everything else through that point. In economics, perhaps we call this specialisation.
My address, for now, is the Indonesian village and district — read from the ground and from space. To read them, I use spatial econometrics and causal inference design.
The train back was almost empty. Lake Biwa passed by the window for a few minutes. Perhaps we crossed the same line that Kuroda Kanbei took when he set out to help Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the Battle of Shizugatake — a battle that became part of the unification of Japan at the end of the Sengoku era.
SEEPS Camp 2026 was organised by the Society for Environmental Economics and Policy Studies. The programme and report are available on the SEEPS website. My thanks to the on-site committee and to the officials of Takashima City for their time and their openness.
For the full report and programme of SEEPS Summer Camp 2026, you can download it from the SEEPS Website: https://www.seeps.org/web/en/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/camp2026_progreport.pdf
Explore more about Takashima City and Lake Biwa here: https://takashima-kanko.jp/en/
Leave a Reply