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<p>In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Japanese government aimed to turn one of the era’s social outcomes – the spread of telework– into a benefit for the country’s long-term efforts to repopulate declining rural areas. Among Japan’s many rural revitalization efforts, the “Digital Garden City” initiative bears scrutiny because it turned the emotional challenges of the disease on their head: by depicting a redeveloped rural Japan as hopeful because, via strengthened Internet connections it would be more like a rescaled version of life in urban centers. This paper uses interpretive methods, particularly discourse analysis of policy documents and broader social and intellectual debates, to explore a key goal of the policy initiative. It continued a move away from emphasizing the bucolic charms of the rustic countryside, often valorized as the site of Japanese tradition, and toward a representation of major cities as the desirable real Japan, with technological interventions offering the opportunity to recreate their economic and social opportunities in more affordable, ostensibly livable spaces. Debates about emotion and politics often focus on their political consequences of emotional framing and stimuli, and less on the disciplining and ordering of political engagement through the depiction of certain emotional responses as legitimate and appropriate. This paper thus explores how, at a moment of crisis, Japanese officials represented a long-standing administrative concern — rural repopulation — as a newly possible way for families in the midst of an economic and social crisis to imagine an eminently recognizable and familiar future as one of hope.</p>

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Gardens of Feeling: Hope, Technology, and the Politics of COVID-Era Development in Rural Japan

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年1月6日

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  • David Leheny,
  • Kiyomasa Kuwana

摘要

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Japanese government aimed to turn one of the era’s social outcomes – the spread of telework– into a benefit for the country’s long-term efforts to repopulate declining rural areas. Among Japan’s many rural revitalization efforts, the “Digital Garden City” initiative bears scrutiny because it turned the emotional challenges of the disease on their head: by depicting a redeveloped rural Japan as hopeful because, via strengthened Internet connections it would be more like a rescaled version of life in urban centers. This paper uses interpretive methods, particularly discourse analysis of policy documents and broader social and intellectual debates, to explore a key goal of the policy initiative. It continued a move away from emphasizing the bucolic charms of the rustic countryside, often valorized as the site of Japanese tradition, and toward a representation of major cities as the desirable real Japan, with technological interventions offering the opportunity to recreate their economic and social opportunities in more affordable, ostensibly livable spaces. Debates about emotion and politics often focus on their political consequences of emotional framing and stimuli, and less on the disciplining and ordering of political engagement through the depiction of certain emotional responses as legitimate and appropriate. This paper thus explores how, at a moment of crisis, Japanese officials represented a long-standing administrative concern — rural repopulation — as a newly possible way for families in the midst of an economic and social crisis to imagine an eminently recognizable and familiar future as one of hope.