Town-making in rural Japan: an example from Wakayama

This article focuses on the process by which postwar Japanese villages are transformed into rural towns, taking an upland municipality in Wakayama Prefecture as a case study. Rural ‘town-making’ or machizukuri is shown to be a multi-faceted process in which the municipal state carries out a protracted social reform of its local population. It does so, however, against a background of largescale rural depopulation, and this is shown to be something which simultaneously enables and inhibits the creation of the new civic community.