Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosyste ...

missing from the Japanese rural scene at the time he conducted fieldwork, “of male bicyclists stopping unconcernedly along the road to urinate.”¹⁰ Many ethnographies of Japan, including Ronald Dore’s contributions on urban and rural contexts,¹¹ Theodore C. Bestor’s Neighborhood Tokyo,¹² and my own book Taming Oblivion,¹³ to name a few, follow this basic approach of compact ethnographic writing focused on the details of community life among a small group of people whose lives are closely intertwined in a seemingly neatly defined web of social interactions and confined geographical space.

More recent ethnographies of Japan have moved away from this approach, reflecting the changing patterns of social interaction and community construction that contemporary Japanese experience via modern technologies of communication and transportation and often focusing on specific types of communities or social issues and patterns of identity expression, such as Karen Nakamura’s work among the Japanese deaf community or a group home for schizophrenics in northern Japan.¹⁴ A good example of work specifically focused on agricultural or rural areas is Donald C. Wood’s study of the planned farming community, Ogata-mura, which extends the community-centered model of ethnographic writing by situating the people and place he studied into national agricultural and industrial flows as well as government policy frameworks that influence patterns of life and work.¹⁵ Another good example is Scott Clark’s Japan: A View from the Bath, which geographically decenters ethnographic writing by focusing on “the bath” in its various forms throughout Japan, without being tied to a particular village or town.¹⁶ While there is still much intellectual and ethnographic knowledge to be gained by focusing on single villages—things change over time and the nature and lifeways of village Japan in 1955 has both differences and similarities with lifeways today—modern Japanese living in agricultural areas do not experience their world the way they did when Dore was collecting data in Shinohata in the mid-twentieth century.¹⁷ And both urban and rural Japanese inhabit a mobile landscape that allows them