Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosyste ...

the Japanese and foreigners who visit as tourists and for locals who are raised and decide to live out their lives in the region. However, if one spends some time in many parts of the Tōhoku region, evidence of what I will refer to throughout this book as cosmopolitan rurality can be seen at almost every turn. Farmers fly drones over green rice paddies, dousing their crops with pesticides and fertilizers that help to increase yields, although there has been an interest in organic farming since the 1990s.²⁰ Bullet trains streak through those same rice fields at speeds approaching 320kph. And the countryside is dotted with satellite dishes on buildings aside which are parked multiple cars, usually made by Japanese manufacturers, but also the occasional BMW, Jeep, Mercedes-Benz, or Land Rover, as well.

Tōhoku has long been characterized as a place of declining population and economic stagnation. It is a region that people are often from, but less frequently move to. As Christopher C. Thompson notes, the history of depopulation in the region has contributed to and been a product of socioeconomic challenges experienced particularly strongly in farm communities since the end of World War II.²¹ Jobs can be scarce or limited to low-paying positions in the tertiary sector and there are often insufficient young people to populate schools or local rituals such as the shishi odori (鹿踊 deer dance) that Thompson describes in his research from another part of Tōhoku.²² Indeed, among many Japanese, the region long has been known somewhat disparagingly as the Tibet of Japan, a moniker that indexes inclement weather, beautiful mountains, economic stagnation, and images of “traditional,” simple, or backward values, as well as social and thought patterns.²³

Despite the fact that during the 1960s investments were made in pulp, petroleum refining, and cement-production industries in the region, the area struggled to compete successfully on national or international scales, leaving Tōhoku functioning primarily as a major producer of agricultural products, rather than industrial goods.²⁴ Many of these images of Tōhoku as a place of economic and population distress were amplified following