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Looking Backward to Look Forward: The Place of Heritage Food in Contemporary Japan
Gary Walsh
Japan in the late 1980s was a time of posthistorical exuberance as the country was poised
to overtake the United States as the world’s leading economy. Japan seemed to have solved the
inherent problems of capitalism in constructing a well-informed and well-disciplined workforce
that identified overwhelmingly as middle class (chūkan taishū shakai). However, after the bubble
economy burst in 1991, Japan’s feelings of posthistory were defined by an extended economic
and social malaise. The last decade of the 20th
century marked in the minds of the Japanese a
clear rupture as the metanarrative that was to guide Japan into the next century had all but proven
unfounded by the mid-90s (Yoda, 2006). During this decade Japan became increasingly more
globalized as it imported more foreign labor and food while exporting jobs overseas. This,
combined with an unraveling social safety net, growing youth crime, aging population and
economic stagnation at home, had a profound impact on Japanese identity. Solutions to
ameliorate these issues have been through roadside stations (michi no eki), local cuisine
initiatives (jimoto no ryōri) and agro-tourism which focus on making rural towns economically
viable while preserving a sense of traditional Japanese culture through heritage food industries.
Japan’s postwar food self-sufficiency has declined from a high of 78 percent in the early
1960s to the lowest food self-sufficiency rate of any industrialized nation at 40 percent
(Assmann, 2010). In 1994, trade barriers to imports on rice and subsidies for agricultural exports
were reduced significantly. This further opened the country to an influx of foreign food imports
which the United States has played a major role (Chan, 2008). According to Chan (2008), “the
average dependency across the main food categories doubled from 21 percent to 42 percent” (p.
118) by the year 2000. The decline of farming families (nōka), the increased need for rural self-
sustainability, the rapid decline of food security, and an overall sense of losing cultural food

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resources have served as the impetus for establishing heritage food industries. These industries
are defined by small-scale agricultural co-operatives, the harvesting of indigenous plant and
animal food species, and are “connected with the local nature and local people of a region”
(Chiiki no shizen ya hitobito no seikatsu to fukaku musubitsuite iru) (“SlowfoodJapan”).
Heritage food movements have also become popular as a response to the effects trade
liberalization has had on Japanese agriculture and food security. Beginning in 1954, Japan was
“forced to import five billion yen worth of wheat from the United States as part of the Mutual
Security Act” (Chan, 2008, p. 117). This changed Japanese dietary patterns as bread became a
staple food, especially for school age children. Increasingly affluent lifestyles and
internationalism (kokusaika) since the 1970s have also contributed to changes in diet which has
affected Japanese food choices and overall health. Concerns over Genetically Modified
Organisms (GMOs) and food quality such as the presence of dioxins in domestically produced
foods have been recent issues since the 1990s (Kirby, 2011). More recently, imported Chinese
dumplings were responsible for the poisoning of ten Japanese citizens in 2008 due to insecticides
(Assmann, 2010). Heritage foods seek to bring back a Japanese sense of taste (aji) while
promoting healthy food habits in response to perceived external threats (Assmann, 2010). In
essence, foods produced at home are seen as safer and of better quality. Foods produced outside
of Japan have the potential of threating the health of individual Japanese bodies (karada/体)
which is taken as a threat to the health of the national polity (lit. national body: kokutai/ 国体).
While notions of preserving tradition are an impetus behind these movements, they are
also symptomatic of the decline of the welfare state since the end of the bubble economy in the
1980s and Japan’s move towards a more neoliberal ideology, which places the onus of long-term
economic stability on its citizens. Prior to 1990s, lifetime employment, healthcare through

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employers, and low income disparity were common for urban residents while the economic
stability of rural families was subsidized by the central government (Vogel, 1979). Much
attention has been paid to urban Japan in regards to the bubble period but rural centers continue
to feel the after effects of the bubble economy nearly a quarter century later. Indeed, while Japan
is a highly urbanized society, nearly 60% of the country continues to live outside Japan’s urban
cores (Mock, 2014). Therefore, attention to these areas is paramount in understanding how
Japan is negotiating globalization and reimagining its own place in the global order at the turn of
the century by often investing in practices reminiscent of a pre-modern, pre-globalized past. This
paper examines how heritage food practices intersect in responding to globalization and rural
decline. In this sense, a response to Japan’s integration into the global economy has partly been
to retreat to the past with a focus on agrarian tradition as a means of local sustainability. Given
that rural areas continue to figure ambiguously in Japan as both in need of saving and a means of
saving Japan, current approaches to rural sustainability through local food may not provide long-
term solutions to some of Japan’s economic and social woes nor serve as a foundation to insulate
Japan from an increasingly globally competitive world. The major reasons for this is the actual
locality of the heritage food industries which tend to have limited distribution or distribution
capabilities. Heritage food tends to remain small-scale local produced and locally consumed.
There is also a lack of investment from outside sources (typically the state) and, due to declining
populations, a shrinking tax base to fund such projects. Finally, despite agro-tourism to attract
urban residents to the countryside, rural areas cannot attract enough potential residents to sustain
rural populations and continue agricultural work.
I use the term heritage food industries throughout this paper to refer to small-scale local
co-operatives that are engaged in cultivating what are considered traditional Japanese

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agricultural products. Given that tradition is of exceptional importance in understanding the
place of rural foodways in Japan today, a clarification or definition should be provided for this
often problematic term. Borrowing from Robertson (1997), “Tradition is a relationship between
past and present representations which is symbolically mediated and not naturally given” (p. 98).
Mediation is the key term here as the commodities that heritage food industries ultimately
produce serve as a means of accessing the past while also constructing it. Creighton (1997,
1998) points out that heritage food serves as a form of collective nostalgia, a means of
responding to cultural shifts that leave communities with feelings of estrangement and
displacement. The popular discourse is that the Japanese understanding of community arose in
the context of small rural rice farming or fishing villages. Moreover, the types of food and the
ways in which these foods were produced were reflective of communal living which provided a
sense of self and place in the world. The perception of contemporary Japan as overtly western,
urbanized and atomized in the minds of the Japanese is a cause for alarm. Thereof, the
consumption of rural products becomes a symbolic expression that eulogizes what has been lost
or, more significantly, constantly at threatened of disappearing forever (Ivy, 1995). As
McKracken (1986) has argued, commodities “serve as media for the expression of the cultural
meaning that constitutes our world” (p.78). In this case, heritage foods provide credence to the
cultural importance of the rural as furusato, a place of native origins and longing, which is
synonymous with an imagined pre-modern past. This, as Creighton (1998) illustrates is both a
marketing strategy utilized by department stores and a genuine sense of lamentation among rural
and urban Japanese.
While furusato can refer to an actual birthplace or hometown, it generally signifies an
idealized rural village that is the spiritual home of all Japanese people (McMorran, 2008; Ivy,

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1995). Moreover, “Fursato is one of the most compelling Japanese tropes for cultural, social and
economic self-sufficiency in the face of vexatious domestic problems such as a dearth of
adequate housing and national anxieties associated with transnational ‘free’ trade” (Robertson,
1997, p. 102). Heritage food industries provide products that satiate a need for cultural
recuperation and have often served to ease disenchantment with the present moment. However,
so long as heritage food industries are linked to the idyllic furusato, their products will remain
nostalgic fetishes. Indeed, as Baudrillard (1994) notes “When the real is no longer what it was,
nostalgia assumes its full meaning” (p. 6).
The means by which the rural figures into Japanese responses to globalization stems from
Japan’s national foundational narratives of the folk (jōmin) and the modernizing of Japan’s rural
peripheries in the late 19th
and early 20th
century. In the former case, the jōmin were construed
as the abiding country folk of native traditions to divert from the reality of rural citizens whose
lives had been displaced by rapid economic development in Japan’s peripheries (Morris-Suzuki,
1997; Figal, 2000) Understanding this history is important in grasping how and why nostalgia
has played a significant role in marketing and objectifying the rural over time while also making
the notion of agrarian tradition a cogent means of grounding Japanese identity and economic
recovery in the 21st
century.
When Japan began to modernize in the late 19th
century under the aegis of the Meiji
Emperor, Japan lacked a means of unifying its population under a revolutionary narrative for its
arrival as a nation-state like that of the United States, France, or Germany. In this case, in order
to become “the Japanese”, there needed to be something that all citizens could grasp as part of a
collective national consciousness in constituting what Benedict Anderson (2006) has termed the
imagined community. Nativist ethnology in the 1920s and 30s aided in rectifying this through

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the construction of the jōmin: the embodied, timeless essence of Japaneseness on which national-
cultural identity could be grounded (M. Hashimoto, 1998). Such figures Yanagita Kunio, the
founder of Japanese folklore studies, figured prominently in constructing the inhabitants of rural
Japan as primordial harbingers of the nation-state through the collection of folklore and
ethnographic research. However, such ethnological work also framed Japan’s rural areas as being
stalled at various stages of historical progress (Morris-Suzuki, 1997). Moreover, while the rural
was being construed as the cultural wellspring of the Japanese nation, rural areas were also seen
as holding untapped economic potential. These areas provided both human labor and natural
resources in need of exploitation. In this sense, the rural was underutilized capital. Rural
residents were seen as inhabiting a natural state in terms of their stage of progress and
underdevelopment of the land they inhabited. However, they also inhabited a unique landscape
that produced the unique customs of the Japanese people and qualities of the Japanese psyche.
Japan’s environment, which symbolized the countries uniqueness and aesthetic, was separated
from the concept of nature which was to be reclaimed and made productive (Morris-Suzuki,
1997). Rural inhabitants, as opposed to the putative jōmin, provided the surplus labor to fuel
industrial growth in the cities or could be mobilized to extract natural resources in the
countryside.
Thereof, even during the early 20th century, Japan’s rural areas were forced into a
seemingly irresolvable dichotomy at once in need of preservation but also development. Rural
folk stories, food ways, and crafts were seen as a source of national tradition but also in need of
modernizing through education and industrialization (Figal, 2000). As Ivy (1995) points out, as
Japan eulogized rural virtues, economic and social policies by the Meiji government to
modernize the nation continued to erode ways of living associated with those values. Ivy (1995)

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states, “The development of the railroads, improved material conditions, heightened demands for
education, and accompanying philosophies of striving and material success contributed to the
continuing transformation of rural life” (p.70). However, Japan’s cultural identity could not be
separated from the rural despite the need for the rural populace to be educated and modernized
for the purposes of creating a national polity. The development of the rural was, therefore, met
with a sense of cultural loss as urban migrations uprooted communities in the countryside.
Interestingly, as H. Hashimoto (2003) notes, the very technologies that displaced bodies from the
rural had now been utilized in reconstructing the rural as a phantasmagorical space of longing,
perpetuated by a real experience of loss. During the late Meijir era, “The Railway Ministry and
related organizations published various kinds of travel guides covering festivals, performing arts,
customs and manners, hot springs, and scenic spots located along each railway line” (Hashimoto,
2003, p.228). In a broad sense, the early 20th century formulated the binary between the
backwards countryside (inaka) in need of modernization and that of its hypereal expression: the
furusato. The rural, in a very tangible sense, became replaced by its own image.
This discourse of economic development at the cost of cultural identity is a recurring
theme in questions of Japanese identity and one often defined by a sense of cultural recuperation
by returning to the unadulterated, immutable rural. Moreover, this recuperation is predicated on a
sense of disappearance or, more accurately, what Margaret Hillenbrand (2010) calls de’ja
disparu: the sense of something already having disappeared. The sense that the rural was always
a train ride away but also always receding gave it increased nostalgic value. The concept of the
rural village, once a site of economic backwardness, and through its own demise, reconstituted
itself as a locus of cultural identity in the furusato following Japan’s reconstruction after World
War II (Robertson, 1988).

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However, “In the decade following defeat in World War II, metropolitan views of the
countryside turned to denigration. It was now suspect, the bastion of residual ‘semifeudal’
elements and superstitious customs that were antithetical to that which was ‘modern’ and
‘democratic’ and desirable” (Kelly, 1990, p. 222). This focus on modernization and
urbanization, for a time, swung the pendulum back to conceiving the rural as inaka. The rural
needed to be escaped from ideologically and physically in order to rebuild the country. The state
was quickly mobilized after the war and reoriented towards economic growth so as to ensure that
every home was provided with what was then known as the three treasures or three S’s sutando,
sentakuki suihanki (fan, rice cooker, washing machine). As Igarashi (2000) states, “Once it
placed itself on the track of economic recovery, Japanese society focused on modernization as if
the production of material culture were a prerequisite for salvation” (p. 61). This salvation came
in the form of high economic growth (kōdo seichō) which would have dire consequences for
rural regions. The neurologically debilitating Minamata disease is perhaps Japan’s most well-
known cost of progress. The disease was caused by methyl mercury in the waste water of the
Chisso Corporation chemical plant which poisoned Minamata Bay and the fishing industry there
throughout the 1950s and 1960s (Hein, 1993). If malnourishment and disease marked the past
(Igarashi, 2000), the effects of industrial pollution marked Japan’s postwar progress. As I will
discuss later, heritage and organic food movements have inverted this, signifying the rural as a
source of nutritive and cultural consumption that can construct healthy “Japanese” bodies.
The 1950s and 60s saw a mass exodus of youth from the countryside as young people
fled rural areas in search of employment within the contiguous industrial core of Japan located
from East to Southwest between Tokyo to Osaka (Mock, 2014). During this period, state
economic policies centered on increased rationalization in mining, farming and industrial

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manufacturing as well as former Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato’s income doubling plan. The
Korean and Vietnam wars also aided in expanding Japanese manufacturing output to outfit the
U.S military (Hein, 1993). This created new ethnoscapes (Appadurai, 1996) as the remaining
long term residents of cities now became inundated with outsiders who wished to become
modern and urban. Although these migrants were all technically Japanese, emigrants of Japan’s
towns and villages continued to be seen as culturally distinct as marked by their dialects and
mannerisms. Indeed, this very notion of internal difference would become, in time, a sine-qua-
non for the marketability of the rural. Still, for those that remained in rural regions, employment
and economic development were critical issues. For rural localities to remain viable two
strategies, jiba sangyō shinkō jigyō (regional business initiatives) and kigyo yuchi (beckoning
industry), were initially implemented in the late 1960s and continued into the 1980s (Knight,
1994). Respectively, these projects were initiated to create self-supporting communities with
capital investments coming from prefectural subsidies and to attract business firms to relocate in
the countryside through the incentive of cheaper land and labor. Despite these intentions, there
were many challenges towards achieving economic growth through this model. In the case of
Hongū, a village four hours south of Osaka which has since been absorbed into a larger
municipality, suffered from its remoteness, lack of age appropriate personnel to work in the areas
industries, and the social environment which detracted urban management from relocating due to
a lack of entertainment and a perception that “the social insularity among villagers might prove
difficult for outsiders” (Knight, 1994, p. 637).
An alternative to these programs emerged in Oita prefecture in the late 1970s known as
the one village one product movement (isson ippin undō) initiated by then prefectural governor
Hiramatsu Morihiko (Knight, 1994). This model continues to be highly influential in how

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heritage industries are organized in Japan and is often touted as a means to rural sustainability in
Japan as well as other parts of Asia. According to Igusa (2006), during the 1960s and 70s Oita
prefecture had the lowest GDP and lowest personal income on the island of Kyushu. National
policies subsidized rice production, but the town of Oyama in Oita prefecture relinquished these
subsidies for increased self-sufficiency and agricultural flexibility. In 1961 the population of
Oyama, then comprising fewer than 1000 households, began to focus on chestnut and plum
production as a means of exploiting the local geography. In this case, Oyama utilized what
economists call comparative advantage by focusing on the production of commodities that could
be made more efficiently or of better quality within that particular locality. This would become
the precursor to post-bubble approaches to rural revitalization where sustainability would be
linked to comparative advantage while thinking in terms of broader national and global markets
(Igusa, 2006). Following Oyama’s example, various villages in Oita prefecture became
hyperspecialized in the production of local products (meibutsu) as well. Overtime, meibutsu
became metonymically linked to their site of production within Oita. As Knight (1994) states,
“Oita produced a prefectural map in which each village was represented by the symbol of its
special product-a shrimp, cow, pig, melon, mushroom, bunch of grapes, and so on. In theory,
each village would stress the production of just one product to sell to the outside, thereby
concentrating its resources and avoiding overlap between different village sites” (p. 638-639).
However, not all villages in Oita prefecture succeeded as the prefectural government refused to
provide financial aid to local producers in an effort to make rural villages completely sustainable
by their own efforts and many areas had an overlap in the types of products they could
manufacture or grow (Knight, 1994; Igusa, 2006). Similar to the early 20th
century, railway
stations played a role in the imagining of the rural whereby posters advertised local products for

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travelers or even decorated railway platforms based on motifs reflecting local produce (Knight,
1994). In this sense, isson ippin is reminiscent of Jean Baudrillard’s reference to Louis Borges.
The rural becomes replaced by the very map that serves to represent it: Meibutsu are eponymous
representations that obscure the realities of those that inhabit the space the map represents. In
essence, it is “the map that precedes the territory,” (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 1) where the rural
becomes a palimpsest overwritten by its own idyllic imagery. Such practices continue to the
present day but economic restructuring in the last decades of the 20th
century caused further
challenges to rural communities while also spurring on a demand for organic and heritage food.
The demand for heritage products rose sharply beginning in the 1970s. The agrarian
practices and rural ways of life that once represented a hindrance in the progress of the nation
had now become a source of Japanese cultural authenticity by the early 1960s (Morris-Suzuki,
1997, p. 72). As a result, heritage food gained a boost in popularity in the 1970s and 1980s due
to what has been colloquially phrased a retro boom (retorobūmu) that has yet to subsist
(Creighton, 1997; Ivy, 1995). The retro boom is marked by the conspicuous consumption of
products produced in the present that are reminiscent of an older time. The nuances of the retro
boom are beyond the scope of this paper, but a few important points should be highlighted in
relation to food and cultural consumption. By the end of the high growth period in the 1970s,
urban Japanese became self-reflective as postwar economic gains had come at the cost of the
environment and cultural identity. Popular culture reflected such sentiments and super markets
and shopping malls began to cater to the large urban middle class which felt a longing for a
community experience not possible in the workaday urban landscape (Creighton 1998; Kelly,
1986). Travel campaigns such as Discover Japan (1970s) and Exotic Japan (1980s) promoted
that the Japanese could return to Japan’s pre-modern past (Ivy, 1995), while supermarkets

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played a part in ameliorating sentiments of loss by bringing the rural to urban areas through
seasonal and local products (furusato meihin) in the early 1980s (Creighton, 1998). However,
these campaigns played off of rural sentimentalities as opposed to addressing rural realties and
predominantly worked through the dichotomy of urban as modern and the rural as past. All that
was modern was artificial, westernized and impersonal, while the rural as past played on
sentiments such as communal values, nature, and an ineffable Japanese essence (Moon, 2002).
Food became a potent symbol of Japanese heritage but also obscured rural experiences with
modernity by abstracting the rural as outside of time.
The rise in popularity of indigenous foodstuffs and other meibutsu coincided with a time
of increased Japanese economic and cultural hubris. While a desire for nostalgic products
remained into the 21st
century, the importance of heritage food production became further shaped
by a series of social challenges brought about by Japan’s experiences with globalization.
Although a belief in rural values as the foundation for Japanese culture remained, Japanese
identity became intimately linked to economic stability. The faltering of the Japanese economy
in the 1990s had profound repercussions for this identity. The narrative of the essentialist
qualities of the Japanese (nihonjinron) such as group-orientation, appreciation for nature, and
ingenuity that purportedly allowed the country to become economically robust would eventually
falter due to the very economic policies that supported it but, like previous sentiments of cultural
loss, Japanese identity could be recuperated within the nation’s hinterland. Therefore, to place
the status of heritage food practices in a contemporary context requires tracing the causes and
aftereffects of Japanese financial liberalization processes that began in the 1970s.
According to Cargill and Sakamoto (2008), “As of 1975, Japan’s financial system was
the most regulated, isolated, and administratively controlled financial system of the

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industrialized economies” (p. 36). However, this system was increasingly becoming defunct in
light of international developments. Throughout the 1970s, Japan faced several shocks (shokku)
indicating that it was not immune to the international market. From the end of 1970 until the end
of 1971, Japan faced a series of Nixon shocks, which significantly disrupted the illusion of
Japan’s role in East Asia as Nixon visited China and sought rapprochement. The United States
also harshly effected Japanese international trade by placing a ten percent surcharge on imports
(Brinckmann, 2008) and began to withdraw its control over the Yen allowing the currency to
float. The changing price of the Yen coincided with oil embargos of the 1970s which further
depressed the economy (Dower, 1993). These changes in U.S-Japan relations which previously
aided in keeping Japan insulated from crises in the international market “caused the Japanese
public to abruptly lose faith in their very future” (Brinckmann, 2008, p. 88).
Whereas fears of the international market marked earlier decades, Japan became more
integrated into the global economy to remain competitive during the 70s and 80s. Japan’s
middle class consumed foreign luxury goods as a marker of status while the oil shocks provided
an export markets for fuel efficient Japanese cars. Japanese technological advances also aided
Japan’s export market through the creation of affordable home electronics (Dower, 1993).
Together with corporate welfare benefits, wage restraint agreements between unions and
corporate firms, and government mandated price controls allowed Japan’s economy to recover
quicker in the early 1980s. Corporate welfare insulated the state from unemployment and health
expenditures while labor and management found a balance to keep workers employed despite
pay reductions. Financial reforms allowed for an increase in private loans and an increase in
foreign investment which aided in staving off negative economic growth as capital markets were

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allowed to expand (Cargill & Sakamoto, 2008). However, expanded lending policies would
have dire consequences by the late 1980s.
Still, Japan’s economic prowess in the late 70s and 80s played heavily in creating a new
grand narrative that defined Japanese identity in the late 20th
century. Japan’s economic
strength, it was argued within Nihonjinron ideology, was the result of innate Japanese
characteristics (Morris-Suzuki, 1998). Indeed, non-Japanese scholars such as Ezra Vogel (1979)
began to consider if Japanese cultural traits were the key to Japan’s economic success during the
1970s and 80s. This sense of confidence placed Japan within a superior position to other
countries and allowed it to reach out globally while remaining deeply insular. Japan became
more cosmopolitan as a result, indicated by the neologism kokusaika (internationalization), while
simultaneously becoming more introspective over fears of cultural loss due to Westernization
and internationalization (Creighton, 1997). In this case, Japan became entrenched in its own
cultural identity as a response to global economic competitiveness and foreign criticism of trade
policies (Dower, 1993). As mentioned above, the retro boom during this time serviced both a
need to connect to the past while also reinforcing an essentialist view of Japanese cultural
identity. Japanese heritage foods, for affluent urban consumers at least, served to reify an
insider-outsider mentality that ordered the world between Japanese and everybody else. Due to
Japan’s economic success “many Japanese began to turn inward and argue that the differences
between the other nations, races, and cultures were greater than the similarities and that Japan’s
contemporary accomplishments derived primarily from these unique characteristics” (Dower,
199, p. 32). An inflated sense of cultural superiority was met with an inflated economy, both of
which burst in the early 1990s.

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Japan’s economic liberalization practices, while making Japan appear economically sound and
better at capitalism than the West (see Mouer and Sugimoto, 1980; Vogel, 1979), created a
speculation bubble in equity and real estate prices that generated a prolonged period of economic
decline. Yoda (2006) stresses that “It is likely that the speculative bubble was tolerated or
perhaps even encouraged by the Japanese government in order to facilitated corporate
investments necessary to sustain Japanese companies’ competitiveness in the global trade war”
(p. 19). According to Cargill and Sakamoto (2008):
The ‘burst of the bubble economy commenced when the BOJ [Bank of Japan]
raised the discount rate in May 1989 over concern about asset price inflation and
an increase in the general inflation rate…by 1990 and 1991, asset prices
collapsed, and subsequent events revealed a fundamentally weak financial system
and set the stage for a long period of intense economic distress. (p. 14).
For Japan’s rural regions this meant that public funding became increasingly restricted
while austerity measures implemented to reduce deficits were particularly detrimental (Cargill
and Sakamoto, 2008). The rural, relegated as a symbol of nostalgia, did not figure in the
development of the national economy as a whole. As Matanle and Rausch (2011) argue, overall
national goals diverted attention away from rural depression during the 1980s. Indeed, the focus
of many Japanese, even among rural residents, was finding modern housing, competitive
schooling, and life-long employment with adequate retirement pensions in the cities. The end of
the bubble economy signaled the end of the possibility of obtaining these goals for the majority
of Japan’s citizens (Yoda, 2006).
Following the economic downturn of the 1990s many rural regions were left with mostly
older populations, though rural outmigration slowed due to a lack of employment prospects

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(Matanle & Rausch, 2011). Local industries such as logging and fishing also declined and there
was little government support in reviving local economies outside Japan’s metropolitan centers
(Mock 2014). The term genkai shūraku came to be used to describe villages that were at the
brink of extinction due to aging and depopulation (Love, 2013, p.115). To remedy this, Japan
has focused on policies to foster rural viability in two main ways, and it is within this context
that heritage food industries largely operate today. The first has been town mergers (shichō
gappei) while the second has been a renewed round of marketing local products. Both of these
strategies are defined by a decrease in the role of the state in overseeing economic development
and a larger role of free-market enterprise.
Even before the bubble, rural villages had vanished or have even been sold. That is, due
to declining birth rates and an aging population, towns became devoid of residents and were
either abandoned or their assets liquidated. To avoid the deleterious effects of a shrinking tax
base and a lack of rural income, rural municipality mergers (shichō gappei) were legislated. This
has entailed the absorption of smaller municipal governments into larger local polities. As a
result, some geographically separated smaller villages have been renamed and rezoned as a
single town. These reforms, however, reflect the withdrawal of the state in supporting rural
regions. Municipal mergers are, in essence, symptomatic of neoliberal reform in Japan and not a
solution to its deleterious effects. Love (2010) points out that “Economic reform policies
introduced in the early 1990s under the banner ‘regional decentralization’ (chihō bunken) and
implemented in the new millennium seek to cut government spending by demanding that local
government, civic groups, and private enterprises assume greater responsibility for the needs of
regional citizens” (p. 222). In essence, regional development and economic stability are no
longer the primary responsibility of the state. The first assumption behind the merger laws is

17. 17
that by re-zoning smaller towns and villages into larger municipalities they will become more
fiscally efficient. The second assumption is that less state involvement will allow municipalities,
especially rural municipalities, to become more economically competitive and, therefore,
prosper. The connections to neo-liberal ideology in chihō bunken policies are apparent. As
Matanle and Rausch (2011) state “Neoliberal economic theory since 2000 has underpinned
decentralization policy. The new blueprint for Japan’s regions is almost that of municipalities as
businesses in competition with each other to attract Japan’s dwindling working-age population,
new business ventures, and visitors who will bring money into the region” (p. 267). For heritage
food industries, this narrative of self-empowerment and autonomy is symptomatic of what
Comaroff and Camaroff (2000) have called millennial capitalism: “a capitalism that presents
itself as a gospel of salvation; a capitalism that, if rightly harnessed, is invested with the capacity
wholly to transform the universe of the marginalized and disempowered” (p. 292).
For rural areas left with senior populations and a lack of access to capital, the ability to
compete in this new economic climate can prove out of reach. However, in post-bubble Japan,
rural practices and an aging population have themselves become possible assets for rural
communities (Love, 2013). Neighborhood farm groups, consisting mainly of older women, have
been mobilized to “invigorate Japan’s regions by putting the appeal of local character to use as
an area resource” (Love, 2010, p. 223). As if following the prescriptive ideology of Adam
Smith, heritage food industries free previously unproductive and idle resources and reorient them
towards productivity and profit. In this case, rather than consuming capital through the use of
welfare services and pensions, senior citizens can engage in generating capital through Slow
Food initiatives and agrotourism by marketing local agricultural products and knowledge of local
agricultural practices, respectively.

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Slow Food initiatives seek to preserve Japanese endemic food resources and agricultural
techniques while promoting overall health through their consumption. In addition, such
initiatives try to ameliorate the perceived atomism of contemporary Japanese life by fostering a
sense of community around food. Slow Food movements “highlight food as a way to experience
conviviality and pleasure, and advocate a slower pace of life, but they also seek to preserve local
agriculture products that are in danger of vanishing” (Assmann, 2010, p. 246). There is also a
strong focus on environmental and cultural preservation for future generations while also
combating food homogeneity brought about by globalization (Love, 210). Slow Food initiatives
therefore tend to evoke tradition to create a sense of safe and wholesome foods but also tend
towards defining which foods and practices count as traditional.
In 1998, SlowfoodJapan was founded as a non-profit organization that sought to preserve
traditional agricultural methods while also integrating indigenous foods into the market
(Assmann, 2010). As a nonprofit, SlowfoodJapan’s primary goal has been to preserve the
endemism of food species and promote sustainable cultivation practices. The figure below
illustrates some of the varieties of food fostered by SlowfoodJapan and their sources of origin.
As in the case of Oita prefecture, Slow Food initiatives link specific specialties to local areas. In
order to remain certified by SlowfoodJapan and have access to markets, farmers must maintain
the genetic integrity of rare or unique species, conform to traditional processing and preparation
methods, not be mass produced, and show a history of being produced in a specific area
(Slowfood.com).

19. 19
Figure 1 . Select local agricultural specialties in Japan by prefecture. www.slowfoodjapan.net
The distribution of these products remains limited due to seasonality and overall
quantities. However, there is a demand for these products which are met primarily by restaurants
and roadside stations (michi no eki). The Japanese firm MOS (Mountain Ocean Sun) Burger is
one of the most significant patrons for heritage food industries as it uses only organic and local
products. MOS burger utilizes locally grown and processed meats and vegetables in its meals
which are made on demand (MOSburger). MOS Burger, as part of the Slow Food movement,
has sustained ties with farmers in Japan to bridge the gap between consumers and producers
amid food safety issues (Assmann, 2010; Kirby, 2011). Consuming Japanese products made by
other Japanese provides a sense of security while reinforcing the larger imagined community as

20. 20
food products of foreign origin increasingly incur risk. Such sentiments have been exacerbated
by illegal immigration and the effects of industrial pollution stemming from other parts of Asia.
In this regard, foreign food becomes associated with the foreign Other, fraught with uncertain,
perhaps even nefarious, intentions and feelings of invasion. Eating at MOS Burger means that
Japanese consumers can support Japanese farmers in a more direct way, allowing rural regions to
remain viable and, thus, preserving the roots of Japanese tradition. Therefore, the act of
consumption becomes a means of promoting national vitality.
Perhaps the most unique and successful outlets for heritage food products has been the
michi no eki: a unique blend of a farmers market, pit stop, and community center. The first michi
no eki began to appear in 1993 as means towards local self-sufficiency (Fujita, 2006). The
success behind michi no eki has been in bringing local food products to a central location where
they are most likely to be consumed while also nurturing a sense of community. Michi no eki are
unique in that they combine the functions of a “highway service or rest area, OVOP [one village
one product] initiative center, and community center” (Fujita, 2006, p 24). Commuters are able
to stop and eat a meal or purchase heritage food products as souvenirs while local residents can
utilize the center for a variety of social functions. Like nōka resutoran, michi no eki serve as
sites of cultural consumption while also bridging the gap between producers and consumer.
Although managed by Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transportation, each michi
no eki is unique in its design and selection of products as they function as semi-autonomous
extensions of the community (Fujita, 2006). Interestingly, while certainly providing an
important source of revenue for rural regions, the presence of michi no eki speaks to the ways in
which rural areas have been restructured to conform to free market ideologies that increasingly
penetrate everyday life. In this case, michi no eki appropriates notions of the rural and resituates

21. 21
them as competitive firms vying for the patronage of commuters and tourists. The most
attractive michi no eki have been those that appeal to local character and a sense of nostalgia,
though location is an important factor in sustaining patronage.
Linking tourism with agricultural production is the other means by which heritage food
industries have remained viable. The cultivation of local foods by traditional means was once
seen as a lack of progress during Japan’s modernization. Today, rural regions have capitalized
on these very practices which attract urban Japanese who seek a furusato experience. Indeed, it is
through the patronage of agrotourism/green tourism that notions of the rural are most salient and
are directly reinforced. Villages that have founded agrotoursim businesses often take in tourists
as honorary villagers “who can enjoy picking mushrooms, feeding hogs and transplanting rice
seedling without having to actually depend on agriculture for a living” (Robertson, 1997, p. 106).
Honorary villagers can partake in day trips to farms on a short term basis or become long-tern
honorary villagers by paying annual dues which grant special access to rural festivals and
products (Creighton, 1997). The notion of being an honorary villager promotes a sense of
belonging for the tourist, while the act of participating in village life perceptually dissolves the
class and social stratifications that allow the tourist to consume the rural in this way.
As Knight (1994) argues “one key aspect of the appeal of these villages to the wider
urban population is as a fictive version of the furusato left behind in the course of urbanization
(p.645). This notion of being ‘fictive’ as Knight suggests plays out on both sides given that the
success of such tourism allows rural residents to abandon farming as their primary occupation
(Robertson, 1997). In this case, the actual act of farming is not fictive so much as a simulacrum.
What urban consumers actually participate in is the actual absence of farming brought about by
the very presence of the tourists themselves. This is not to suggest that the tourists are being

22. 22
duped, only that they are complicit in constructing a particular version of the rural which
Appadurai (1996) calls ersatz nostalgia: “a nostalgia without memory” (p. 82). In other words,
rather than seeing contemporary rural realities as the result of historically contingent processes
within Japan, the rural is construed in temporal terms as existing outside of this history,
preserved for future consumption.
Agrotoursim has helped in some ways to provide employment for rural residents in lieu
of full-time industrial, agricultural, and forestry jobs. There is also the hope that agrotourism can
aid in increasing the “flows of human vitality and income from urban to rural regions,” (Love,
2007, p. 552) therefore reversing the trends of outmigration of people and capital. However, over
the past few decades, tourism in general has been seen with skepticism by rural communities as a
poor substitute for the types of income and stability that previous occupations provided. Given
this, tourism fails to provide the kinds of jobs and rewarding employment that can keep youth
within rural areas (Knight, 1994). Male youth also are likely to leave over fears of being left
bride-less. Rural Japanese men are often unable to find wives without job opportunities that can
support a family, thus furthering rural depopulation (Knight, 1994). As Love (2014) notes,
heritage food industries and other rural revitalization efforts “cannot sustain the region in a
normative sense against a future of projected decline” (p. 99). Agrotourism also suffers from
other barriers which are related to the historically ambiguity between the rural as tradition and
the rural as unprogressive. Agrotourism brochures depict nostalgic visions of the countryside as
free from the congestion of urban living, but these “contrast starkly with another stereotype of
the countryside as thick with consanguineous relationships or ketsuen (literally blood ties) and
enduring ties to place or chien(literally land ties)” (Love, 2007, p. 553). Agrotoursim has thus
had to rely heavily on projecting a furusato image of community, healthy living, and cultural

23. 23
tradition so as to assuage the rural realities of aging populations, unemployment, and emptied
villages that make the inaka unappealing.
Heritage food industries have strived towards addressing two major concerns in
contemporary Japan. The first concern has been finding practical solutions to rural decline and a
greater need for economic self-sufficiency at the local level due to Japan’s post-bubble economy.
Overall, heritage food industries have failed to provide the kind of economic sustainability and
vitalization that the Japanese government has hoped for. Indeed, as Matanle and Rausch (2011)
attest, “although such revitalization measures have been a constant feature of policy approaches
to rural decline and depopulation…in aggregate, they have had almost no success reversing their
economic decline or demographic shrinkage” (p. 24). To compete successfully, heritage food
industries must rely heavily on a furusato image while producing products that consumers
actually want. The Kingdom of Mountain Bounty (yama no sachi ōkoku) is a classic example.
Founded in 2002 in Northern Japan’s Iwate prefecture, the company branded itself by promising
to capture the nostalgic spirit of the village mountain (satoyama) through its products (Love,
2007). Mainly specializing in the harvesting of edible bracken (warabi), Kingdom of Mountain
Bounty sought to capitalize on Japanese associations with safety and local produce. However,
unable to turn a profit due to limited access to markets and funding to pay for operation and
packaging costs by the local Nishiwaga government, the company closed down in 2006 despite
consumer interest and “was quietly added to a long roster of failed local revitalization attempts”
(Love, 2007, p. 542).
The second concern is more ideological. For some contemporary Japanese, “the modern,
urban-industrialized lifestyle is experienced with a twinge of regret and sense of loss, while
remote areas become idyllic representations of a more pristine way of life, less corrupted by

24. 24
industrial dehumanization, urban anomie, or Western influences” (Creighton, 1997, p. 240).
Heritage foods conceptually offer access to a more authentic Japan but further problematize rural
realities. What the rural means fluctuates based on positionality and reflects the growing
economic as well as social inequities between urban and rural populations in Japan today. As
Love (2007) argues, “Green tourism taps into the dominant national vision of the countryside as
an attractive alternative to the haste and anonymity of urban living” (p. 553). At the same time,
however, “young Japanese women are looking to escape the burdens of ‘traditional’ life and the
limited opportunities and financial penalties that come with it” (Mock, 2014, p. 7). How
tradition is articulated and who consumes it reveals the unequal power relations between urban
and rural residents. That is, the ability to consume the rural is a privilege act while actual
inhabitance of the rural remains disadvantageous. Indeed, heritage food industries reveal an
interesting contradiction: that those charged with sustaining Japanese cultural foundations tend to
be its poorest and most constrained citizens.

25. 25
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