Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosyste ...

to the institutional frames of life experienced prior to taking said risk, while at the same time building institutions that create new forms of confinement, even when they are still small businesses. I am following Bourdieu’s formulation of social capital as the aggregate of actual or potential resources tied to access to and control over networks of social relationships.⁸ This form of capital provides members of a particular network with power in the form of credit that can be exchanged for social, financial, and labor-related assistance. Throughout this book, I will be focusing on small-business owners, which are sometimes differentiated from entrepreneurs. However, given both the theoretical and definitional imprecision of the term entrepreneur and the social conditions and attitudes of small-business owners observed at my field site, as I move through the chapters that follow, I will largely use the ideas of the entrepreneur and the small-business owner interchangeably.

Ethnography and Rural Japan

One of the first ethnographies of Japan I read as a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh was Edward Norbeck’s Takashima: A Japanese Fishing Community.⁹ Norbeck’s study follows the pattern typical of other ethnographies of Japan (and other places) written in the 1950s and, in fact, well into the 1970s. It is situated in a small community in Okayama Prefecture and describes the details of household, community, religion, and work in the village. It is what I call a compact ethnography that keeps itself limited to the lifeways of a close-knit group of people living in an environment that allows them and the ethnographer to interact daily on foot or, perhaps, by riding a bicycle. The field of view Norbeck adopted as an ethnographer reflects his perspective on the place as an outside observer from a very different cultural setting. “The Western traveler,” writes Norbeck, “marks the narrowness of the roads. He notes the manner in which buildings are compressed together so that as much productive land as possible may be used for raising crops.” The Westerner, according to Norbeck, is also likely to be struck by images of rusticity, seldom