This article examines the mura okoshi undo (village revival movement) in contemporary Japan. The public rhetoric of this movement is that of rural self-reliance, of valiant villages drawing on their inner resources in a struggle for survival in the face of large-scale demographic and economic decline. On closer inspection, however, many of the villagers actually involved in the movement turn out to be return migrants, and further, village revival initiatives are encouraged by municipal authorities-that is, this movement for self-reliance is officially endorsed. One of the key analytical questions that arises from this situation concerns the nature of the agency of the movement. In what follows, I attempt to show how the rhetoric of selfreliance obscures a complex agency of rural revitalization that can only be understood in relation to patterns of migration and state encouragement. A brief introduction to the economic and demographic circumstances of social decline in rural Japan serves to show the context in which the village revival movement has developed. An outline of the movement is then presented with reference to examples from Oita and Wakayama prefectures. Finally, through a detailed example of the movement in a specific municipality, based on ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in the late 1980s, an account of an actual local movement in action is given.
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John Knight (1994) studied this question.