In the rice-producing area in Tohoku where family size is shrinking and the population is ageing, it is necessary to set out measures that clearly state the role of local community in supporting self-reliance of rural seniors at home. This paper regards economic, instrumental and emotional supporters to be “welfare support resources” and identifies such support resources for rural seniors based on a survey conducted among seniors in Daisen, Akita in order to examine roles of local communities and challenges in addressing senior needs. As a result of analyzing the situation, the following three points became clear.
　　　First, rice production is an important source of income for seniors but senior families who don’t live with their children lack a supplemental workforce. The conventional collective management of farm roads and waterways provides indirect support to agricultural activities by seniors. However, the primary workforce for the collective work comes from middle-aged members of the community. Thus it is necessary to introduce measures to reduce the burden on middle-aged members and ensure reciprocity between middle-aged members and other generations. Secondly, local communities are expected to provide relatively light support in terms of burden or heavy but less time-consuming support when they provide instrumental or emotional support. In order to pursue this support, local communities need to watch seniors on a routine basis while sorting necessary tasks for their residential lives and develop a system of support that is appropriate to the realities of seniors and local communities in partnership with related organizations. Thirdly, the availability of instrumental and emotional support sources differs depending on the attributes of the seniors, thus measures to support seniors need to be developed by taking their attributes into consideration.

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　　　The residents in many of the villages in hilly or mountainous areas in contemporary Japan have to confront pessimistic prospects on their life conditions. They are suffering from irreversible depopulation and ageing, the decline of the local economy, and the deterioration of farming land and forest. In this situation, a mind-set that the current and future situation cannot be improved prevails among the residents. By exploring the discourse and action of a man born in 1944, who is active to improve the life environment of a village which is located in the western part of Kanto region, this paper aims to examine the difficulty of his attempt to compete against the prevailing mind-set and to imagine the alternative history of the village. He is eagerly trying to collect and investigate forgotten pasts of the village which, in his theory, demonstrates the “communal mind” or the “harmony” of villagers which had existed before the postwar economic growth and then disappeared. The man insists that his investigation will finally make other residents recollect what they have forgotten and, as the result, the residents will be able to solve the contemporary predicaments. However, when the people like him, who belongs to the generation which built bases for their livelihood on the outside of the village in the period of economic growth, criticize the current situation, the other residents question the position of their discourses. Some say why they can dogmatically maintain their privileged position to blame others in spite that they are also responsible for the current predicament. Others even blame that most of the members of the generation once abandoned their duties for the village and played a central role in bringing down the current predicaments. In the course of examining this difficulty, the author would also pursue what kind of historical praxis, reorganizing the relation between the past and the present, is needed in the life in the period of the past economic growth.

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　　　This paper examined the relationship within a Japanese village on Hirado Island in Nagasaki Prefecture between the frequency of managerial elections to a Christian lay assembly as the critical social status and the following class factors: the frequency of such elections in a neighborhood association, household economic status, and resident personal attributes. Based mainly on local village historical documents from 1930 to 2009, we used multiple regression analysis and investigated the career patterns of the heads of each household of the village’s self-government.
　　　In this village, this study did not observe any clear correlations between elections to lay managers in the church and such social class factors as economic status, level of education, and age. In contrast, we found a correlation between management careers in the church and in the neighborhood association. We classified these career patterns into eight types, only three of which include the elections of lay managers in the church.

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