Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosyste ...

shinkansen (新幹線 bullet train) tracks, and well-developed surface-road systems that people use to purchase goods at large shopping malls, often in neighboring towns or somewhat distant cities such as Sendai.⁶⁵

Research related to changing patterns of life in the Japanese countryside, of course, must be contextualized in the political, economic, and social flows of the nation-state and global economy. It is difficult to characterize towns such as Kanegasaki in terms of binaries like agricultural and industrial. On first glance, these places may look decidedly agricultural with their wide expanses of open farmland—used not only for planting rice but also in Kanegasaki for dairy farms set amidst rolling hills where corn is grown in fields that abut large barns housing dairy cows. But, as noted earlier in the book, nestled into the hills adjacent to that farmland is a Toyota factory that produces the Prius C, as well as pharmaceutical and semiconductor production facilities.

To ride the shinkansen north from Tokyo into Tōhoku is to be confronted not with a transition from urban/industrial to rural/agricultural Japan but to glide through a pastiche of urban and rural spatialities intertwined in a latticework of variously populated areas linked through limited-access highways, rail lines, and communications networks that are set amidst checkerboard rice fields, red and yellow McDonald’s restaurants, 7-Eleven convenience stores, high-rise hotels, and shopping malls with large parking lots that accommodate the automobile-centered lifestyle of the Japanese countryside. Kelly’s nuanced description of contemporary rural social patterns in Japan and his notion of regionality as a way of rethinking life in agricultural Japan provides a productive way to contemplate the relationship between rural and urban spaces. Kelly describes an ongoing process of metropolitanization of rural lifeways that has generated patterns of living in which highly mechanized farming no longer takes significant amounts of people’s time, which, in turn, means that for many it no longer represents the primary social framework through which life is organized and experienced. Instead, as Kelly wrote in 1990, patterns of work, school, and family life in the Japanese countryside