Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosyste ...

short-term problems related to a decrease in the working population and increase in elderly population that can become a drain on the economy as there are fewer workers paying into government programs like the long-term care program I will discuss briefly in chapter 4 and more people placing demands on those programs as they age.⁶⁸ In Japan, another byproduct of this has also been a proliferation of empty, sometimes collapsing buildings and abandoned grave sites that have become readily evident over the past 15 years in areas like Kanegasaki and Ōshū as older people have died without resident offspring to reside in or continue caring for the family property.⁶⁹

As I have argued in this chapter, contemporary Japan is perhaps best understood in terms of ongoing processes of socio-spatial depolarization of periphery and center combined with growing interconnectedness among different types of social and geographical communities, making it difficult from an analytical perspective to differentiate the rustic from the cosmopolitan in many places. However, the fact remains that many Japanese, including most of those with whom I have spoken in Kanegasaki and other parts of Tōhoku, at least to some extent, characterize the region as rustic/rural/agricultural and contrast that to regions like cosmopolitan/urban/industrial Tokyo. In other words, despite the empirical complexity of characterizing the region I encounter as an anthropologist, the notion of a binary relationship is often reproduced in local discourses about socio-spatial differences and is particularly evident in the use of terms like inaka 田舎, which is used by both locals and outsiders to describe rustic/rural regions and people and which can imply a feeling of agricultural lifeways that contrast with the lifeways of more densely populated areas and unambiguously urban spaces like Tokyo, despite the fact that one certainly finds urban and industrial areas within the context of regions described as inaka, as noted above.

I raise this point because it is important to recognize that Japanese themselves often draw a fairly clear distinction between what is viewed as spatially and conceptually rural/agricultural as opposed to urban/industrial,