HITOYOSHI, Japan -- Last September, doctors told Yoichi Noda that his job managing a Kyoto air-cargo office was killing him. So the 38-year-old father of two quit the career he had spent 15 years building to try another profession -- lumberjacking.

Mr. Noda's decision to leave his corporate life and the urban sprawl of Osaka to fell Japanese cypresses was prompted by an unusual marketing campaign by the Kuma River Valley Timber Association. The association, located in the Kyushu mountains of southwestern Japan, is scoring woodsmen from an unlikely source -- the nation's ample supply of fed-up salariman.

Japan's pressure-cooker office culture might be inadvertently helping solve a rural labor shortage caused by young people leaving the country for careers in the big city. Across the nation, traditional businesses like logging and rice farming are taking in overworked salarymen to bolster their workforces. For Mr. Noda, the move to Hitoyoshi turned out to be the ideal burn-out coping strategy. "Before I left Osaka, I felt like I needed 30 hours a day to finish my work," he says. "Now my work day moves with the sun."

Offering a bucolic alternative to cubicle life is just how the Kuma River Valley Timber Association, a group of 15 family-owned logging firms, marketed themselves when they advertised on a government-funded Web site featuring news and jobs in rural areas.

Mr. Noda took the bait. He had started working as a salesman for NNR Nishitetsu Global Air Cargo Service in Osaka, soon after he graduated from Kyoto Industrial University with a degree in international law. In 1999 he was promoted to run the nearby Kyoto office. That's when his hours, long even by Japanese standards, became unbearable. He left for work every morning at 4 a.m. and says he often wouldn't finish until midnight before facing the hour-long train commute home.

After a year, the 20-hour days began to take their toll. Mr. Noda was hospitalized for a month with pneumonia. As he lay in an oxygen tent breathing bottled air, he dreamed of inhaling the mountain air of his ancestral lands in Kyushu, which he had left as an infant.

Kuma River Valley Timber Association Chairman Yoshihiro Nagayama had problems of his own. The number of loggers working for his own company were dwindling. To make matters worse, the century-old local high school had removed "agriculture" from its name and reduced the number of animal husbandry and horticulture courses it offered, such as forestry. Young people simply weren't entering the business anymore. Other rural areas are facing the similar issues: The Yamanashi prefecture southwest of Tokyo, for example, regularly places ads in the national Nikkei Keizai business newspaper to promote its natural assets. Its Web site touts the "Easy to Live in Yamanashi" campaign and in an effort to attract workers for native industries such as forestry, grape and peach cultivation, it has taken to marketing itself as the "environmental capital" of Japan.

At the suggestion of the Kumamoto Prefecture's Economic Development Department, Mr. Nagayama asked the timber association to try online marketing to nab new employees. It organized a workshop, inviting city dwellers to sample mountain life.

Mr. Noda, six weeks out of the hospital, was among 13 men who stumbled upon the Web page. Some had come from as far away as Tokyo -- a distance of nearly 1,000 kilometers -- for the three-day event. Mr. Noda breathed the country air, climbed hills each day with lumberjack crews and started to learn a new skill -- felling timber. Each night he slept well. The experience convinced him, as well as two other city-dwellers, to trade in their office life to work among the trees with Mr. Nagayama's company.

Earlier generations of Mr. Noda's family had earned a living cutting trees and indeed there was still some family land in the nearby Fukuoka Prefecture in Kyushu. "I think many people who have moved out of the country probably regret it now," Mr. Noda says. "After living in the noise and smell of cities, we want to return to nature."

But there was still one person in his life who needed to be convinced. When Mr. Noda was hospitalized, Yuko, his wife of seven years, was seven months pregnant with their second daughter. She was less than enthusiastic about her husband's desire to trade his computer for a chainsaw. The country can be far from bucolic. Older people speak regional dialects, often unintelligible to outsiders. Public transportation in Kuma County is limited. And, compared to the bright lights of Osaka, nightlife is practically nonexistent.

Ultimately though, concern for her husband's health led Mrs. Noda to agree. The family moved to the hamlet of Nishiki near the forests where two grocery stores, several restaurants, a hot spring and the town office were all within walking distance.

Mr. Noda was hardly the ideal woodsman. Overweight, weakened by illness and pushing 40, he was about to start a new job that winded men half his age. And taking up lumberjacking for health reasons borders on the absurd: Statistically, it's one of the most dangerous jobs in Japan. Mr. Nagayama's limping gait is an abject lesson. Three years ago, the 45-year-old's legs were crushed when a road shoulder collapsed, causing the wood processor he was operating to roll on top of him. He lost his right leg below the knee. In the past three months, there have been four serious injuries among Kuma River Valley loggers -- three of them requiring two-month hospital stays.

But despite the dangers, Mr. Nagayama says he isn't surprised to see the salarymen joining his crew. "Spending more than 15 hours a day at an office sounds awful," he says. If they're willing to uproot themselves, he's willing to train them. "It shows they really wanted to move to the Kuma area and work at our firm."

Mr. Noda says the charms of country life have outweighed the challenges. Despite a cut in pay, he says the cheap cost of living keeps his family's living standard on par with Osaka. And he says people are much friendlier than in the city. "We have had no problem making friends." The family takes walks among the rice fields that surround their home, tend to their own garden and fish for ayu in the nearby river.

For the first three months working in the mountains, Mr. Noda came home with every muscle in his body "crying in pain." Now, 10 kilograms lighter, he feels better than he has in years. When he stops for lunch to eat his homemade bento rice box on the mountain, he enjoys the mountain air and the view of the Kuma River cutting its way through the peaks. When the sun starts to set, he knows his work is almost done, unlike the legions of salarymen who will stay at their florescent-lit desks until well into the night. "The best part is I can spend time with my children," he says. "I can actually see them when it's still daylight, not when they're asleep."