Rethinking Locality in Japan

Sonja Ganseforth is Principal Researcher at the German Institute for Japanese Studies in Tokyo. Her research interests include development and sustainability discourses, globalized agri-food systems, small-scale fisheries, and the political ecology of food. Her first monograph analyzed Japanese development cooperation in Palestine (2016).Hanno Jentzsch is Assistant Professor at the Institute for East Asian Studies, Vienna University. He works on agricultural politics, central-local relations, and social welfare in Japan. His first monograph Harvesting State Support (2021) analyzed institutional change in Japanese agriculture.

• Part 1: (Re)lating Localities as Lived Spaces in Japan 1. Locality in Shōnai: Scale, Containers, Fields, and Horizons 2. Localized yet Deterritorialized Lives in Rural Japan: Fragmented Localities, Mobility, and Neoliberalism 3. Rur-bane Relations: Assemblage and Cosmopolitics in Central Hokkaido 4. The Meaning of Place for Selfhood and Well-being in Rural Japan Part 2: Local Social Worlds at Risk 5. Localizing the Nuclear: Risk Normalization and Sense of Place after Fukushima 6. Mapping the Local Economy of Care: Social Welfare and Volunteerism in Local Communities 7. San’ya – The Making and Unmaking of a Welfare Quarter Part 3: Localities under Contestation 8. Defending the Local: Resident Activism against Municipal Mergers in Postwar Rural Japan 9. Local Governance of Public Transport Services: Maintaining Identity and Independence after the Heisei Mergers 10. Territorialized yet Fluid Locality: Reform, Consolidation, and the More-than-Human in Japanese Fishery Cooperatives 11. The Reinterpretation of Locality and Place in the Wine Industry of Yamanashi Prefecture Part 4: Local–National Dynamics 12. Furusato Nōzei Tax: Local Place in National Tax Policy and the Dynamics of Locality 13. Uprooting the Political Landscape: How Municipal Mergers Untethered the Local from National Politics 14. Competing Conceptions of Local Democracy in Japan Part 5: Coda 15. Earth is our Locale: Decentering and Decelerating the Human in the Anthropocene

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