Introduction: Japan’s new ruralities

Objective of this publication is to generate advanced insight into the conditions of rural life in contemporary Japan. In particular, the book will explore how local governments, communities and other stake-holders are coping with the constraints and opportunities imposed by decentralization reforms, and to what degree local strategies and developments are carried on by autonomy or heteronomy. Heteronomy forces local actors to come to terms with processes beyond their own reach, such as the liberalization of trade in agrarian goods, corporate decisions against local branch plants and in favor of offshore production, or industrial pollution of air, soil, and irrigation from abroad. Policy-makers in Japan as elsewhere have come to acknowledge the significance of autonomy and local knowledge, resources and practices to mitigate the consequences of structural change and to fulfill the expectations rural areas are confronted with, including the preservation of landscapes and cultural traditions, environmental protection and contributions to improving Japan’s food self-sufficiency rate.
This chapter provides background information on the discourse of rural decline in Japan and a short introduction to the outline of the volume. The main part in-between introduces two new theoretical concepts to the debate on rural development in Japan. ‘Peripheralization’ implies that rural regions are being disconnected from economic and social development because of their dependence on the centers of global or national power, where central political actors and corporation headquarters are located and decisions made. The ‘global countryside’ scholarship takes into account that same as cities, the countryside exhibits new characteristics that are driven by structural changes and a complex net of trans-regional relations on a global scale. While peripheralization brings in global power relations as the basic factor reinforcing rural decline, the global countryside concept with its emphasis on agency displays Japan’s rural areas and its inhabitants as actors enacting and reacting to global processes and thus actively co-shaping the countryside.
This introduction falls into the following subchapters: (1) From depopulation to degrowth, (2) Peripheralization, (3) Situating Japan’s peripheries in the ‘Global Countryside’, (4) Globalization impacts on space and authority, (5) Rurality check: Contestation of the countryside, (6) Outlining the volume.