Rethinking Locality in Japan

Sonja Ganseforth, Hanno Jentzsch, Sonja Ganseforth, Hanno Jentzsch

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000415407
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Antropologia

This book inquires what is meant when we say "local" and what "local" means in the Japanese context.

Through the window of locality, it enhances an understanding of broader political and socio-economic shifts in Japan. This includes demographic change, electoral and administrative reform, rural decline and revitalization, welfare reform, as well as the growing metabolic rift in energy and food production. Chapters throughout this edited volume discuss the different and often contested ways in which locality in Japan has been reconstituted, from historical and contemporary instances of administrative restructuring, to more subtle social processes of making – and unmaking – local places. Contributions from multiple disciplinary perspectives are included to investigate the tensions between overlapping and often incongruent dimensions of locality. Framed by a theoretical discussion of socio-spatial thinking, such issues surrounding the construction and renegotiation of local places are not only relevant for Japan specialists, but also connected with topical scholarly debates further afield.

Accordingly, Rethinking Locality in Japan will appeal to students and scholars from Japanese studies and human geography to anthropology, history, sociology and political science.

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INTRODUCTION

Rethinking locality in Japan

Sonja Ganseforth and Hanno Jentzsch

What is the “local” – and why do we ask?

Social sciences and humanities are frequently concerned with the “local,” both as a unit of analysis for the in-depth investigation of macro-level phenomena and as a research subject in and of itself. Across the disciplines, scholars analyze place-making practices, socio-spatial inequalities, the local implementation of national policies, the structure of local governance, voter behavior in electoral districts, the meaning of local identities, the interrelations of local and global transformations, and the development of local industries. Perceptions of the local and its boundaries also shape our everyday life. Consumers might prefer “local” products over imported goods, parents might worry about which school district their neighborhood belongs to, and newcomers might struggle not to act out of place (Cresswell 1996) in order to win acceptance in their new residential community.

Whether in research or everyday life, these examples all concern certain spatializations of social relations – and yet, the localities in question are constituted very differently, with boundaries not necessarily formally defined or visible on maps and, more often than not, fuzzy and subjective. Local administrative units – albeit probably the most common subnational analytical unit, at least in political science – are limited in demarcating the “local” and associated socioeconomic, political, and cultural phenomena. They contain and cut across the boundaries of neighborhoods, sites of local production and tourism, and spheres of solidarity and social cohesion, and are themselves frequently subject to change. As soon as we recognize localities as socially (re)produced, historically contingent, and never entirely fixed (Massey 2005), the answers to the seemingly trivial question of what is (the) local, too, become highly contingent and political, as heterogeneous concepts of locality and multidimensional borders overlap, coexist, or even clash.

Local dynamics in Japan

This book offers an interdisciplinary collection of articles that take the question of “What is (the) local?” as their analytical starting point. While this question has been discussed intensively since the 1980s and holds universal relevance for any geographic region, the contributions in this book all focus on Japan, which provides a particularly interesting case for problematizing locality. The complexities of local relations in Japan are expressed in a broad variety of ways, including terms that signify formal territorial delineation (chiku, district; shikuchōn, municipalities), terms that evoke the notion of historically grown socio-spatial relations (sonraku or mura, natural village; buraku or shūraku, hamlet; chōnai or kinjo, neighborhood; kyōdōtai, local [cooperative] community), or fluid and versatile terms to describe one’s home area (jimoto or finritsalo) and the respective region (chiiki or chihō), all of which are interrelated in multiple ways. Adding to this complexity, the formal boundaries of what constitutes the “local” in Japan were altered abruptly and deliberately in the recent past. In the early 2000s, a series of political reforms aimed at decentralization and the restructuring of central–local fiscal relations resulted in a massive wave of municipal mergers. On the one hand, this development is in line with the global trend towards consolidating local governments (Zimmerbauer and Paasi 2013). On the other hand, however, municipal mergers in Japan happened in a remarkably rapid and disruptive fashion. Between 2002 and 2006, hundreds of previously autonomous towns and villages became part of amalgamated municipalities. As a result, Japanese municipalities became extensive in international comparison and strikingly heterogeneous both socio-economically and topographically. As the newly merged towns and villages retain distinct histories, identities, and even limited formal and informal self-governing capacities, large parts of Japan are in the process of renegotiating local governance, the local redistribution of resources, and socio-spatial belonging (Shimada 2014; Rausch 2016; Reiher 2014).

Beyond the disruptive effects of municipal mergers, locality in Japan has been changing in dynamic ways in the context of prolonged socio-economic and socio-cultural processes. Rural–urban migration before and after the Pacific War, more recent demographic trends such as aging and (rural) depopulation, climate change, and man-made and natural disasters have all contributed to the socio-economic, cultural, and even topographical reconfiguration of socio-spatial formations below, beyond, and across municipal boundaries.¹ Similar processes have been occurring elsewhere in the world as well, yet Japan’s remarkable path from postwar industrial development to contemporary demographic shrinking (and its responses) might well be considered instructive for other countries following similar trajectories (Matanle 2017). Japan is also an important arena for globalization processes such as the establishment of global commodity chains, the negotiations of free trade agreements as well as related technological developments and information flows, all of which have profound effects on urban areas and the “global countryside” (Woods 2007). Since the 1970s, several waves of academic discourses and political programs have focused on the “revitalization” of Japan’s regions. Although the target of these revitalization efforts remains elusive, and the terms and concepts have changed over time, discourses surrounding idealized notions of regions (chiiki), villages and towns (mura, machi), rurality and the “old hometown” (furusato), or terroir (fūdo) still (re)frame perceptions of the “local” in Japan beyond administrative divisions.² This has concrete influence, for example on the consumption of local produce and places in tourism, the selective allocation of public goods, or migration patterns (Klien 2020; McGreevy 2012; Kitano 2009; Jentzsch 2020; Tamanoi 1979). At the same time, the notion of furusato also constitutes a rallying point of national(ist) identity in a presumed age of modernity, globalization, and unravelling boundaries (Ivy 1995; Robertson 1988).

Local questions

Against this background, the contributions in this book inquire into what constitutes localities in Japan – their relationalities, imaginaries, and materialities, as well as their spatial, social, formal, and informal boundaries, and the dynamics that produce, reinforce, or alter these boundaries. Beyond these conceptual issues, which speak to an ever-growing literature on spatial thinking in the social sciences and humanities, the contributions look at concrete political, socio-economic, and cultural problems through the analytical lens of (changing) “localities” in order to produce new questions, reveal different stakeholders, and uncover the impact of social constellations that otherwise remain invisible. Our goal is not to find one single answer to the question of what is the “local” – such an answer would have to be either overly specific and attuned to context and discipline, or banal and superfluous, if not outright impossible (Duncan 1989). Rather, we want to emphasize that precisely because the local is always contingent, critical reflection of its relations and boundaries remains important.

The contributions here show this as well as how localities are up for contestation both from within and without (the latter including, of course, researchers themselves). Moreover, they address the ongoing de-institutionalization of localities as a common, but arguably still underdeveloped, research topic (Zimmerbauer and Paasi 2013; Zimmerbauer et al. 2017), and the various processes of (formal and informal) “re-institutionalization” of localities both in the context of administrative restructuring and long-term socio-economic and cultural change. In general, the tensions and frictions arising from social, political, and geographical spaces not (or not anymore) aligning are a primary concern of engaging the “local” in Japan. This perspective brings to attention questions of power, agency, and responsibility. Who has the authority to define the character of the local? Who has the power to redraw boundaries, and why and how are boundaries redrawn? Who has the agency to shape the character of the local, and who is included or excluded? Who bears responsibility for the effects of the differential distribution of benefits or burdens? Who bears the risks when local boundaries are altered? Who represents localities, and whose perspectives and voices become muted by specific conceptions of the local? Before we introduce the contributions in more detail, we will lay the conceptual groundwork with a brief discussion of (local) places and boundaries.

Conceptualizing the “local”

Our concern with the local corresponds to the contention that space matters, which stands at the core of what has been labeled the “spatial turn” in the social sciences and humanities. Approaches to spatial questions since the 1980s have re-conceptualized space not as an objectifiable, homogeneous, and measurable container where detached events just happen to take place but as a contingent product of social, political, and cultural relations, which is itself involved in the formation of such relations (Elden 2010; Lefebvre 1974; Massey 2005; Warf and Arias 2009). Traditionally, geography has been the discipline most prominently concerned with the characteristics and shapes of (physical) places. However, other disciplines have become increasingly more attuned to the spatial aspects of socio-economic relations, politics, power, and culture.³ This book aims to contribute to this growing literature.

Studying locality in particular carries assumptions about scale, usually implying a zooming in below the level of the nation-state, perhaps even much smaller. There is a broad variety of nested, formally and informally constituted socio-spatial formations that can be this locality, and these formations can also reach far beyond the nation-state, such as diasporic networks and transnational political or cultural groups. Coming from a wide range of disciplines, the contributions to this volume highlight different aspects of what the local is, produce different questions, and apply different spatial concepts. For some disciplines and research questions, administrative sectors might suggest themselves as the most convenient units of analysis. We do not per se reject the notion to treat administrative sectors as localities. Yet, we agree with Agnew (1998) that viewing social formations primarily through the multiscalar boundaries and delineations of reified state power constitutes a “territorial trap,” which runs the risk of missing other socio-spatial relations that are nested within, overlap, or go beyond political-administrative structures, both contemporary and historically, but may be equally – or even more – relevant (Massey 1991 b). As our contributions address various Japanese manifestations of this problematique both directly and indirectly, the collection ties in with longstanding theoretical debates on the conceptualization of locality and place, which are outlined in the following sections.

Spatial concepts and imaginaries

Locality is often associated with “place.” Intuitive and commonplace understandings of local places relate to their role in people’s everyday lives, thriving on co-presences, frequent meetings and interactions, and a shared feeling of belonging. As such, they are intimately connected to personal life worlds and horizons of experience, which is also reflected in Japanese expressions of locality, e.g., in the term “jimoto” (Sekiguchi et al. 2017). The idea of a lived space corresponds to Lefebvre’s (1974) concept of espace perçu, which can differ substantially from the espace conçu, the conceived space of administrative boundaries and planning. With the growing interest in spatial relations, place and locality have received intensified attention, especially in human geography (Massey and Thrift 2003). For example, in his theory of “structuration,” Giddens (1984, 118), concerned with the reciprocal co-production of social structures and agency, coined the concept of the “locale” referring to “the use of space to provide the settings of interaction, the settings of interaction in turn being essential to specifying its contextuality” (emphasis in original). Building on Giddens, Soja (1989, 151) defines “localities” as “particular types of enduring locales stabilized socially and spatially through the clustered settlement of primary activity sites and the establishment of propinquitous territorial community.”

Globalization and “space-time compression” (Harvey 1990) have served as important catalysts for the debate on locality, in that the flow of goods, information, and people has been ascribed the potential to dissolve socio-spatial boundaries on the global, national, and local scale in interweaving processes of de- and reterritorialization (Brenner 1999). While the local renegotiation and co-production of global processes has been described by the neologism “glocal” (Swyngedouw 1997), (local) “place” is sometimes juxtaposed with “space” (e.g., of globalized, equalizing flows) as the locus of difference or resistance (Escobar 2001; Castree 2004). As such, local place has also served as a central reference point in nationalist, regionalist, and fascist ideologies as the roots of their (imagined) social and cultural identity which globalization threatens to disrupt, resonating with the (re)invention of the idealized homeplace (furusato) in Japan. Here, the 1973 oil shock and uneven socio-economic development between the three major metropolitan areas and the peripheries also inspired increased attention on the regions and the emergence of “regionalism” (chiiki shugi) in the social sciences and politics (Kitano 2009; Tamanoi 1979). Similarly, geographical differentiation of socio-economic tra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Series editors’ preface to Rethinking Locality in Japan
• 1 Introduction: Rethinking locality in Japan
• Section I (Re)lating localities as lived spaces in Japan
• Section II Local social worlds at risk
• Section III Localities under contestation
• Section IV Local—national dynamics
• Section V Coda
• Index