Just a few hours north of Tokyo's seemingly endless sprawl is the mountainous region of Echigo-Tsumari in Niigata Prefecture. Like so many other rural parts of northern Japan, it is a rugged, isolated, aging and economically stagnant place where elderly men and women can be found doubled over in terraced rice paddies with their hands in muck as their kind have done for 1,000 years.

It could be any number of places in this country, beautiful but overlooked, with a population bound by tradition and with nothing to look forward to but its own seemingly inevitable demise. But in Echigo-Tsumari all is not as it seems. The region is the home to an experiment in rural rejuvenation that is also one of the most successful and progressive regular exhibitions of contemporary art anywhere.

The Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial -- staged in 2000, then 2003, and again now -- is by far the largest outdoor exhibition of art in the world. Hundreds of works of contemporary sculpture, installation and video by artists from across the globe are scattered across a mountainous exhibition area approximately the size of greater Tokyo. Art is everywhere, and for the more than 250,000 people that are expected to visit the region, many of whom come from outside of Japan, between July 23 and Sept. 10 anything and everything in this vast rural landscape becomes a possible "work."

Of course, most of the works included in the two-month exhibition are not difficult to spot. Chris Matthew's colorful cutout steel sculptures placed around a rice field in Nakasato will not be mistaken for scarecrows, though they probably serve that function well enough. Dominique Perrault's design for a stage on which a noh performance was given at the exhibition's opening is obviously no natural rural amphitheater. Katsumi Sengoku's sculpture of dozens of twisting metal rods grasping at the sky is about as unmistakably sculptural as you can get. Nonetheless, one of the most compelling aspects of a visit to this extraordinary exhibition is that you begin to look at the environment around you, both consciously fabricated and haphazardly arranged, with new eyes.

The Echigo-Tsumari Triennial is the brainchild of Niigata Prefecture native Fram Kitagawa, a former scholar of Buddhist art history turned contemporary art gallerist who is a well-known expert in dealing with the particular challenges of placing art in the public realm.

When, in the mid-1990's, his home prefecture began to look at ways to reinvigorate local economies, Kitagawa saw an opportunity to take to a different level what he had learned from putting sculptures in the atriums of corporate office buildings and the private homes of wealthy collectors. From 1996 he struggled for four long years with local community leaders from the six municipalities that make up Echigo-Tsumari, as well as Niigata Prefectural authorities, giving by his own estimation more than 2,000 separate presentations of his plan for the triennial. His task, not an enviable one, was to convince isolated, tradition-bound and aging rural communities that the best thing they could do for themselves was to allow contemporary artists from distant places to put abstract sculptures and conceptual installations in their rice fields.

"I'm not from here, and thank goodness for that," Kitagawa told The Japan Times in an interview. "I am from a different part of Niigata. If this were my hometown, it would have been dreadful. My mother would have died! You have to understand, the resistance was extreme. Everybody disliked contemporary art. There is no way, people said, that art could promote community and regional development. All of the six municipalities were against it in the beginning. But things have changed quite a bit now. People have really started to enjoy the event. More and more locals have begun to participate, and with that participation has come greater enjoyment and understanding."

Of course, there is still some lingering resentment from locals who do not appreciate playing host to the event, or the works for that matter -- many of which remain permanently in place and must be maintained in perpetuity. As one Matsudai rice farmer told a visiting foreign journalist with a grimace: "Yeah, there is lots and lots of art out there."

But most people in the region are eager to offer encouragement to artists and organizers, and many locals are particularly pleased that so many outsiders come to visit. This means Kitagawa is something of a superstar here. Fumiko Yanagishi, the owner of the ryokan Shinanojo in the municipality of Tsunan, sums up popular opinion succinctly: "Our region has beautiful natural scenery, but does not have so many typical sightseeing attractions. So the triennial has brought different people who otherwise would never come. That is a very important thing."

The exhibition requires of its participating artists an extraordinary degree of sensitivity to the existing conditions of the land in which their work will be shown, and to the sensibilities of the owners of the land. Artists who create successful works here must therefore navigate between their own needs and desires and those of the physical landscape and the population that, because of its age and background, often has a very different agenda. As is to be expected in an exhibition of this size, not everything works all that well. But extraordinary art that takes full advantage of the complicated set of circumstances so evident in this dense and multilayered place is to be discovered everywhere.

Among the works from 2006 there is the pleasingly weird and ironic 150-meter-long line of clothing strung out as if to dry across a gorge by Finnish artist Kaarina Kaikkonen. Takamasa Kuniyasu, a local resident of the region, has created a massive sculpture of spiraling wooden logs that twist into a tight egglike structure that looks as if it is has grown up by some miracle of nature out of its little muddy spot of earth at the bottom of a steep cliff now covered in flowering hydrangeas.

In 2000 and 2003 a great deal of money flowed into the region because of the broad-based prefectural redevelopment initiative of which the exhibition is only a part. As a result, Kitagawa's main concern in the past was making sure the triennial was both involved with and, sometimes, leading infrastructure and architectural projects. His efforts resulted in the construction of many roads throughout the region, as well as buildings designed by important international architects that have been a great success.

But as Niigata's prefectural initiative draws to a close, this year's triennial cannot boast of any projects of such size, and Kitawaga has been left with the task of refocusing the event away from big, bold, high-profile works and more toward the insertion of smaller-scale works of sculpture, installation and video deeper into the small agriculture communities that were meant to be the primary beneficiaries of the event. This has proven easier said than done. While, after an initial struggle, local bureaucrats have been firmly behind the exhibition, the tiny farming communities have been a harder and longer sell. As a result, many of the works from the first two years are to be found in parks, along roadsides and in other public areas. But working closely with locals for the better part of a decade, both for the two-month duration of the triennials and the months and years of preparation between them, Kitagawa, the participating artists and a small army of volunteers have managed to pry open what were once hermetically sealed villages.

The most interesting initiative of this year's triennial is the "House-Museum Project," or "Akiya Project" in Japanese, which literally translates as "Empty House Project," for which more than 40 vacant homes and school buildings have been renovated and converted into art spaces. The basic idea has been that organizers and artists work hand in hand with local communities to identify vacant homes and schools, which, due to the depopulation of the region are in great abundance, do extensive renovation work and place within them site-specific works of art. Efforts are then made to sell or rent the houses to outsiders who might have an interest in owning a second home in the region.

Some of this year's best works are to be found in these homes and schools. In the tiny community of Oshirakawa, made up of a approximately nine households, Czech artist Pavel Mrkus is showing his video "House of Water Tales" in an old farmhouse, now the summer home of a University of Tokyo professor of French literature. Part art-film, part documentary, set in a darkened tatami room just beyond the intense summer heat and raging cicadas, the viewer is immersed in the satoyama of the town, a word that describes the centuries-old marriage of people and their environment that has resulted in the distinct beauty of the Japanese rural landscape.

Further to the south, Shunichi Otani has marvelously reconstructed the interior of a farmhouse and printed transparent reproductions of photographs from family albums of neighboring households onto the windows. Standing inside, one looks out through images from the 1940s, '50s and '60s at a past world that is still fiercely remembered and respected by the elderly population.

In light of the almost unqualified success the triennial enjoyed in 2000 and 2003, Kitagawa insists that it will continue for as long as possible. In its first year an estimated 160,000 people from outside the region visited the exhibition. In 2003 that number jumped to 200,000, and this year the goal is to bring 250,000 visitors to the exhibition. Since 2000 it has also enjoyed enormous media attention in Japan and abroad, with reviews appearing in dozens of foreign newspapers and magazines. In addition, Kitagawa's recent fundraising efforts raised approximately 800 million yen from the prefecture, local municipalities, companies and private individuals -- a larger budget than in any of the past years.

One result of its success is that many of the early goals of the event have been met. Art has been successfully placed among these communities. Locals are gaining a great deal by coming into contact with Japanese and foreigners who they would not otherwise have had the chance to encounter. Those visitors in turn have gained intimate access to a rural region that has much to teach the modern denizens of cities about what it means to remain close to the land, living with it as opposed to simply using it.

In light of all this, the great problems that continue to face the Echigo-Tsumari region, as well as much of the rest of rural Japan, have come into even sharper focus. The opening of this year's triennial took place during a brief pause between torrential downpours that have pounded the region since April, causing much damage. It is also clear that these communities are struggling to cope with the aftereffects of a winter of record snowfall, four meters in some areas, and the shattered nerves that are still in evidence after the largest earthquake in decades shook the region in 2004. And perhaps most importantly, there remains the very real challenge posed by depopulation. Across this region and Japan, young people are fleeing their ancestral homes, and an entire generation of elderly Japanese are left to toil well into their 80s and even 90s.

But Kitagawa is quick to point out that the Echigo-Tsumari Triennial is not in the business of answering questions. Rather, it asks questions, draws attention, and prompts people to move forward with hopefully greater understanding and interest. "There is still really no good solution. We have to keep on trying as best we can," he says. "Before this event nobody came here, not even the children to visit their relatives. That is not true anymore. That is only one thing, but we have no other options. We believe that because people are coming back here and taking an interest in this place, because they are coming with their children, things will change."

That this change is coming thanks in large part to the carloads of city slickers rooting around in the backyards of farmers in order to get a look at works of contemporary art might come as a surprise to everyone here save Kitagawa, but surprise or not, for the residents of Echigo-Tsumari, it is a most welcome change of fortune.
Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial 2006 runs until Sept. 10 and can be reached in about three hours by car or two hours by train from Tokyo. Organized tours are available and visitors are recommended to contact the triennial information centers located in Tokamachi and Matsudai cities or read more online at www.echigo-tsumari.jp. Maps and guidebooks in both Japanese and English are available throughout the exhibition area, and a 3,500 yen all-access pass is required to gain entry to many sites. The pass can be purchased at many locations in the region or at most major convenience stores anywhere in Japan.