People work upon nature and gain a large variety of living necessaries from it. They spend them for their daily life and for their own reproduction. It is the process by which human beings bring new individuals into existence. The older generations finally die and return to nature. It is the strict law of nature in itself. Our economics consider it as a kind of metabolic or cyclic process. We call it as “the principle of economy”. This metabolic process is the law of nature that the old give place to the new and the new take the place of the old. The process lasts forever. In contrast to “the principle of economy”, I use the expression, “the rule of economy” in this paper. This is the rule of society-wide arrangement of capital and labor through the price mechanism on the market. The rule of economy is the historical phenomenon embodying the principle of economy. The rule of economy appears in the modern capitalistic society for the first time in history.
　　　　A community, which, here in this paper, means a unified body of many residential units, has a long history from the primitive age. From another viewpoint, a community is a social unit embodying the above-mentioned principle of economy. People in earlier ages could not live independently, separated from their communities. A community, then, was an indivisible organization for people’s life, as the original sense of the word shows.
　　　　By the division of labor, various sorts of work for a community were brought into existence, forming strata of people engaging in various kinds of works. And this specialization of work came to be fixed and brought about the social system with control and subordination, which became characteristic of communities preceding those of the modern times. This social system lasted up to the modern times. When the history of community came to an end, the modern times started. The end of the history of community went side by side with the appearance of the above-mentioned rule of economy.
　　　　People in a modern society are different from those in earlier communities who could not stand by themselves. Unlike them, they stand on their own feet. They are no longer bound by the indivisible organization of old communities. It is at this stage that the rule of economy works well for the first time in the human society. I have been taking part in the research activities of the Association for Rural Studies from the viewpoint of economics. The subject of the studies of the Association is the rural communities in general, namely, agricultural communities or village communities. Of course, these communities are not the same as those former communities which were indivisible bodies. These communities which we study are modern ones under the above-mentioned rule of economy.
　　　　A unit of economic organization or economic activity of manufacturing industry in the advanced countries generally assumes the form of enterprise. Those who work there are manual laborers and white-collar workers. They sell their own human activities that provide goods and services to their employers and gain the wages as the prices for their labor. Here, capital and labor are clearly separated.
　　　　A unit of economic organization or economic activity of agriculture does not assume the same form as that of the modern industry. The unit is the house of farmer as a private individual. It is the equivalent of “nohka” in Japanese, which, literally translated, means “a farmer’s house”. The house in the farm is a single unit for the life of the farmer and his family members who are consumers as well as producers. On the other hand, the farm, by which or on which the farmer’s house stands, is an area of land for agriculture, though an average Japanese farm is much smaller than those in Western countries. ………

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　　　　The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the representations of “agriculture and rural space” in MANGA, one of the major genres of popular culture. Today in Japan, “consumerist gaze” has a significant influence upon rural areas. The popular culture, where such influence can be easily found, has been subjected to study. Even though, few studies have focused on the subculture genres like MANGA.
　　　　This paper picks up 26 MANGA works which treated agricultural subject or whose settings were in rural space at that time. In the first step, the trend of settings and descriptions in those works is analyzed. According to this trend, these works are divided into 4 groups, and their features are shown below ; group A “comedy-style and personal topics （e.g. marriage）”; group B “dealing with social problems” ; group C “return to native place （U-turn） and significant concern about rural/food culture” ; group AC is intermediate between A and C. Additionally, group A is divided into A1 and A2 according to whether “out-migrants （I-turn）”appear in the works. Next, 4 works which are representative of groups except AC are examined.
　　　　By this analysis, several representations of “agriculture and rural space” and their transition process in MANGA works are defined. Before the late 70s, “agriculture and rural space” was represented as unrefined “premodern”, compared to refined industry/urban area. Afterward it came to be represented as “problematic modern” as same as urban area, and after the late 90s as “alternatives to modernity”. Since around 2000, “agriculture and rural space” is represented as “hetero-culture” which is equal option to city. Generally, the comedy-style works turn the negative representation into positive one. In conclusion, the characteristics of that representations in MANGA are defined as; the inverse of dominant sense of values by “laughter” ; the ceaseless shift of themselves through intertextual acts.

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　　　　Based on the interview survey conducted in Sichuan province in 2005, from the perspectives of sociology and demography, this paper aims to give a comprehensive analysis regarding the impacts of rural population outflow on China’s rural society.
　　　　Focusing the household, this study not only reveals the impacts of family members’ outflow on the “left parents” , “left spouse” and “left children” respectively, but also shows the rural family as a whole has also experienced great changes in fulfilling its functions. Furthermore, this study also shows the rural population outflow has been damaging the agricultural activities in these sending villages, and the village as a whole has been witnessing dramatic changes in its physical and social surroundings.

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