Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosyste ...

even if the meaning in some ways shifts in relation to context and analytically the spatio-social dimensions of the relationship are not always readily evident in the expressions of depolarization that have occurred in the region over the past several decades. This process is not unique to Japan, and several scholars have attempted to address the blurriness of rural and urban regions in other parts of the world that have undergone processes related to and generating spatio-social depolarization. For example, in examining changes in the Benelux region of Europe, Gulinck and Dortmans use the term “remnant rurality” as a way to characterize regions removed from urban centers, but within which there may also be patches of urbanity and well-developed infrastructure, such as high-speed rail and limited-access highways, that link together all parts of a region and connect that region to larger political and economic structures.⁷⁰ From an analytical perspective, I am unconvinced that the notion of “remnant” rurality adequately expresses reconstructed contexts associated with spatio-social depolarization because the idea indexes images of rurality as something of and from the past that is, in a sense, dematerializing in the face of modernization rather than being a social process that is continually reconstructed by locals to reflect desires and hopes for life now and in the future. Human agency is left out of the picture as is a sense of the ways in which people regularly redefine the metaphors they use to represent their own patterns of life.

Another term that has been helpful in thinking about contemporary life outside of unambiguously urban areas is neo-rural. Unfortunately, neo-rurality has been defined inconsistently in academic literature, where it can refer to back-to-the-land movements and the associated reconstruction of eco-political territory as a geographical and epistemological challenge to contemporary urban spaces and capitalist exploitation of the land.⁷¹ Although to some extent this conceptualization of neo-rurality occurs in Japan, a broader definition is useful as I am thinking about the term here. Elsewhere, I have defined neo-rurality as referring to socio-spatial regions that: 1) are culturally and socially viewed by locals (and outsiders) as unambiguously rural in contrast to urban or suburban