Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosyste ...

informants and friends in Tōhoku are equally connected and equally able to explore other places, like Austin, and many have travelled overseas at least once in their lives and often multiple times; in fact, one person I know well has visited me in Austin, and in the summer of 2019 I met with another couple in New York City who happened to be visiting as tourists at the same time I was there for a conference. People move about in cars throughout the region and often travel to distant places. While their lives often continue to be focused on their local village, in some ways the depth of field that characterizes the scope of their daily experience, as well as their occasional experiences of travel, is much greater than it was even in the 1990s. In other words, the flow of change is complex, with eddies and currents that lead the ethnographer along with his interlocutors in many directions, and I have struggled as a scientist to arrive at a manner of characterizing this region that does not rely upon standard academic dialectical tropes that juxtapose frames of experience in terms of categories like rural and urban, agricultural and industrial, rustic and cosmopolitan. As I have spent more time in the region over the years, it has become clear to me that, whatever it is, Tōhoku—like any other place—cannot be easily fit into a particular phenomenal frame of experience, because the temporal and embodied structure of experience is limited by the fact that humans are “emplaced in a world that always outstrips the expanse of our being.”¹⁸ We live in a world that is itself in change and we lack the capacity to experience either the entirety of that world or the entirety of its constantly evolving nature.

Kanegasaki and Tōhoku

Cold and cloudy in the winter, hot and humid in the summer, Kanegasaki and the neighboring cities where I have conducted research are in the southern part of Iwate Prefecture, one of six northernmost prefectures on Japan’s main island of Honshu that together form the region known as Tōhoku. The area seems to radiate a pastoral vibe that captures feelings of the rural (inaka 田舎) and traditional (dentōteki 伝統的)¹⁹ for both