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Paper short abstract:

Fieldwork on 17 remote islands investigated the roles of the new rural creative class for community development. Findings illustrate motivations and approaches of urban-rural migration, and highlight the challenges of settling down, establishing new business types, and community integration.

Paper long abstract:

Japan is at the vanguard of a projected depopulation trend among developed nations across East Asia and beyond, with a national population already in decline and expected to contract by half or more this century.

In rural Japan, island communities are going through a crisis caused by decades of out-migration, lack of employment opportunities and cuts in essential public services. To counter these issues, several Japanese municipalities in the Seto Inland Sea area have been engaging in revitalization projects, many of which focus on the development of local products and tourism.

Our research focuses on urban to rural lifestyle in-migrants who moved to the Seto Inland Sea area to establish creative business as the possibility to do so often plays a key role in bringing young urbanites back to rural areas. Field research was conducted on 17 islands through 45 semi-structured interviews. We demonstrate that creative in-migrants play key roles for social, cultural and economic development. Findings illustrates the diversity of motivations and approaches behind their decision to relocate to small island communities, and highlight the various challenges they face when settling down, establishing new types of businesses and integrating into the community. The recent emergence of small-scale mixed-type creative businesses run by the new rural "creative class" is considered the main mechanism for developing a new tertiary industry in a shrinking society, while also bringing innovation, vitality and creative social capital to the community. Creative rurality theory is used to discuss the way in which in-migrants create their own creative network - for mutual support and cooperation across different islands. Findings further suggest that in the future disadvantaged island communities are likely to receive increasingly more dynamic populations characterized by outside connections and an ability to facilitate global-urban-regional complex resource exchange, thereby achieving greater resiliency and sustainability toward community capacity building. The research outcomes can be a useful instrument to inform local policies aimed at fostering the revitalization of rural communities, especially those policies focused on encouraging the settlement of in-migrants and supporting them through the development of their enterprises.