Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosyste ...

in the form of entrepreneurialism—that I think is a universal feature of human behavior. Humans are creative beings who usually look for ways to maximize their advantages in social ecosystems; even behaviors that are ultimately self destructive can also be quite creative. It is the overwhelming use of creativity as an adaptive tool that, in my view, most distinguishes us from other animals. We are not alone in being creative, but the extent of our dependence upon creativity as a way to cope with our surroundings seems to be singular in its scope as compared to other animals. In addition to my focus on entrepreneurs, the exploration of the relationship between the rural and the urban, rustic and cosmopolitan has implications for understanding human social and economic behavior well beyond the confines of northern Japan. Generalization is difficult, but research that provides a basis for comparison across human settings is analytically and methodologically useful, even if the primary aim of the work, as is the case here, is not comparative in nature.

In writing this book, I am largely concerned with one rather simple question: What does it mean to talk about rural spaces in reference to contemporary Japanese society and how can the study of entrepreneurial ecosystems help us in understanding those meanings? This question is embedded in a broader theoretical question that I want to explore here: From an analytical perspective, is the concept of the rural an adequate category for thinking about social and geographical spaces found in the countryside of modern Japan? I have little doubt that the concept of rurality is a meaningful social and geographical category in the minds of Japanese when they think about different regions of their country, and I will discuss this later in the book. However, that is a different sort of issue from the analytical one of whether or not rural and urban function as adequate categories for thinking about people’s lifeways in a particular geographical and social space. As I work through this book, I will consider both of these perspectives—the analytical or etic and the native or emic—as they relate to the conceptualizations of rurality, and my primary goal is to make use of the ethnographic data I have collected over the past few decades to interrogate the notion of the rural as a