Project
The politics of care and well-being in community economies: Elderly women’s local businesses and practices in rural Japan
Conditions in Japan including depopulation, aging, food and social insecurity, declining rural livelihoods, and losing economic and social vitality, have sparked concerted efforts to empower senior rural women through local businesses based on their altruistic desire to be of service to collective wellbeing, Kokorozashi (こころざし) in Japanese. These women have been active in entrepreneurship that involves significant economic practices, and natural resource use and management for more than a decade. Today, more than 10,000 rural women’s enterprises in Japan generate livelihoods that nourish them, and their families and communities. The objective of this project is to examine how they care for others through their kokorozashi business and to explore the embodied meaning of well-being at the intersections of gender, age, and rurality.
The award-winning rural revitalization project called Kunma Suisha-no-sato, was initiated mainly by local women in semi-mountainous Kuma ward, Shizuoka prefecture in 1987. This project is used as a case study for their long-running community development efforts, the local and communal scope, engagement with collective well-being.
This research uses a combination of Gibson-Graham’s Community Economies and Feminist Political Ecology as an analytical lens to illuminate that the rural women’s kokorozashi business opens up post-capitalist possibilities in aging and depopulating rural communities. In the light of the rural conditions, their practices manifest efforts for the better use of profit and surviving well together that entail a series of ethical choices for arrangement and negotiation through their business.
By using this lens, this project aims 1) to understand how different interdependencies are emerging through rural women’s kokorozashi business, 2) to explore the process of producing interdepending relationships between humans, nature, and other non-human actors, 3) to explore how they care for others in emotional and subjective relations, and 4) to examine the meaning of well-being embodied through kokorozashi business in aging and depopulating rural context.