Empowerment of Rural Community and its Resilience: A Case Study of a Small-Scale Rural Community in a Mountainous Area in Japan.

Japanese rural communities have experienced an aging population with a drastic decline in its size while more economic functions and workplaces have become concentrated in urban areas. Some rural communities in remote mountainous areas even face the further serious problem of extinction of their own community. Even with such a difficult situation, some rural communities have been successful in achieving the migration of their young generation back to their rural areas, and even in reviving their energy year by year. The objective of this paper, therefore, is to demonstrate how rural communities in remote mountainous areas in Japan can become empowered and resilient regardless of the serious threat of further depopulation and marginal settlement through a case study of a small-scale rural community in a remote mountainous area of Miyazaki Prefecture, Japan. The paper first overviews how rural communities have experienced depopulation over time together with changes in livelihood along with changes in lifestyle. Then, by describing how a small community in the study area was challenged to implement a series of projects by themselves, utilizing their local resources and cultures, it explains how a depopulated community could revive and gain confidence in themselves while receiving a lot of attention from visitors from outside. The study results show that the aged female population in the community is the key human resource as they can actually play an important role in the rural community, producing local valuable products and services. Moreover, the study points out the importance of maintaining and passing on rural communities' identities to the next generations, while explaining why some of the young population now choose to live in such remote rural areas -- a shelter from the overly globalized and industrialized modern society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]