Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosyste ...

and unequal distribution of power that can lead to variations in spatial and economic development.⁵⁵

The peripheral/marginal and central/core contrasts, of course, even if presented as binary oppositions, exist along sliding scales in which peripheries may become centers over time and areas deemed as centers also are contexts of inequality and marginalization that may be expressed along racial or socioeconomic lines (or both), as is often the case in American cities like Detroit and that may lead to open rebellion when conditions of marginalization become intolerable.⁵⁶ Indeed, because both peripheries and centers are composed of social actors with agency, not only do the relationships between peripheries and centers change over time but individuals and groups may also intentionally attempt to reconstruct and reconceptualize these relationships or reinvent the socio-spatial composition of either context or the perceived relationships between contexts. Of course, it is not necessarily the case that actors in rural areas will attempt to reconfigure their immediate socio-spatial surroundings into archetypal centers; instead, as we will see in the narratives and ethnographic observations I discuss in this book, people may create socio-spatial environments that do not fit neatly into the binaries of urban/rural, peripheral/central, agricultural/industrial, or modern/traditional.

This process of reinventing the nature of rurality and questions related to the meaningfulness of the notion of the periphery in Japan are central in my thinking as I move through the remainder of this book. I see this process as a locus of hybridization that can involve not only some of the more typical examples associated with globalization such as intermarriages and international trade but also that is constructed through the creation of hybrid spaces or material hybridities—that often reflect hybrid identities—which are themselves depolarized manifestations of temporal and spatial frames of experience.⁵⁷ These processes are not engines of globalized homogenization as was argued by many in the 1990s such as George Ritzer,⁵⁸ although this idea has been challenged