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Paper short abstract:

Based on qualitative research in the Aso region in Kyushu, this paper asks how people in rural Japan address problems in the local community. It shows how everyday life aspects of these activities have great potential to explain the dynamics of rural political participation.

Paper long abstract:

Comparative studies argue that Japan shows lower numbers especially in expressive forms of political participation than most other OECD countries. However, at the local level citizen protests against e.g. construction projects in their vicinity are relatively common. Further, ethnographic accounts of rural communities demonstrate a variety of ways of how people actively participate in their local communities in potentially transformative ways. While most studies still stick to a narrow definition of the “political”, this study connects to more recent approaches to political participation which treat such community activities as forms of political participation. Based on qualitative field research between 2018 and 2021, this paper asks how people in the rural Aso region in Kyūshū address local problems and how they talk about their political activities. I took a closer look on numerous community activities in several municipalities in the region and demonstrate how they can be viewed as a specific form of political participation closely linked to the everyday lives of the participants, involving certain ways of lifestyle or even emotions. Further, against the backdrop of demographic decline, many of the activities observed in this paper aim at preserving the local community rather than actively challenging the local authorities. I contrast these preservative political activities with an example for more elite-challenging local activities—the protest against a local cattle barn—to illustrate how everyday life aspects eventually led to conflict within the protest movement. I conclude that especially in times of demographic challenges in rural Japan, we can observe a variety of forms of political participation that enable valuable insights in conflicts within local communities but also into many non-confrontative forms that try to preserve the current community structures.