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CONTEMPORARY JAPAN: URBAN & RURAL LIFE Rural Life |
| The Japanese archipelago — with more than one thousand islands in all — spans diverse living environments: snowy mountains in the northern island of Hokkaido; bustling cities such as Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka; tropical rice paddies in southern Kyushu. In this video series, Harvard University professors Theodore Bestor and Helen Hardacre describe the character of both urban and rural life in Japan. |
Helen Hardacre :: Our image of Japan today is as a highly urban society, but we shouldn't forget that there are rural areas too. The family farm even is still a reality in many areas, and the political importance of rural areas is also very great. Rural areas these days tend to suffer from some problems regardless of region. For example, nearly all of them are losing population and therefore their tax base — the funds that can be available for basic social services — are in some jeopardy. Also, the population of rural areas is increasingly an aged population, which requires special social services, particularly relating to medicine. Rural areas, because of their growing depopulation, find it difficult to educate children in each community because there simply aren’t enough children in many small towns to justify maintaining a school. Thus, many children of middle school, high school, even primary schools, must sometimes be bussed to another larger town, or must board in a larger town, just in order to go to school. |
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