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It is almost certain that social scientists interested in Japan, who on the whole have conducted their research in the country’s industrial and urban settings (against the background just described), have contributed to the development of a normative understanding of postwar Japan as a country with an energetic and dynamic economy and society; a notion that is rooted in conventional progressive notions of modernisation, industrialisation, and permanent economic expansion. Rural depopulation and its associated outcomes have therefore come to be understood as unfortunate but unavoidable, or even necessary, consequences of national—read urban—success. In this way, misgivings surrounding the rural-urban relationship under Japan’s spectacular postwar economic development may have come to be neutralised through incorporation in the unfolding narrative of Japan’s modernisation and its so-called economic miracle. Despite the readjustments rural communities have undergone as their populations have thinned out, so far this story of Japan’s postwar dynamism has largely been an optimistic one because, as was argued by the government at the time, all (or nearly all) Japanese have benefited from the improvements in living standards and longevity that have accompanied such a remarkable transformation. Indeed, historian Mikiso Hane (1996) referred to this period (somewhat tongue in cheek) as ‘the greatest years of prosperity Japan had seen since the Sun Goddess Amaterasu shut herself up behind a stone door to protest her brother Susano-o’s misbehavior,’ and economist Kaname Akamatsu (1962) went as far as employing the flying geese metaphor from classical Chinese literature to suggest that through the judicious application of its development model, Japan could lead the rest of Asia out of poverty and into a new era of prosperity.
Japan in the 21st century, however, is a different society from what it was in the mid-1960s, when the population was expanding by approximately one million persons per year and the average annual growth in the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) was more than 10 percent. Sometime between 2005 and 2010 the population of the country as a whole began to shrink, and it is projected to continue to do so for some decades. Since 1990 the country has suffered three economic recessions