VSJF Annual Conference 2017

Rural Japan Revisited: Autonomy and Heteronomy in the Peripheries

The annual conference 2017 of the VSJF (German Association for Social Science Research on Japan) will be held from 31 October–2 November, 2017 in Vienna. It is hosted by the University of Vienna and the Austrian Economic Chambers. Prof. Dr. Wolfram Manzenreiter and Dr. Ralph Lützeler from the Department of East Asian Studies – Japanese Studies at Vienna University will organize this conference in cooperation with the DIJ Tokyo (German Institute for Japanese Studies). URGENT: We ask participants interested in joining the reception at the residence of the Japanese ambassador to register for this event at our homepage by September 15. Due to organizational reasons registrations for this event cannot be accepted after this date.

This conference will focus on the challenges Japanese peripheries and their communities are facing under the threats of depopulation, political power concentration and economic globalization. The three day program will start with two panels on innovation strategies and business opportunities to stimulate a dialogue exchange between scholars from Japan or Japanese Studies and business representatives that are providing services and goods for regional economies in Austria and internationally. On the second and third day, the topic will be addressed from a more academic perspective. We have planned panels on dependency structures between rural and urban areas, changing social relations, rural in-migration, revitalization efforts of local actors, and rural well-being.

By putting Japan’s experience with rural development onto the agenda of social analysis, we intend to initiate a significant perspective shift within social scientific research on Japan in general and within the debate on regional Japan in particular. We call upon “revisiting rural Japan” now for two major reasons: First, rural Japan, which has been the main object of empirical research on Japanese society during the formation period of modern Japanese studies, has come to be rather neglected by social scientists since the 1980s. Second, contemporary debates on the conditions of rural Japan are usually prioritizing an urban reading of the countryside and ignoring local interpretations of problems, needs, interests and resources.

Specifically, the conference is devoted to highlight the tensions between autonomy and heteronomy in rural areas. Japan’s regions are dependent on central fiscal spending to a degree that the scope of decision-making at the local level has been rendered as “30 percent political autonomy”. In addition, many salient problems in the peripheries have been caused by decisions and processes initiated at national and global centers, such as the liberalization of trade in agrarian goods or pollution of soil and irrigation by industrial pollution from neighboring areas or even abroad. While heteronomy characterizes regional politics to a large degree, there is ample evidence to argue that autonomy is an important prerequisite for rural areas to realize their full potentials and to live up to the increasing amount of expectations they are confronted with, including the preservation of landscapes, cultural traditions, environmental protection and contributions to improving Japan’s food self-sufficiency rate.

For further information, including the conference program and registration details, please have a look at our conference homepage http://www.univie.ac.at/vsjf2017/.

If you have any questions please contact us at
vsjf2017@univie.ac.at