Japan's rural regions have been shrinking for the entire postwar period, and successive efforts to revitalize rural society have failed. This article asks whether the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, and the subsequent meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, present the Japanese state and society with a watershed opportunity to rethink regional revitalization and national energy procurement strategies. The article begins by summarizing the events of March and April 2011, examines possible approaches to the reconstruction of communities in the T hoku region, and critiques problems of governance in postwar Japan that the disaster reveals. The article concludes by pulling together the information and analysis presented into a discussion of the prospects for achieving the three point vision for a safe, sustainable, and compassionate society that Prime Minister Naoto Kan set the Reconstruction Design Council.

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Female empowerment is a prerequisite for a just and sustainable developed society. Being the most developed non-western country, Japan offers an instructive window onto concerns about gender worldwide. Although overall gender equality is advancing in Japan, difficulties remain, especially in achieving equality in the workplace. We draw on theories of ontological commitment and the psychology of fiction to critically analyse the role of popular culture -in this case manga -in the reproduction of gender inequality in the Japanese workplace. We present examples of four of the most popular mainstream manga aimed at working men and women in Japan and show how women are depicted. We argue that the hyper-mediated fictional realism of representative tropes generates an ontological commitment to characters and narratives among consumers that reinforces the reproduction of a culturally exceptionalist national political economic space, one of whose essential defining characteristics is a gendered workplace. Our research suggests important implications for researching the relationship between culture, in all its forms, and spatial variation in persistent institutional biases among varieties of capitalism.

An electronic version is available here: http://org.sagepub.com/content/15/5.toc. Suggested CitationMatanle, P., McCann, L. and Ashmore, D-J. (2008) AbstractIn this article we analyse representations of the Japanese salaryman and Japanese organization in Japanese manga, or graphic novels, during the turbulent decades from the mid-1980s to the present day. We argue that manga presents salarymen protagonists in a sympathetic yet not uncritical light, and that it displays support for and criticism of both the Japanese and American organizational models. We describe how these manga offer important critical challenges from the world of popular culture to the direction of change in Japanese business organizations since the 1980s. In addition, we suggest that the manga may also provide salarymen with opportunities for critically re-evaluating their own working situations and for developing methods for surviving and thriving under the pressures of working within contemporary Japanese business organizations.

The population and society of Sado Island are declining at an alarming rate. Much of this decline has been due to endemic outward migration of the island's younger people to Japan's large urban areas in search of opportunities for tertiary education and salaried employment. Even though opportunities to find work in Sado do exist, these are in occupations that younger people currently find unattractive. Moreover, education in Sado currently does not serve local circumstances and needs well, being organised primarily by and for the urban centre. This research starts by presenting an overview of the issues surrounding population, education, and employment on Sado, and then moves to presenting a case study of the life and work of Sado Island's craft-potters. The article uses statistical data from official bodies and unstructured interviews with the island's residents as empirical support for its theoretical discussions. The article concludes by hinting at a possible stabilization of the population through a combination of educational reform, craft-based employment re-generation, and taking advantage of emerging trends in world tourism.