Thoughts from Traveling Through the Regions

October 18, 2019

This book is based on a magazine series for people interested in relocating. It describes regional conditions across Japan and the lifestyles of the migrants living there, based on interviews.

I am not a specialist in regional revitalization or migration. My research has focused on the formation of national identity during the Meiji era and the postwar period, as well as the history of social movements.

However, following the Great East Japan Earthquake, I wrote a paper on the reconstruction status of the Sanriku region based on field surveys. Since then, I have taken an interest in regional issues and have written serial articles for local newspapers covering regional activities. The magazine project for this book was requested by an editorial department that saw those articles.

The editors had already been publishing articles introducing migrants for a long time and possessed the knowledge and network regarding which regions had what kind of migrants. This was exactly what I had hoped for. While visiting these migrants, I sought to gain a comprehensive understanding of each region and to understand the general situation of regions in Japan. This book is the result of that endeavor.

What I realized through these visits is that the problems of a single region must not be understood in isolation. The reason a region once flourished and is now declining is that its relationship with other regions has changed. In other words, regional problems cannot be solved unless the underlying inter-regional relationships change. Ultimately, a perspective that grasps not just the region but society as a whole is necessary.

In parallel with this book, I was conducting research to understand the lifestyles of Japanese society through three categories: "large corporation type," "local type," and "residual type." In The Structure of Japanese Society (Kodansha), published almost simultaneously with this book, I presented these three categories and examined the history of how large corporations' employment practices were formed and their differences from other countries. For me, visiting regions and researching the history of large corporations' employment practices were like two wheels of a cart in comprehensively understanding Japanese society.

I am not a researcher of regional revitalization. However, I hope that you will find something of value in the regional observations made from the perspectives mentioned above and that they will serve as an opportunity to reflect on contemporary Japanese society.

Thoughts from Traveling Through the Regions

Eiji Oguma

Tokyo Shoseki

192 pages, 1,600 yen (excluding tax)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.