Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosyste ...

by several scholars in recent years as many have come to think more about the interrelation between global and local flows,⁵⁹ but are instead loci of interspatial and intersocial borrowing, reconfiguring, and fusion generated through access to local and global sources, often creating new and different types of spaces and identities that cannot be easily classified in terms of categories such as rustic and cosmopolitan or agricultural and industrial.

Cosmopolitan Ruralities in Northern Japan

Rural Japan has been the focus of considerable research by anthropologists and other social scientists since the 1930s, beginning with John F. Embree’s ethnography Suye Mura: A Japanese Village.⁶⁰ Numerous studies of rural life in Japan have followed Embree’s work, including Richard K. Beardsley, John W. Hall, and Robert E. Ward’s Village Japan, Robert J. Smith’s Kurusu: The Price of Progress in a Japanese Village, 1951-1975, Dore’s Shinohata: A Portrait of a Japanese Village, Gail L. Bernstein’s Haruko’s World: A Japanese Farm Woman and Her Community, and Norbeck’s Takashima: A Japanese Fishing Community,⁶¹ as well as more recent works like my own The Practice of Concern: Ritual, Well-Being, and Aging in Rural Japan and Wood’s Ogata Mura: Sowing Dissent and Reclaiming Identity in a Japanese Farming Village.⁶² The list is long and the depth of ethnographic writing that has been produced related to lifeways in regions viewed as rural Japan from the 1930’s until the present is impressive.

Perhaps part of the reason for this highly developed research literature on rural life in Japan is related to a general fascination among scholars after World War II with processes of modernization and the reconfiguring of Japan as an urban, industrial society with a broadly defined middle class, as exemplified in Vogel’s study of urban white-collar families in Tokyo in the late 1950s.⁶³ This literature describes a fairly rapid transition during the postwar period from rural areas traversed by “wash-board corrugated” roads more easily navigated on a scooter described by Dore,⁶⁴ to a countryside crisscrossed with limited access highways and elevated