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1 results

  • 4 - Rethinking the Village

  • Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Australian National University, Canberra
  • Book:
    Japan's Living Politics
    Published online:
    16 April 2020
    Print publication:
    07 May 2020, pp 70-89

  • Summary

    The New Village (Atarashiki Mura) was an experiment in rural living created in 1918 by novelist and White Birch founder member Mushanokōji Saneatsu. Mushanokōji envisaged the village as the start of a social movement which would transform Japanese rural life from below. In fact, though, the village (which still exists today) remained tiny. However, I argue in this chapter that it had an influence and significance which cannot simply be measured by its size. The New Village helped to inspire a boom in the creation of experimental rural communities in Japan and China in the 1920s, and its practical influence even extended as far as South America. Despite internal problems, and despite the fact that Mushanokōji expressed enthusiastic support for Japan’s wartime military expansion, the village experienced a postwar period of revival and continued to be seen as a model for some social experiments in the 1970s, when the rise of environmentalism inspired a new interest in the creation of intentional communities.