2020 Volume 32 Pages 151-166
Rice agriculture in the Tohoku region of Honshu has been supported by wage employment since the 1960s. However, this agricultural system faces many difficulties, especially shortage of managerial successors, and it introduces social crises to local societies.
Some farmers and habitants have been trying to maintain and develop the local agriculture and family lives against those social crises. This research aims to study their activities and logics through 10 case studies in Osaki-City, Miyagi-Prefecture.
The basic framework of this inquiry is based on Plato’s Idea theory. People’s activities and the logic underlying them are developed out of ideas conceived by them. The ideas are developed into four aspects of activities, self-help, self-expression, associational cooperation and communal cooperation (conviviality), by setting up two analytical axes: individual-cooperative and logos-eros. By using this framework, the activities and logics of 10 cases of interviewees are understood more deeply.
Lastly, the study shows that the logic of “stranger” was conceived by some I- or U-turn habitants and farmers and they had inspired people around them to live and work independently and to cooperate in a convivial manner.