Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosyste ...

permeate everything, only to yield to autumn shades of harvest gold and orangey reds that retreat into the inevitable gray-white shadows of winter with its crystalline trees and slush-strewn roads. As one twists through the cloverleaf exit and enters National Route 4, the assault of trucks and diesel fumes is intense. Route 4 is not a toll road. As a result, a seemingly endless line of dump trucks, other commercial vehicles, and cars often forms in both directions along stretches of the two-lane road. Many of the trucks lug loads so heavy that ruts have formed on each side of the road where tires tread.

To the north of exit 36-1 is the City of Kitakami, with, as of 2017, a population of about 93,000 and a population density of 212 persons per km² and to the south is the town of Kanegasaki, with a population a little under 16,000 and a population density of 87.8 persons per km². When I exit the expressway, I normally head south to Kanegasaki, where I have been visiting for both research and family reasons since 1988. Over the past thirty years, much has changed. In fact, when I first arrived in the area, Interchange 36-1 did not exist; its construction in the 1990s was a major accomplishment of then-Mayor Takahashi, who worked hard to situate the interchange in Kanegasaki, as opposed to Kitakami, in the hopes that it would bring development to the area. It did. Today a large Aeon department store, several chain restaurants like Marumatsu, and one of Japan’s ubiquitous 100-yen shops have been built close to the interchange along Route 4. The area that was largely rice fields when I first visited Kanegasaki is now a major shopping district for people both from Kanegasaki and Kitakami. If one continues south on Route 4, the next town is Ōshū, which has a population of about 119,000 and a population density of 120 persons per square kilometer.

This book is an attempt to work through ideas that have been brewing in my head over much of the past thirty years as I have tried to find ways to adequately describe and discuss, from an analytical perspective, lifeways in Kitakami, Kanegasaki, and Ōshū and to some extent the region of Tōhoku where these cities are located. For me, this is much