ABSTRACT
Japan is a modern society with a conspicuous preoccupation with the past. Commentators have suggested that present-day Japan is afflicted by a chronic ‘sense of homelessness’ (Robertson 1995:101), that it is governed by a fetishistic cultural logic (Ivy 1995), and that the upshot of this sense of loss and incompletion is a national tendency to restore what has disappeared and to recover distant origins. One feature of this intense national nostalgia is the role of the regions as repositories of Japanese custom and tradition and ‘cultural building blocks’ of the nation (Yoneyama 1988:79). In the context of rural tourism and revitalization initiatives, localities and regions project themselves as ‘survivals’ of particular historical pasts, well-known examples of which include the reconstructed period-style ‘villages’ such as ‘Heian Village’, ‘Edo Village’, ‘Meiji Village’ etc.1
