Imagining Tōhoku: Perceptions and policies of postwar rural northeastern Japan

Abstract

This dissertation examines how metropolitan institutions, such as mass media, and national government viewed and treated Tōhoku (northeastern Japan) both as the source of labor, economic, and energy extractions for the national development from the postwar period and the current post-2011 Great East Japan Disaster (commonly known as the 3.11 Disaster) period. In doing so, these various institutions established and deployed their images of “pure and underdeveloped” countryside of Tōhoku while simultaneously treated the region as the authentic, ideal homeland (furusato). This dissertation demonstrates the existence of historical continuity in the metropolitan and government’s treatment and use of Tōhoku. The examination of the continuity as well as of the role of metropolitan media and government throughout the postwar to the 3.11 Disaster period is significant. In fact, most scholarships on Tōhoku, focus on pre-modern and/or the post-Disaster period only, and do not contextualize Tōhoku within metropolitan cultural and media stereotypes of Tōhoku, and within national economic development. This dissertation examines various newspapers, photograph collections, popular magazines, novels, films, and government policies on land and infrastructural developments in the Tōhoku countryside and on national labor migration to and from Tōhoku. Analysis of these sources demonstrates that the mechanism of resource extraction by the national government and metropole, and of the persistent existence of cultural stereotypes of rural Tōhoku, is a key defining socioeconomic feature of postwar and post-3.11 Disaster Japan.