A closed school is reborn as a museum. Ichihara in Chiba is not far from Tokyo, yet here spreads deep satoyama countryside. Once every three years, an art festival is held. The stage is the line of the Kominato Railway, a peaceful one- or two-car local train; in the season of rape blossoms, the trackside turns yellow. Many of the works are set in former schools, closed as the children dwindled. Those classrooms and gymnasiums become venues for contemporary art. Where desks once stood, there are now works; into school buildings emptied of everyone, people come again. Depopulation is lonely, but for the festival's duration, the liveliness returns. You sway along on the local train, get off at a station, walk the hills, and search for the works; that journey is the festival's true body. Beside Tokyo, such a landscape exists.