Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosyste ...

Conceptualizing Rurality

The nature of twenty-first-century rurality is difficult to characterize analytically, a problem that has led to a variety of terminologies being used to express a contrast between social and geographical spaces in terms of oppositional binaries such as agricultural/industrial, traditional/modern, rustic/cosmopolitan, periphery/center that are used to represent geographical, economic, cultural, and political frames of individual and collective experience not only in Japan but also more generally throughout the world. The idea of peripheral and center has often been used in discussions of the social, political, economic, and geographical landscapes of Japan both within Japan and from the perspectives of scholars studying Japan from outside, and it has played an important role in Japanese history in relation to the conceptualization of areas like Tōhoku as being on the periphery.⁵² And this idea remains one way in which scholars have imagined contemporary Japanese life, although here I hope to show that this is a problematic way of thinking about Japan in the twenty-first century.⁵³

As Manfred Kühn notes, peripheralization is a concept that references a sensibility that social relations have spatial implications not only related to geography but also to ideas viewed as being in some way removed from the metropolitan and cosmopolitan. In many cases, the idea of the periphery also indexes perceived temporal inequalities—inequalities in economic status, education access, social status, and overall quality of life—that reflect and generate significant differences related to lived experience between areas deemed peripheral and central.⁵⁴ The periphery, as both an analytical category and popular descriptive trope, may often rather vaguely contain representations that suggest notions of marginality as characteristic of peripheral regions as places and peoples left behind but also as places harboring traditions viewed as culturally and socially authentic, as was noted above in reference to Tōhoku. In many respects when used either analytically or more generally, the idea of peripherality tends to index assumptions about differential access to