Abstract
This paper presents an account of the associations made, in a variety of questionnaire responses, by university students with the term‘rural’in the Japanese context. Here, it pays special attention to the discursive process over space and representation, and to the role of language for mediating them, and for producing and reproducing collective meanings of rurality. Thus, the respondents were asked to make texts which account for what two words remind them of: No-son (an agricultural village in the literal sense) and Den-en (a paddy field and a garden), both being generally used as referring to physically non-urban areas. The percentage of respondents mentioning key words related to 29 items-landuse, physical and built environment, ways of life, social and cultural features, and so on-is illustrated (Figs. 1 and 2), and the texts themselves are examined, being focussed upon what representation they make with rurality. In conclusions, the component of respondents' representations of the rural contains many aspects of the‘rural idyll’or the‘rural myth’. In particular, in spite that some point out‘problems’around the current rural area, nevertheless, aspects of the (agricultural or industrial) production process are evidently absent from most if not all responses, and instead there are dominant romanticized views of farming and idealization of a (patriarchic) family and/or a village community. Further, there is certainly difference between two sets of imaginary countryside associated with those two words: that in term of Den-en tends to be more idyllic. The authors finally argue that lay discourse of the rural is interrelated to that of the policy of the government and the mass media, which have increasingly tended to be in the post-productivist direction at least from the early 1990s onward.
