This paper reinterprets the accumulated scholarship on local labor markets from a novel methodological perspective by conceptualizing rural industrialization as a spatiotemporal formation where capitalist and agrarian logics harmonize. While local labor markets have historically been understood as distinct from national labor markets—primarily sourcing labor from farming households—their analytical utility has diminished in recent decades. By adopting Henri Lefebvre’s framework of rhythmanalysis, this study reveals how, during Japan’s rural industrialization phase, the cyclical rhythms of agriculture and the linear rhythms of factory labor coexisted. In the Mogami region of Yamagata Prefecture, this coexistence fostered a multi-occupational structure grounded in intergenerational household arrangements, wherein three-generation households enabled diversified livelihoods that combined agricultural income with non-farm employment, supporting the social reproduction of part-time farming households. However, since the 1990s, the transformation of non-farm employment and the decline of agriculture have led to the unraveling of this structure and the deepening marginalization of peripheral regions. The paper advocates for the significance of autonomous rhythms in resisting externally imposed capitalist temporalities and gestures toward possibilities for life beyond employment.

This article is a tentative review of the discussion on authenticity in the fields of sociology, anthropology, and geography in the English-speaking countries. The concept of authenticity has long been central to Western tradition of Philosophy, particularly existentialism, and MacCannell （1973） introduced this concept to sociological studies of tourism inspired by Boorstin’s work on “pseudo-events”, and Cohen （1972, 1979, 1988） elaborated MacCannell’s scheme including the typology of tourist or touristic mode. In geography, an early attention to this notion appeared in Edward Relph’s work of humanistic geography （1976）, however, the later efforts in this field have been carried out mainly under the influences of tourism studies of sociology and anthropology. In both sociology-anthropology and geography, their early works tend to insist on essentialism or objectivism, afterwards however, the idea of constructive authenticity has been dominated. The search for authenticity in each discipline has been carried out by referring to each other. However, there is an imbalance between sociology-anthropology and geography. Articles on authenticity in geography tend to refer to the sociological or anthropological theories of this notion, but it can’t be said that the reverse is true.

According to the essays reviewed in this paper, we find a couple of dimensions behind the concept of authenticity; i.e. 1） essentialism vs. constructivism, 2） object-related vs. activity （or experience）-related, and 3）individual nature vs. intersubjective nature of experience, etc. Due to these multidimensional natures of authenticity, it would be hard to make a clear definition or typology of this concept. However, N. Wang’s article （1999） may give a positive suggestion for this issue. He proposed three types of authenticity; i.e. objective, constructive, and existential. Among these, objective authenticity refers to the authenticity of originals, constructive authenticity refers to the authenticity projected onto toured objects by tourists, and existential authenticity refers to a potential existential state of Being that is to be achieved by tourist activities. The former two, objective and constructive, correspond to the ‘Object-Related Authenticity in Tourism’ and the last one corresponds to the ‘Activity-Related Authenticity in Tourism’. As we can’t say that his idea is sufficient as a typological theory, we need to further elaborate his scheme.

Finally, we will consider the nature, role, and significance of authenticity studies in geography. Geographical research has enlarged the extent of authenticity studies adding diverse spatial dimensions, and it has presented many specific cases in which authenticity has been constructed. Why authenticity has become an important issue in geography? This question is deeply related to the changes in geography since the 1970’s. Under the influence of humanistic geography, geographers have become more and more interested in human-based phenomena, introducing a new concept of geographical space called the ‘place’. When we observe the nature and dynamics of an actual place, one of the noticeable features is people’s strong longing and insistence towards authenticity. Introducing this concept may lead to deeper understanding the constructing nature of many geographical processes and finding diverse contexts surrounding current local culture in postmodern societies.