Abstract
This paper elaborates the process of how media representation was formed around “Agricultural Communities” in Japan after the war, taking as its lead the NHK program, “Farm Programs.” Most existing studies have focused only on urban tourists' view of such communities rather than discussing the issue of representation as related to social issues like the declining acreage and depopulation that these communities have been coping with. Besides, these studies did not conduct any further analysis either of this representation or of the program's audience, which leaves untouched the question of how the representation was shaped or what kind of negotiation took place between the program's creators and their rural subjects. The present paper will elaborate on the above issues by focusing on NHK's local correspondents as mediators of communication between NHK's directors and Japan's rural society in order to illustrate new possibilities regarding the link between Regional/Rural Sociology and Media Studies.
