Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosyste ...

facilities for Citizen watches and offices for companies such as Hitachi, as well as stations for the bullet train and, as noted above, exits off the expressway that runs through the northern part of Japan tying the area not only to metropolitan regions like Tokyo and Osaka but also to international economic and cultural hubs. There are shopping malls and movie theaters, exercise centers and art museums. Indeed, postmodernity’s version of the Tibet of Japan is a place highly interconnected with national and global cultural and industrial flows both through transportation and communication networks.³⁰ Like in other parts of Japan, WiFi is easy to find in coffee shops or stores, the vast majority of people of all ages are connected to the web through their cell phones and smart phones, and many engage in domestic or international interactions via applications such as Skype and FaceTime, creating and negotiating—virtually—multigenerational and transnational family and business spaces.³¹

Despite these features of the social, economic, and political landscape in the region, Tōhoku has experienced annual net losses in migration since the 1970s, although return migration—sometimes referred to as the U-Turn pattern, a term coined by Kuroda Tashio in the 1970s—has also been a common feature of a demographic landscape with a significant non-metropolitan oriented proportion of migrants.³² By the 1990s, the term “U-turn” had come to be widely associated in the Japanese media with turnaround migration where people who had moved to metropolitan areas for education or work eventually chose to return to their natal homes or simply move out to the countryside to escape the stress and crowding of large cities. This pattern is accompanied by the L-turn, in which someone who grew up in an urban area moves, perhaps with a U-turning spouse, to a region perceived as rural.³³ The growth of these terms used in both academic literature and the popular media underscore a simple fact that modern Japan is a mobile society in which people often move from one social and geographical landscape to a different type of space and may live in a variety of locations and cultural contexts over the course of a lifetime.