Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosyste ...

More specific to the Tōhoku region and to recent events are a series of policies aimed at recovery and revitalization of the areas devastated by the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disasters of 2011. A variety of programs have helped encourage startups or restarts along coastal areas of Miyagi and Iwate prefectures, which were hit particularly bad by the disaster. Within a year of the disaster, there were many small business startups, particularly restaurants and other services such as barbers, in the areas along the coast, often to take advantage of the influx of construction workers there to help with the reconstruction. In some cases, people returned to restart businesses they lost in the disaster, while others moved into the area from other parts of Japan to start new businesses—a few locals told me that they looked at this somewhat negatively because it appeared as though outsiders were taking advantage of the situation. Most of these programs have been focused on the coastal areas that were hit by the tsunami, the closest of which is more than an hour by car from the area where I do my research, although they certainly have had an influence more generally throughout the Tōhoku region, just as the triple disaster has shaped life and businesses in northern Japan in general over the past eight years.

Small-business creation, entrepreneurship, and the generation of entrepreneurial ecosystems, of course, are not simply about government policies and business plans. For many who start micro-businesses, ambitions are at least equally related to personal desires and feelings of fulfillment through one’s work and in one’s life.⁵¹ Indeed, several of the cases of local-business owners I discuss in this book focus on the lives of individuals who, after spending several years working in corporate Japan and living in a major city, decided to leave secure employment situations in order to start businesses in a small town in Tōhoku. What emerges is a complex intersection of personal identities, concern with community, and the politics of population that are expressed not only in terms of revitalization of rural areas, but also as an effort to create a new social and geographical space that does not fit neatly into traditional images of rurality.