Japan’s New Ruralities

Wolfram Manzenreiter is Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria. His research interest in the social outcomes of globalization is documented in Sport and Body Politics in Japan (Routledge 2014) and the co-edited volume on Happiness and the Good Life in Japan (Routledge, 2017).Ralph Lützeler is Assistant Professor at the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Vienna, Austria. His relevant publications include the co-edited volume Imploding Populations in Japan and Germany: A Comparison (2011) and other papers on demographic change and its regional implications in rural and urban areas of Japan.Sebastian Polak-Rottmann is a PhD student, researcher and lecturer at the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Vienna, Austria. His research focuses on private security companies, political participation and well-being in Japan.

• 1. Introduction: Japan’s new ruralities Part 1:Transformations in the primary sector 2. From agribusiness to deer hunter: "Placing" food industrialization and multispecies health in Tokachi, Hokkaido 3. Corporatization as hybridization in rural Japan: The case of Iwasaka in Shiga Prefecture 4. Sea pineapples in troubled waters: On the local-global interdependencies of the sea squirt (hoya) industry in the aftermath of the 3.11 disaster 5. Reclaiming the global countryside? Decline and diversification in Saga Genkai coastal fisheries Part 2: Political innovations in rural Japan 6. Local renewables: Japan’s energy transformation and its potential for the remaking of rural communities 7. Empowering rural cooperation: Effects of agricultural policy intervention on rural social capital 8. Sustaining healthcare in Japan’s regions: The introduction of telehealth networks 9. Regional revitalization as a contested arena: Promoting wine tourism in Yamanashi Part 3: New residents in the countryside 10. Has the island lure reached Japan? Remote islands between tourism boom, new residents and fatal depopulation 11. Fluidity in rural Japan: How lifestyle migration and social movements contribute to the preservation of traditional ways of life on Iwaishima 12. Nai mono wa nai—Challenging and subverting rural peripheralization? Decline and revival in a remote island town 13. Embracing the periphery: Urbanites’ motivations for relocating to rural Japan Part 4: Conceptual interventions for a new understanding of rural Japan 14. Reinventing rurality: Hybridity and socio-spatial depolarization in northern Japan 15. Rereading the changing Japanese rural peripheries: New approaches and actors for the future 16. Environmental activity gaps and how to fill them: Rural depopulation and wildlife encroachment in Japan 17. Epilogue: Think global, act peripheral in Japan’s new ruralities