Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosyste ...

more than an analytical and academic exercise; I have spent at least four years of my life in the region, have family there, and have made many close friends among the residents as I have conducted ethnographic research. Despite that deep and long-term experience, as I have tried to understand the lifeways of the area through participant-observation over the years, I have found myself often confused about how to characterize my experiences. When I first visited Kanegasaki, the town where I have done the majority of my research over the years, the geographical and social context seemed very much rural and agricultural—any culture shock I felt probably had more to do with a Boston-raised suburban kid visiting an agricultural landscape that seemed far removed from the mainstream of global society than it did with the differences between Japanese and American cultures. In fact, I have always found Tokyo to be much like any other big city, although with its own distinct charms; Tōhoku seemed truly different from my experiences of life in the US. But is that perspective a product of my upbringing in suburban Boston? Or is it in some way a feature of the place and its lifeways that distinguishes it from the city? These are important questions, because they point to the problem of how we characterize and experience the rural and the urban, rustic and cosmopolitan in a globalizing social, economic, and political environment.

No doubt, most anthropologists struggle with these types of questions over time—the more one comes to know about a place, the less one seems to understand it. Humans are complex animals who never really stay put socially or geographically—the world we create is one of constant change, which makes that world impossible to capture in any objective or even lasting way. But there is value in trying to work through and contemplate the features of a particular place, time, and its people as one way of thinking more generally about the nature of humans as social and creative animals. Generalization is difficult, at best, and I make no effort here to draw broad conclusions from the very specific cases I will explore. However, while this book is about one place and period of time in Japan, it deals with a topic—human creativity expressed