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.
Tabla de materias
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Lifestyle Migration and Mobility: Negotiating Urban Lifestyles in Rural Communities
2. The Countryside between Aging, Lack of Perspectives, and Creative Depopulation through the Lens of Female Settlers
3. Post-Growth Forms of Living and Working: Countryside as Experimental Ground and Social Imaginary
4. Between Agency and Anomie, Possibility and Probability: Lifestyle Migrants and the Neoliberal Moment
5. Convergence of Work and Leisure: Blessing or Plight?
6. Liminal Belonging and Moratorium Migration: Lifestyle Migrants between Limbo and Purpose of Life
7. Social Entrepreneurs between Self-Determination and Structural Constraints: Examples from Miyagi and Tokushima Prefectures
Conclusion: Deconstructing Japan’s Rural-Urban Divide
References
Index
Sobre el autor
Susanne Klien is Professor of Modern Japanese Studies at Hokkaido University, Japan. She is the author of
Rethinking Japan’s Identity and International Role: Tradition and Change in Japan’s Foreign Policy.
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