Can art revive rural Japan?
I've been doing a lot of dashing about during my time in Japan - but one real moment of peace came when I paid a visit to the in Niigata, on the coast of the Sea of Japan.
It's an extraordinary undertaking: more than 350 art works scattered over an area of more than 750 square kilometres of breath-taking countryside. And the moment of peace - typically Japanese, you might think - was when we stumbled across some hand-painted wind chimes, strung between trees along a footpath. The tinkling sound in the quiet of the woods was exceedingly good for the soul. (You'll be able to hear them for yourself, I hope, on Thursday's programme.)
There is a serious point to the Echigo-Tsumari exercise which goes beyond the art itself. Niigata is an area renowned for its agriculture and its skiing. But these days the farmers are dying out, and each winter there's less and less snow. So they have to find some other way to keep the local economy afloat.
This year's Triennial is the third since it started 10 years ago, and the organisers are hoping for half a million visitors by the time it closes later this month. Not only do the visitors bring cash to the region; the hope is that by encouraging urbanites to venture out into the countryside, they may be tempted to re-engage with rural life and keep the region going.
Niigata is littered with abandoned, empty buildings. In one echoing school, I found photographs pinned to a noticeboard in a corridor, showing year by year, an ever-diminishing number of pupils. 
But in the school hall, a young artist called has installed a work made up of 170,000 pins, threaded together in an undulating mat that covers the floor, with a giant pin cobweb hovering above it. It took her - with the help of women from the village - three months to complete, and during that time, she lived among the villagers, in a deliberate attempt to build a connecting bridge between her urban life and their imperilled existence. 
Did it work? Yuko thinks it did. She now has a greater understanding of the village women - and she thinks they began to understand what she was trying to do. It won't save the countryside, but perhaps it's a start.
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