Entrepreneurs in rural Japan: gender, blockage, and the pursuit of existential meaning

Abstract

This article explores return migration for the purpose of starting small businesses. I discuss the cases of three individuals who decided to leave their employment in urban areas to start businesses in a small town in Tōhoku. The key research question focuses on how gender influences the ability of people to start and maintain small business in rural areas and the extent to which expectations and assumptions associated with gender roles inhibits the ability of women to start and continue small businesses. My findings suggest that gender can be an important inhibitor for people running businesses in rural Japan, but that this is not necessarily associated with being a woman. Furthermore, blockage of achieving personal and business goals, which are associated more with finding existential meaning rather than economic wealth, were more directly associated with one’s role in the family than with expectations specifically linked to gender.

Keywords:

• Japan
• entrepreneurs
• small business
• existential meaning

Notes

1. It is worth noting that many people I know in northern Japan were as shocked by the election of Donald Trump as were many Americans. People living in the region are tied to both national and international news sources and very aware of goings-on in other parts of the world.

2. There are a variety of ways in which the concept of blockage has been developed in anthropology. Here I am using the concept in a way similar to Scott (2005, 210), who notes that one way to think about blockage is as an obstruction in normal flows of exchange among individuals that form conditions for life-giving order. Blockage of these flows can create life-threatening chaos. In the context I am discussing here, blockage is not necessarily life-threatening or chaotic, but certain features of one’s identity can form limiting factors that block one’s ability to pursue specific life-course paths or to combine paths normally separated (such as work and family). These blockages can make it difficult to negotiate complex and at times contradictory paths that arise as a result of expectations related to personal characteristics such as gender or birth order.

3. This article focuses on the experiences of three individuals and thus should not be taken as representative of broader social patterns related to small-business ownership and entrepreneurial activity in rural Japan. However, the examples here are not unique to the Tōhoku region. I have observed similar entrepreneurial activities and experiences in Niigata and although the data here focus on northern Japan, this is part of a larger project exploring the lives of small business owners in several parts of the country. The types of experiences encountered here represent common themes that appear in the larger set of 25 interviews from which this particular study is drawn.

4. Lyng’s early research is not without criticism, particularly in its insufficient engagement with issues of race, class, and gender (see Miller 1991).

5. Source: Iwate Prefectural Government, http://www.pref.iwate.jp/kouchoukouhou/27900/28905/028935.html

6. Population data are drawn from the Japan Statistical Yearbook, which is produced by the Japanese government: http://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/nenkan/1431-02.htm

7. Although I refer to the individuals I discuss here as entrepreneurs on the bases of the risk-taking activities in which they have engaged, it is important to recognize that in rural Japan the idea of entrepreneurialism can have a negative meaning, in part as a result of perceptions in the context of a transition economy where the approaches associated with entrepreneurial activity can be connected to attempts to skirt government regulation (Wood 2012, 21). In the region of Japan where I have conducted this research, I have not come across this perspective, but this may be a consequence of the fact that my informants are not working in areas related to rice production which, as Wood notes, has been heavily shaped by government reforms that have had a significant impact on rice farmers.

8. Note that this is the term my informant used in our conversation, so I will use this to be consistent with her own expression of identity.

9. This is the term that she used, although one also often hears the term omuko-san in daily speech. This may have been a result of her talking to me, as a foreign anthropologist. In any case, the meaning is the same.

10. Tamanoi (1990), argues that many of the anthropological studies of family and women in the 1980s questioned the validity of a sharp dichotomy between public and private spheres that had been widely described in the literature on Japan up to that point. Women, and men, too, live embedded in a complex web of symbolic and social connections that both constrain and lend meaning and continuity to social life.