Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how convivial, bottom-up craft initiatives in rural Japan—through cases in Gunma and Yamanashi—are contributing to reimagining the countryside as a hybrid space of creativity and collaboration beyond top-down, essentializing discourses of tradition and authenticity.

Paper long abstract

Craft production has long been tied to the rural, in Japan and beyond. In the Edo period, feudal domains sponsored craftspeople to strengthen and diversify their economies, and since then, professional craft production has remained closely connected to regional identity in Japan, developing through particular families with strict hierarchical and patriarchal systems shaped by secrecy and exclusion. While the Meiji Restoration brought craft to the center of Japanese national identity, modernization and the rise of industrial mass production also introduced a set of contradictions, altering traditional modes of craft-making. In the postwar era, rapid urbanization and rural outmigration prompted a series of policies designed to protect local crafts, now repurposed for tourism and regional place-making. However, many such policies selectively promote crafts tied to ideals of authenticity and uniqueness, reinforcing essentialized images of Japan that primarily benefit the center.

This paper examines recent craft initiatives in rural regions where craft production has long been present but not necessarily mobilized for regional or national identity projects. Rather than emphasizing hierarchy, seniority, and exclusion, these initiatives cultivate an ethos of sharing, openness, and collaboration, often between locals and outsiders—domestic in-migrants, returnees, and foreign artists. Through such practices, they contribute to reimagining the Japanese countryside not merely as a repository of tradition, often portrayed as anachronistic or static, but as a space of creativity and experimentation, shaped by change and adaptation. Blurring the boundaries between art, craft, and everyday life, and between making and playing, these bottom-up initiatives frequently emerge from serendipitous encounters, creative improvisation, and wayfaring, as residents and visitors seek alternative ways of being in rural regions marked by marginalization, internal colonization, and economic and environmental pressures. Through two case studies in Gunma and Yamanashi prefectures, we ask how such craft initiatives—shaped by conviviality through collective making and community participation—help reimagine rural regions as spaces of hybrid assemblages, both human and non-human.