ABSTRACT
Japanese rural areas have experienced radical transformation both economically and socially. Today, rural residents face difficulties in sustaining farming and community activities that have been maintained in the past. In particular, the proliferation of global market principles into Japan’s rice sector has altered practices in paddy agriculture as well as the demographics of rural communities. In communities where farmers are confronted by the interests of non-farming community members, critical problems may arise as to how farming-related activities can be carried out, including maintenance of communal farming assets such as paddies and irrigation systems. In many cases corporations have replaced traditional family-run farms as significant, and sometimes dominant, players in the agricultural sector. Drawing on the concept of peripheralization combined with assemblage thinking and theories on the globalization of rural areas, we ask how the residents of a small village in Shiga Prefecture manage their farming traditions, how they preserve common agricultural resources and to what extent the transformation could be considered a global phenomenon. We conclude that globally proliferating values, epitomized as neoliberalism, accelerated corporatization in rural Japan through a complex interplay with local-level sociocultural backdrops. However, our case study illustrates that farming companies may also help to increase community discussion about land-use and to preserve communal agricultural assets.
