Seeking to challenge negative perceptions within Japanese media and politics on the future of the countryside, the contributors to this book present a counterargument to the inevitable demise of rural society. Contrary to the dominant argument, which holds outmigration and demographic hyper-aging as primarily responsible for rural decline, this book highlights the spatial dimension of power differences behind uneven development in contemporary Japan. Including many fi eldwork-based case studies, the chapters discuss topics such as corporate farming, local energy systems and public healthcare, examining the constraints and possibilities of rural self-determination under the centripetal impact of forces located both in and outside of the country. Focusing on asymmetries of power to explore regional autonomy and heteronomy, it also examines "peripheralization" and the "global countryside," two recent theoretical contributions to the fi eld, as a common framework. Japan’s New Ruralities addresses the complexity of rural decline in the context of debates on globalization and power differences. As such, it will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, anthropology, human geography and politics, as well as Japanese Studies.

Seeking to challenge negative perceptions within Japanese media and politics on the future of the countryside, the contributors to this book present a counterargument to the inevitable demise of rural society. Contrary to the dominant argument, which holds outmigration and demographic hyper-aging as primarily responsible for rural decline, this book highlights the spatial dimension of power differences behind uneven development in contemporary Japan. Including many fi eldwork-based case studies, the chapters discuss topics such as corporate farming, local energy systems and public healthcare, examining the constraints and possibilities of rural self-determination under the centripetal impact of forces located both in and outside of the country. Focusing on asymmetries of power to explore regional autonomy and heteronomy, it also examines "peripheralization" and the "global countryside," two recent theoretical contributions to the fi eld, as a common framework. Japan's New Ruralities addresses the complexity of rural decline in the context of debates on globalization and power differences. As such, it will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, anthropology, human geography and politics, as well as Japanese Studies.

2020 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Urban Migrants in Rural Japan provides a fresh perspective on theoretical notions of rurality and emerging modes of working and living in post-growth Japan. By exploring narratives and trajectories of individuals who relocate from urban to rural areas and seek new modes of working and living, this multisited ethnography reveals the changing role of rurality, from postwar notions of a stagnant backwater to contemporary sites of experimentation. The individual cases presented in the book vividly illustrate changing lifestyles and perceptions of work. What emerges from Urban Migrants in Rural Japan is the emotionally fraught quest of many individuals for a personally fulfilling lifestyle and the conflicting neoliberal constraints many settlers face. In fact, flexibility often coincides with precarity and self-exploitation. Susanne Klien shows how mobility serves as a strategic mechanism for neophytes in rural Japan who hedge their bets; gain time; and seek assurance, inspiration, and courage to do (or further postpone doing) what they ultimately feel makes sense to them.

Best known as a leader of the Indian takeover of Alcatraz Island in 1969, Adam Fortunate Eagle now offers a memoir of his years as a young student at Pipestone Indian Boarding School in Minnesota. He lives up to his reputation as a "contrary warrior" by disproving the popular view of Indian boarding schools as bleak and prisonlike. Fortunate Eagle attended Pipestone between 1935 and 1945, just as Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier's pluralist vision was reshaping the federal boarding school system to promote greater respect for Native cultures and traditions.

Rural communities in Japan have suffered from significant depopulation and economic downturn in post-war years. Low birth rates, aging populations, agricultural decline and youth migration to large cities have been compounded by the triple disaster of 11 March 2011, which destroyed farming and fishing communities and left thousands of people homeless. This book identifies these challenges and acknowledges that an era of post-growth has arrived in Japan. Through exploring new forms of regional employment, community empowerment, and reverse migration, the authors address potential opportunities and benefits that may help to create and ensure the quality of life in depopulating areas and post-disaster scenarios. This book will be of interest not only to students of Japanese society, but also to those outside of Japan who are seeking new approaches for tackling depopulation challenges.

"A combination of individual and institutional entrepreneurial activities is changing the social and geographical landscape of rural Japan and reinventing that space as one that blends perceptions and experiences of the urban and rural, cosmopolitan and rustic. While there has been considerable research on rural Japan and numerous studies that focus on entrepreneurs, only limited attention has been paid to the intersection of entrepreneurial activities in rural Japan and the ways in which entrepreneurs more generally are contributing to the re-formation of rural space and place. This ethnographic study develops the concept of cosmopolitan rurality as a social and geographical space that cannot be characterized as either urban or rural nor as specifically cosmopolitan or rustic. In the "rural" Japan of the early twenty-first, as in many other parts of the industrial world, we see the emergence of a new type of social context forming a hybrid space of neo-rurality that brings together people and ideas reflecting local, national, and global frames of experience. One of the key drivers behind this hybrid space is expressed in entrepreneurial activities by locals to generate an entrepreneurial ecosystem that it is hoped can attract new people and ideas while retaining ideational and geographical elements associated with traditional values and spaces. Cosmopolitan Rurality, Depopulation, and Entrepreneurial Ecosystems in 21st-Century Japan is an important book for Asian studies, rural studies, anthropology, and the study of entrepreneurialism"--

Rural Japan during the twentieth century has been portrayed as a vast reservoir of conservatism in much of the literature on Japan's modern development, and Japanese agriculture since the 1960s has been treated as an artificial creation sustained only by protectionism of the worst sort. This book presents a range of original, in-depth work, including work by Japanese scholars, that seeks to move beyond such stereotypes to reveal the diversity and complexities of rural life in Japan from 1900 to the present.