Meaningful Aging in the Middle of Nowhere: Community, Subjectivity, and the Elderly in Rural Japan

By ethnographic research done in 2007, 2009-2010, and 2011, this paper illustrates the dreams and struggles of a group of aging residents in O town, a remote and depopulated town in Hokkaido, Japan. While they managed to pursue a better quality of senior life, their livelihoods have been largely damaged by the uneven geographical development under the neoliberal regime. The neoliberal regime has also created an urban ethics of entrepreneurialism that requires citizens to organize, operate, and assume the risk for business ventures. The entrepreneurial ethics has diffused in the countryside and formed a cultural hegemony that constricted the development of alternative ethics.

Working with members of a local organization “ODC,” I found that the aging locals managed to encounter the rural predicament by searching for new meanings in their everyday lives. Members of the ODC have worked for 8 years on a project of local revitalization called the “Bochibochi Village” Project (BVP). The BVP aims to attract urban retirees to settle themselves in O town by offering a “slow living” lifestyle, cheap rent, and a communal farm. As voluntary helpers of the BVP, local residents introduced the newcomers to the natural surroundings and delicacies from mountain and sea. The ODC members expected the BVP to be a solution to the structural inequalities from which many rural towns in Japan have suffered for decades. In fact, the implementation of the BVP has created a “regime of living,” a heterogeneous network that connects these newcomers to local livelihoods (e.g. fishery and dairy farm) and the ecological system of the surroundings. In other words, the BVP has created a new community that is deeply rooted in the local climate (fūdo). This community has provided both mental and material supports to the participants who maintained their subjectivities against the ethics prescribed by entrepreneurialism.