Under Two Globalizations: Progress in Social and Cultural Geography of Japanese Rural Areas, 1996-2006

This paper overviews the progress in the social and cultural geography of Japanese rural areas from the mid 1990s to the mid 2000s by considering four topics: political and economic restructuring, sustainable systems of social integration and subsistence, self-governance of natural environments, and the history of the social construction of rural images. Today, Japanese rural geographers encounter two kinds of globalization: economic globalization, which directly or partially influences the four phenomena above, and the globalization of research activities by geographers who must internationally develop their own theoretical frameworks on these topics.