Special issue: Exploring rural Japan as heterotopia

Exploring rural Japan as heterotopia

This set of papers, by authors from Japan, Europe, the US and Canada, originated from a panel entitled “Heterotopia in Post-Growth Rural Japan: Negotiating Difference in Local Communities” at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Jose, California, 2018. All contributions draw on long-term ethnographic fieldwork. We believe that the grounded perspectives salient in all papers tie in well with the concept of heterotopia, as the research tool of ethnography highlights the multilayered nature of places and social relations across times and spaces. The original panel organizers were Stephanie Assmann and Susanne Klien. But as Stephanie shifted to a new university position, Paul Hansen, who was unable to join the original panel due to being on another, stepped in as co-editor and contributor. We remain indebted and thankful for Stephanie’s input and continued camaraderie. We would also like to express our thanks to Kato Fumitoshi (Keio University), who was an outstanding panel discussant at the AAA and helped shape the trajectory of this project.

Before delving into the papers included in this special issue, some obvious questions emerge. What is heterotopia? For those readers who are familiar with this pervasive but elusive concept, why is it used as a provocation or conceptual scaffolding herein? And why focus specifically on rural Japan? These important questions we will address in this short introduction before offering an outline of the contributions.

Heterotopia in brief

The origin of heterotopia as a concept in social theory comes from the field of medicine. Heterotopia is a compound of the Greek hetero, or “other,” and topos, meaning “place.” It is a description of biological tissue, malignant or benign, developing where, given the body as a normative model, it ought not to be. For example, after a bone has been broken, its regrowth may differ from its past parameters via ossification. Or, lacking such bodily trauma and crisis, skin tissue may simply develop in areas where it is not expected. Such growths may be unusual or atypical, but they need not disturb the functioning of the organism.

In the preface to Les Mots et les Choses, known in English as The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, published in 1966, Michel Foucault was the first to extract this term from its popular medical usage in order to use it as a metaphor referring to historical and social processes (Foucault 1994). His initial attraction to the term is largely in keeping with his work of that period. His focus was on decentering the language of taxonomy and classification (Foucault 1994, xvii–xix). “Heterotopias are disturbing…because they make it impossible to name this and that…[They] desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences” (Foucault 1994, xvii, italics in original). Presumably reading the resonance with dimensionality beyond text in this term, Foucault was invited to give a talk to a gathering of architects in 1967. By all accounts, this “turn to the spatial” in his work both intrigued and baffled Foucault. Suddenly his work was viewed as being in conversation with French contemporaries interested in mapping the play of space and the everyday emplacement of social relations, notably Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau (Dehaene and De Cauter 2008, 3–9). Nevertheless, Foucault did not return to elaborate on the concept in any detail beyond a few interviews. His short lecture was published posthumously in 1984 as “Des espaces autres. Une conference inédite de Michel Foucault” (“Of Other Spaces. An Unedited Conference by Michel Foucault,” and again in 1986 under the title “Of Other Spaces.” Subsequently, this short, one-off essay has gone through a number of nuanced translations, and its central concept has become both a springboard for new ideas related to relationality and space, and in equal part, a bone of contention, mostly in human geography, art, and sociology. This is unsurprising, as this question often surfaces across conceptual domains and academic disciplines: What exactly did Foucault mean by X or Y?

Renowned geographer and urban planner Edward Soja remarked about Foucault’s deliberations on heterotopia, “Frustratingly incomplete, inconsistent, incoherent” (Soja 1996, 162, also referenced by Cenzatti in Dehaene and De Cauter 2008, 75). David Harvey indicated that Foucault should have abandoned the concept entirely (2000, 538). Yet, despite criticism about the incomplete theorization of the concept by Soja, Harvey and many others, heterotopia has, curiously, remained an extremely popular concept across the social sciences (Gallan 2015, 5). Some scholars have argued that it is the very “undecidability” of heterotopia that maintains its relevance and productivity (Heynen in Dehaene and De Cauter 2008, 311–312). In any case, a summary might be useful for readers unfamiliar with the term used as a lynchpin to discuss rural Japan herein.

In “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault begins by thinking of a mirror as the locus of both real and virtual space: “…it renders this place that I occupy at the moment I look at myself…[as] absolutely real…and [in that moment also] absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived [my image and the surroundings] ha[ve] to pass through the virtual point which is over there” (Foucault in Dehaene and De Cauter 2015, 17). In this sense, a mirror image is like a utopia, an idealization of the real. But what if one starts from the perspective of the mirror itself? Foucault suggests, “…I discover my absence in the place that I am” (Dehaene and De Cauter 2015, 17). This play is at the heart of his conceptualization of heterotopia: how it can be made possible for one to interpret space without the binary essentialization of it being utopic (what ought to be) or dystopic (what ought not to be), but heterotopic, “emplacements” that exist in tension with what is and what ought to be. Heterotopology thus would be the “study, analysis, description and ‘reading’…of these other spaces as a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live” (Dehaene and De Cauter 2015, 17). Foucault highlights what he terms “six principles” that are examples, really, of what might constitute targets in this field of study (Dehaene and De Cauter 2015, 17–22).

First, there are two types of heterotopia, ones of crisis, such as the military, and ones of deviation, such as prisons. In either case, normative assumptions held by society outside such heterotopias are subverted. Second, a heterotopia, despite being Other, often performs some function within society at large: for example a cemetery, or a similar site for the placement of the dead, is found in most societies. Third, and perhaps most closely tied to the notion of mirroring noted above, a heterotopia “has the power to juxtapose in a single real place several spaces, several emplacements that are themselves incompatible” (Dehaene and De Cauter 2015, 19). Foucault offers the example of a theater (Foucault 2013). In such a location, multiple events, settings, and interpretations unfold. The next related principle is the idea of heterochronism, where either various epochs are compressed into a place, such as a museum or library, or limited time transformations take place, such as a theme park or fairground. Put colloquially, these are sites that are either “trapped in time” or “here today, gone tomorrow.” Fifth, “[h]eterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable…[They] generally conceal curious exclusions. Everybody can enter…but in fact it is only an illusion…in the very act of entering one is excluded” (Dehaene and De Cauter 2015, 21). Here, the example of illicit sexual liaisons in an American-style motel is offered. The sixth principle is more of a summary, similar to the negation of utopic and dystopic visions noted above. Heterotopias either “create a space of illusion that exposes all real space…as even more illusory” (Dehaene and De Cauter 2015, 21), or they create the flip side of the reflected image, a new reality whereby what is perceived as disorderly in the original space now is refracted into one that is finely ordered, such as a Jesuit mission or puritan outposts in the “new” world.

With these notions as a backdrop, a common ground, we encouraged the contributors to this special issue to address or adapt the concept of heterotopia as they saw fit. We have left it to the authors in this special issue to decide to what degree they are in accord or discord with Foucault’s use of the term and in what ways they wish to engage with it. But why address this idea at all, and why focus on rural space in Japan?

Why heterotopia?

Beyond what is noted above, we suggest that heterotopia is an important concept for several reasons. The reader will quickly note how the idea clearly resonates with discussions wherein place might be seen as juxtaposed with space (Massey 2005; Kitano 2009). Also, returning to the first principle, heterotopias of crises can be viewed as in conversation with liminality (Faubion in de Cauter and Dehaene 2015, 31–39), precarity (cf. Allison 2013), and affect theory (cf. Stewart 2007). While heterotopias of deviation imply a connection with other theoretical concerns like cosmopolitics (cf. Irving and Schiller 2014) and hybridity (cf. Cloke 2006), we argue that the diverse collection of case studies presented in this special issue illustrate the continued legitimacy of heterotopia as “constellations of the in-between” (Heynen in de Cauter and Dehaene 2015, 322). The pervasive ephemerality of heterotopia – be it regarding spatiality or sociality – may be because it crisscrosses between representation and reality across time and space. The papers of this special issue illustrate how intricately related this notion is with human agency, and, as Hansen argues, more-than-human agency. We contend with this special issue that heterotopia is an appropriate conceptual lens for the sharpening of an interdisciplinary perspective that transcends time and space as well as normativity to analyze multilayered constellations of spatiality and sociality in a constantly shifting human condition. After all, heterotopias are about ruptures, breaks, disorder. We propose that approaching such fragmentation ethnographically may be helpful to understand the alleged coherence of entities.

Why rural Japan?

Analyses of urban space frequently view it as heterotopic. We are particularly indebted to an outstanding collection entitled Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society (DeHaene and De Cauter 2015); we felt that “rural Japan” may be a particularly rich arena to think this through in a similar framework. Rural Japan is often depicted in an essentialist and uniform light in a way that urban Japan is not (Guarné and Hansen 2018; Klien 2020). It is often seen as the counterpoint to the presumed vitality of urban Japan (Mock 2014), and is thought to be conservative, aging, and declining (Matanle et al. 2011; Schnell 2005). Indeed, inertia and passivity seem one of the most common associations with rurality in Japan (and elsewhere). While to some extent these assertions are valid, the irony we draw attention to is that such imaginaries contain clearly heterotopic features in line with the notion of deviance. Rural areas are perceived as diverging from urban society in multiple ways: the excessive abundance of time, social capital, space (imagined or not), material goods and age in a predominantly urban world that is characterized by a lack of time, focus on services rather than goods, increasing social isolation and lack of space. Some recent collections also question this framing of rural Japan (cf. Manzenreiter, Lützeler, and Polak-Rottmann 2020; Ganseforth and Jentzsch 2021; Matsuda 2020). Rural Japan deserves our attention because the focus has shifted from its conventional depiction as an embodiment of essentialist Japanese identity, be it as the production space of rice – a key symbol of Japanese culture – or as an imaginary of Japanese traditions and values that have long vanished from urban conglomerations. Recently, the notion of rural Japan as hybrid assemblages that transcend bounded locales has attracted more attention, including studies of foreign wives or of internationalization efforts of municipal governments in rural Japan (Faier 2009; Hansen 2018; Watanabe Traphagan 2006). In our opinion, this aspect of the inherent sociocultural permeability of rural Japan makes a renewed analysis of life in rural areas potentially insightful and rewarding, especially when combined with the concept of heterotopia.

The papers of this special issue take a rural relationality approach, focusing on the significance of networks and the negotiation of diversity in rural areas. Questioning conventionally constructed notions of rurality, numerous scholars from human geography have emphasized the diversity of the countryside (Woods 2005, 299), and have highlighted the vitality and fluidity of rural spaces (Edensor 2017, 40). Woods refers to “relational rurals” (2011, 40). Doreen Massey’s argument that space should be seen as “a product of practices, trajectories, interrelations” (2004, 5) ties into this line of thinking. Closely related with this rural relationality approach is the idea of hybridity. According to Murdoch, “The countryside is hybrid. To say this is to emphasize that it is defined by networks in which heterogeneous entities are aligned in a variety of ways. It is also to propose that these networks give rise to slightly different countrysides: there is no single vantage point from which the whole panoply of rural or countryside relations can be seen” (2003, 274). In contrast to the essentialist notion that rural areas are bounded entities with given identities, the papers of this special issue highlight the fact that rural areas harbor the diverse identities of multiple stakeholders. These identities are processual: like body and location, they too are continually evolving. This echoes Allan Pred’s statement that “places, are never ‘finished’ but always ‘becoming’” (1984, 279). Tying these poststructuralist interpretations of a process-oriented rurality together with notions of deterritorialized rurality, we draw on Paul Cloke: “Rurality can thus be envisaged as a complex interweaving of power relations, social conventions, discursive practices and institutional forces which are constantly combining and recombining” (2006, 24).

These ideas segue naturally with heterotopia as a concept. Lefevbre has argued that spaces should be seen as something both concrete and abstract in character (1991, 341–342). The multilayered nature of spaces – and rurality in our case – implies the intrinsic overlapping of practice, experience, and representation. Not only do new residents bring unfamiliar imaginaries and practices to their rural environments, they also continue to draw on their “urban” experiences, linking them to their newly chosen places of residence. The fact that disparities, tensions, and fractures also occur between generations and individuals clearly illustrates that heterotopia is not confined to the binary of local “insider” and “outsider” or native and newcomer. In fact, “locals” of varying age cohorts and socioeconomic backgrounds also display such heterotopic features. This, once again, deconstructs rural spaces as coherent and bounded entities, and reaffirms their rich diversity. Murdoch and Pratt have indicated that “the point is there is not one [rural] but there are many.” (1993, 425); Murdoch and Pratt and Pratt have described this multiplicity of rurality as “post-rural” (Murdoch and Pratt 1993, 425; Pratt 1996, 76). In this vein, we introduce these papers as a special issue to illustrate the continuing relevance of the “post-rural” as examples of living rural communities that matter far beyond their locales and national contexts. We believe that heterotopia is a well-suited paradigm to do this.

Contributions to this special issue

In her initial paper, Susanne Klien focuses on urbanite settlers who work as rural revitalization volunteers in several rural sites across Japan. She examines the strategies and measures taken by these individuals to create heterotopic islands of survival in their chosen places of residence, arguing that adaptation and resistance may be simultaneously salient in neophytes’ narratives and practices. She pursues a classic Foucauldian approach in interpreting heterotopias as ephemeral chameleons that metamorphose between deviance and illusion across time and space.

Nancy Rosenberger and Ayumi Sugimoto then analyze the creation of internal heterotopias in their ethnography of small family farmers in northern Japan against the background of neoliberal pressures, focusing on how local farmers balance their lives between traditionally ingrained ideals of communal harmony and neoliberal competition. Ayumi Sugimoto then discusses rural women who run farm inns in northern Japan across two generations, showing how these female entrepreneurs negotiate their lives and careers between traditional family and community structures and new roles as aspiring independent entrepreneurs. Depicting farm inns as heterotopic ideal spaces, Sugimoto contends that agritourism can serve as a multifaceted arena that allows female farmers to live between societal conventions and individual meaningfulness.

Ksenia Kurochkina analyzes new settlers in rural areas focusing on three distinctive lifestyles practiced by rural newcomers: self-sufficiency in food, agro-entrepreneurship, and those seeking an “average” way of life. She depicts the daily practices of new inhabitants in rural places in order to explain the heterotopic complexity of rural transformation in contemporary post-growth Japan. Her ethnographic study challenges conventional assumptions about rurality by highlighting the complexity of contemporary rural spaces and social life.

Paul Hansen examines differing perceptions of location and wellness through the One Health movement and heterotopic emplacement. His paper brings together the ideals and goals underlying the One Health movement, a growing field under the rubric of public health, and the notion of ikigai or “meaning of life” in a variety of embodied and affective registers in central Hokkaido. He reflects on the meanings of safety, security and freedom as imagined and experienced by his long-term interlocutors. Through his focus on the notion of heterotopic emplacement, his findings too contest the association of rural areas with stagnation and decline.

Conclusion

Foucault ends “Of Other Spaces” with his vision of a perfect heterotopia (1986): “The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage replaces adventure, and the police the pirates” (Foucault in Dehaene and De Cauter 2015, 22). At the time of compiling the essays of this special issue, a deadly novel virus, COVID-19, was brought to Japan via the Diamond Princess cruise ship. A second cruise liner with infected passengers was stranded off the coast of California and passengers on a third cruise liner off the coast of Sydney were instructed to self-isolate due to infections. Foucault wrote about ships as the epitome of imagination meeting adventure; yet, these objects of desire and luxury “were also the tools that transported millions of slaves to the New World, establishing a history of racism and inequality that is still leaving its mark on the former colonies” (Heynen in Dehaene and De Cauter 2008, 320). Interpretation depends what side of the mirror you are on. With regard to the ongoing global pandemic, the unfortunate passengers bound to these ships through viral misfortune, albeit with fortune enough to afford such a cruise, are faced with “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011) as these sites of desire, freedom, security, glamor, and luxury successively turned into biopolitical nightmares and uncertain trajectories, even prisons, becoming heterotopias of crisis par excellence. In a similar vein, rural Japan, viewed in largely negative or nostalgic terms since the 1960s, may be emerging as the salvation from much that ails contemporary post-growth Japan. With unemployment rates shooting up as a collateral effect of COVID-19 and no certain governmental support systems in place, can we expect a growing attraction to rural Japan, similar to that seen after the Lehman Shock? Some major companies such as Fujitsu and Panasonic have decided to move a considerable number of their staff to rural areas, decreasing office costs and promoting more flexible modes of work. In other words, once again, will rural areas move to the vanguard of societal experimentation, harboring heterotopias to come?

Notes on contributors

Paul Hansen is a Tokunin Professor at Hokkaido University. His research focuses on animal-human-technology, cosmopolitics, identity, and ethics.

Susanne Klien is Associate Professor at Hokkaido University. Her research interests are regional revitalization, mobility and social change.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.